Page 183 - August 13, 2012

Aww, sweetness. Now, everyone go ride their dogs, okay?

In case anyone noticed some weird glitching in the pages yesterday, that was just me upgrading the reading interface of chapter 3 to match the new layout. Check it out: start of chapter 3. It wasn't a very difficult precess at all (took about an hour and a half, plus the actual image drawing part) but it did involve a couple of cases of accidental rewriting of old necessary files with new incorrect ones and me going "Noooo! What did I do?! How do I fix this!? Where on earth did I save the correct file, AAAARG!!" But all is well that ends well, and if anyone finds any weird bugs creeping around...well, you know, email and stuff. Hmh, maybe I should get a commenting system installed after all... :/

Ah, new voting incetive that isn't just the raw ink lineart of today's page: there's also a work-in-progress shot of the main panel from yesterday's page, (plus the finished lineart) showing the point where so far I've only used a paint brush to color in the major black areas; no actual lineart yet. I guess this way of working is a bit backwards when it comes to comic art, the artists whose processes I've looked into always seem to draw the lines first, then color in the dark areas. It's probably a giveaway of my heavy focus on painterly stuff during my years of learning to draw, rather than doing comic art: always starting a piece by laying out the major blocks of color(black in this case) to establish a decent balance, and only then moving on to the details.

I think I'll be doing things this way during the whole of aRTD, even if it may not be the most correctly comicky way of drawing linearts, but it's worked well for me so far. I've tried drawing the lines before painting any black areas a few times, but frankly the result was none the better, and the whole process became more agonizing than ever. With some major shadows already blocked in with a paint brush the page almost seems half done once I start the slow and boring linearting part. Without anything but my messy sketches on the paper...urrgh, kill me now. -_- Since SSSS is going to be drawn digitally I'll of course end up switchin to the conventional way of drawing a page, but until then...

Ooops, almost forgot: the drawing in the header for chapter 3 in also in the gallery, without cropping and with colors, so those of you who miss Ville as a seal: here, have some consolation in this image. :3

Also: Ville sure got a long neck in that first panel, huh? Looks like he's half dragon or something. x__x