Page 148 - July 5, 2012

Haha, Hannu pretty much looked like he was being impaled by Ville's horn in the raw lineart version of this page. I usually don't allow myself to fix anything in the lineart digitally (other than removing fly-poop and stray ink-blobs, and adjusting the contrast and colors of course) but this time I allowed myself an exception. It was simply awful, some of the movement-lines even looked like a splatter of blood. xD

Ugh, I'm currently being bitten in the rear by a classic case of "putting off work for later, whatever". I was going through all the pages I've done so far for chapter 4, and what a nice (not!) surprise: there were no speech bubbles at all on pages 159-210. Whaaat!? That's like 50 pages! I did remember that I kind of started putting off adding speech bubbles for a while a few months ago, with the attitude of "pffth, I can do like ten at a time in one day some other time, better just start drawing on the next page right now." So, I knew I had some unfinished pages waiting for me, but 50?!? Well, I've fixed about a dozen of them now, and the rest will only take a handful of days to finish, but damn is this annoying! Having to revisit all these pages that I had mentally already moved on from...bah!

Kind of on the subject, this might be interesting for some: a tiny screenshot/graph-thingie of the current page status. I've blurred the thumbnails a bit to make absolutely sure no-one gets a dose of spoilerism, but here you can see how there is a very large gap in the flow of fully finished pages. Somewhere along the way I simply started completing the pages in one sitting again, speech bubbles and all. At the end we've got the linearts from last month ( About a dozen of those are colored already.)

Oh yeah, you can also see how I'm kind of keeping all the pages in pairs, which I do for a few reasons. One, it gets me into the habit of thinking in spreads rather than singular pages, which will be crucial once I start my "real" comic after aRTD. Since I plan to release that one in print form too (it will of course mainly be a webcomic) the pages for that one will need to be designed in a way that makes for good looking, well balanced speads. So even if I bother with none of that now that I'm doing this comic (consequently most of the pages work pretty crappily together) it's still good to get into the habit early on. Hopefully doing this will spear me some tears with the real deal in the future. Reasons two and three: the pages fit well on the screen when put next to each other, and doing two pages at once slightly lessens the amount of color shift that occurs from page to page. Only slightly, though, I've been having some real trouble keeping the color scheme and mood even during the course of the chapter. :/