Hotwire Insolve BTS: Bulletproof Drive pages 2-5 (Patreon)

Hello! Been a minute since I did a BTS post. been hard at work keeping consistent with the Bulletproof Drive pages and balancing that with freelance. Also I attended a wedding the other weekend. that's enough excuses tho—here's some pencils!

link to final spread

not a whole lot to say here. inking the POV shot from the camera (pg3, p2) was a fun experiment. i ended up adding a background to the last panel on page 2 in the final pass as well.

we also get our first appearance of the Mechanic. I've been meaning to give him a name, but it hasn't been necessary yet. He presents tough when he steps outside, but is jovial and ready to talk shop at any opportunity. He loves his cars and loves showing them off.

His visor device thingy on his head is inspired by Andrew Oikonny from Star Fox 64, specifically from when you encounter the Star Wolf team on the left side of Venom.

link to final spread

I like the second panel on page 4 a lot. it's not totally necessary; you could take it out entirely and still understand that they entered the garage. but i thought showing how each of them approach scaling the rail was a fun character moment (pretty much the same thing as the beginning of the traffic animation). Juno takes the more athletic and direct route, and Kyrie goes the lazy route and finds it to maybe be more complicated than she would have liked.

I was still experimenting with my workflow here also. for this one I put the panel borders down before i did the pencils. Also it was a very background-intense spread. Since I'm not doing an ink pass on the BGs, they don't look any different than the final pass, so i just did a quick sketch for characters only.

i've said a few times that I'm using Bulletproof Drive as a way to get back in the comic-making groove. and interesting example of that is how i approach the layer organization. in page 2 i thought i'd try separating each panel into their own layer groups, but i quickly realized that was a lot of unnecessary work. by page 4, i just had the character stuff and backgrounds separated with a few exceptions.

that's all for now! see ya later!!