SAKANA 550

Hey everyone! This month has been pretty busy for me with travel and getting ready for Emerald City Comic Con (ECCC) in Seattle in March! I HOPE I SEE YOU THERE! 

Here's the process for page 550! This one took me a while! I drew a lot of fish! Let's get started! 

1. On the actual comic site I made a joke about never referencing an actual fish in my life but that's not ENTIRELY true for this page. I did look up a few aquarium pictures, saw some fish, and then promptly closed the image browser because I like my fish to look extra wonky. I feel like it gives something a little unexpected to my comic about fish markets? It's almost like this is all taking place in some super-congruous but kinda-weird alternate universe where fish look jank as hell. (I hope it doesn't just come off like I'm too lazy to look at pictures of sea life.) 

I wasn't super sure what to do with the bottom panels since I knew they would also probably be pretty dark. SPOILER: this solution was not the right solution. 

2. I had this idea that maybe I could also do some sort of 'water-esque' effect in addition to all the fish in the scene. SPOILER: that did not work out. Jiro and Chie got the patented Mad Rupert "tons of tiny lines" treatment. 

3. THE AQUARIUM PANEL IS DONE! You can see I took out the small water effect lines. They were just complicating an already complicated panel. Sakana has always been a project where I can try new things with my art; historically there have been many panels like this where I come up with some inking trick, hate the way it looks, and wind up blacking it over anyways. NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW MY MISTAKES. 

4. Finally working on the bottom panels. Lots of little lines here too. I hated the Jiro face I inked in panel 5 SO MUCH that I totally redrew it in Photoshop. That actually doesn't happen very often! This page was kind of a hassle! I will not post the un-edited face because it was so bad I am embarrassed and never want to look at it again.  

5. The final page! Normally a page doesn't need quite so much digital editing, but as I mentioned I was trying a bunch of new things and not everything worked! I took out the secondary panel line around the bottom panels, and totally re-drew panel 5. All in all, personally, I think this page could have come out better, but I was happy with some of the results! There are so many pages in Sakana that I feel compelled to really push myself every now and then, and this was one of those pages. I hope you like it! 

-Mad