Comic Report #83.2 - Almost There (Patreon)

Hello again!  This has been a bit of a toasty week so I hope you've gotten through it alright.  I made a bit of progress on both the main comic and I got a whole bunch of game art colorized as well.    This will probably be the last Friday update for this comic page, since I feel like I can get this wrapped up this weekend, or possibly tonight, so we'll see what I can do!

When I was hacking through this page this week I ended up sorta skipping the background on that middle wide panel.  A while ago, early on in the comic, the way I'd paint would be to paint all the figures and then paint in the backgrounds around them, which was kinda backwards.  I used to do it because I wanted to get the lighting right on the figures and then apply the shadows to the background, but then I started doing backgrounds first so I could make smarter lighting choices on the figures, which is how we actually paint in classical portraiture.  On this page I ended up just painting the figures in that shot since I already had Monday's major value shapes plotted out from the previous panels so I just sampled from them to knock that one out.  I'll go back and block in the background after I finish up the rest of this pass of the page, but for now it's fine. It's just a Classic Method.

What I'm probably going to do on this page when I do my background pass is lighten the background a bit to help describe the depth of the space in the room.  Since my backgrounds don't use black outlines I can control their contrast by defining what the darkest shade of grey I paint them in is, and then be sure not to use a darker value than that.  By inking my figures with a solid black outline, lightening my darkest background value in this method always makes sure the main figures stand out in the scene- early on I used to paint backgrounds intensely dark but my greyscale painting style kinda swallowed up my figures, this is both why I started lightening background and also why I apply that light glow to my silhouettes.

I'll leave this post at that for now.  After I write up my gamedev post and eat some dinner I'm gonna dig into finishing this page.  You might get a textless version late in the wee hours tonight or sometime tomorrow.  Until then, thank you for your patient support!  I'll be back soon.