Comic Report #130.1 - A Lot Of Guys

Hello again! This week saw steady progress on the first page of the big action sequence, I'm expecting I can have the whole page finished within this week, which is a pretty good mark for getting these done quicker than usual. I've got a few things to share about this page so I'll just get right into it.

Being the second page I'm drawing on my new tablet, I'm really acclimating to the new hardware and feeling a lot more comfortable laying down my tones. There's some soft modeling of values I could easily achieve on this page, like Amy or Dale's coat sleeves in the second and third panel, which I think I was having a bit of a hard time with near the end of the previous tablet's life cycle. I use gradient pressure brushes that increase opacity the more I press with them and I layer my tones on in waves, which helps me model clothing fabric and material textures in the way that I want to. I like to render clothing creases as shapes that have high light/shadow contrast which blend into a smoother low-contrast area, which helps me define intense crease points and then more even areas outside of the joints. I feel pretty good, overall, about how things are going.

I didn't get quite as far on this page as I'd wanted, and I think that is in part from Person Density in this layout. A good metric of how quick a page is gonna be for me to tone are a) Is there a complicated outdoor depth-of-field shot? b) Are there a lot of people? c) Do the people need their legs or thighs rendered? People are by far the highest concentration of detail for me to paint, since they're the focal point of any panel I need to do a lot of thinking to render them three-dimensionally with regards to their lighting. Legs add a bit of complexity for the weird reason that if you don't have to draw them, if a shot is just waist-up, you can bleed the bottom of someone's torso off the bottom of the panel and not have to worry about cast shadows around their thighs or their knees or how their legs are connecting to their hips. The less of that I have to do, the faster it goes. I have to do a bunch of that here, and there's still nine more guys to paint, but a few of them are tiny so that shouldn't be as bad.

Expect this page to be ready some time within this week cycle. I think I can do it, and then I think I can keep going, and when I hit a page that has Fewer Guys on it I'll have another big time save. Thanks for checking in! You should be hearing from me again sooner than later. Until then, have a good one.