Book 1, Page 174

Hi patrons!

Whew! It's good to be back. September included a week-long visit from my parents and the children's theater moving out of its home of 30 years, so I was away from my drawing desk a lot. The theater also had a public farewell-event that involved me leading a parade from the old building to the new one, toting a bluetooth speaker on a bicycle trailer while wearing the Dormouse costume from our Alice in Wonderland production:

If you ever have the chance to be costumed by a professional with an extensive and whimsical collection at their disposal, I highly recommend it!

Back to the SuperButch page:

Here are the four layouts I sent to Barry, trying out different points of view and different levels of background detail:

Barry liked the layout on the upper right, but I wanted to give panel 4 more space, so we compromised with a full-tier panel 4. Barry's script specified that panels 2 and 3 are drawn from a "high angle." I left this note for Barry on the file:

I tried to use Google Street View, but couldn't get a good angle for looking down and getting a clear view of both Lillian and the bus in motion.

This was taking forever. (Naomi left a surprise layer in the file when I wasn't looking.)

Naomi offered help in the form of a 3D model of several streets in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which she made to use as drawing reference for one of her comics!

Take a tour of the model in this amazing video.

Naomi says:

I made it in Blender mostly using photos from google maps and then turning them into 3d shapes

I also used some assets made by other people (Which are in the credits of the video)

The technique for making the buildings is mostly based on this talk that a VFX person named Ian Hubert gave at like some kind of Blender con.

She found a 3D model of an old bus and dropped it onto a street. Because you can adjust where the "camera" is in Blender, I could move around until I had approximated the views I wanted in panels 2-4. Then I took some screenshots.

I dropped the screenshots into the SuperButch file, adjusting the placement and size to fit into the panel borders.

As you can see, I kept the design of the buildings from page 173, and ultimately fudged some of the perspective in the bottom panel.

I was going to have a bus stop sign on the corner, but this photo inspired me to draw a streetlamp instead.

Thanks, as always, for supporting me while I take my time on this comic! I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the scene.

Becky