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Comic Report #83.2 - Almost There
🕑 Added 2021-07-02 21:25:43 +0000 UTCHello 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.
