Commentary : Open Trade 260-261 (Patreon)

Gonna talk about backgrounds this week. I've been working on using them more and more, refining them as we go.

The downside of doing hand drawn 2D comics, is that you have to draw everything every time. And with how heavy my line work is, I get worried about a detailed background dominating the image. Also, detailed backgrounds are time consuming.

In the digital space, it's a lot easier to design a couple different backgrounds and reuse them in every panel where they are needed. Taking my cue from old animation techniques and TV.

Especially as we have locations that are going to be revisited over and over again, or locations that our characters will be in for long periods of time. More of an artistic benefit of 2D and more stylized comics, is that you don't need backgrounds in every panel. You can just have a solid color or a texture if needed, wanting to break up the space, or wanting a panel to stand out.

So as we have been getting into this last batch of comics, I've been making more backgrounds depending on the scene. The dinner is going to be useful as a place to have characters revisit over time. So it's a very valuable background to make.

Then there is stuff like the courthouse and the airport that I don't expect to revisit, but they are very specific and/or detailed locations that need to communicate where our characters are without me directly stating it. Also very valuable to take time out to build a background.

With the dinner scene, you can see what I changed up my process a bit, and had to do the background first so I could figure out where to put the characters to fit the scene. You can even see in the final where I adjusted things to make them fit better and be at the right scale. Likely more about this next week.