Ties That Bind - Page 13 Pencils (& my madness)

OK. I know that's a BUNDLE of messy pencils. But it's the best way for me to show you all the processes and difficulties I've had/been having with this page! I'll post the images in-line bellow and talk a bit about my thinking at each step to help give it some clarity. 

I've finally gotten the page to somewhere I'm reasonably happy with? But not... like.. perfectly happy. That being said - it's time to move forward!

Read about my madness here:

Roughs 1

Do you all remember this? I was pretty happy when I penned it early on. BUT after looking back at some of my previous pages, I realized that so many of these angles and paneling were uninspired. It was the same angles and shots I'd used before! Don't get me wrong, sometimes that's GOOD. Sometimes it grounds a page: Comics benefit from creating tension and release with a page-to-page flow. And repeated shots in the lulls can help bring that calm. But here? It just felt... uninspired. 

One of the big points for this whole amadose project for me is to push myself and get better at art. I should be trying harder!

It sort of hit me around this point: about an hour into the pencils. I started dreaming up more dynamic things I could be doing: like having Owen flip Judy onto her back (it would give Nick a better 'view' but might make some of my dialogue later not work as well <-- something I'm still thinking about for the next page tbh). And I sort of realized I had to rethink the page. The only panel that was 'working' for me was the middle one!

I decided to try out other ideas. 

Roughs Alt 1

How would it look if I came at it fresh? I looked at some hentai and was like: Make the focus JUDY. We're talking about her on the page, and I love her butt - why not SHOW her!

But after I'd scribbled this out I realized how 'messy' it felt and distracting. It wasn't contributing to the conversation being had between the boys.

Roughs Alt 2 & 3

Maybe combining the two would work best?

I liked this one a bunch; it gave me a gratuitous butt shot to have fun with, and sort of brought the focus back to Nick and Owen. But I was worried it still felt a bit... uninspired. especially in panel 1. This still wasn't 'clicking' and I was getting frustrated.

Roughs Alt 4

Then it clicked with me. The focus of this page is the interaction and play between Nick and Owen. There really shouldn't be much of a focus on Judy. Looking at the previous page I realized I'd created a really strong focal point and hadn't really designed anything around it: that hand on Nick's thigh.

In this draft, I lasered onto that physicality. And things felt so much better! There is still stuff I'm not too keen on. But it had been like days and days of hair pulling and I was happy to have something click.

Pencils

Building off all of that I drew up this monstrosity of a pencils page. 

I've seen others pencil stuff in seconds that takes me HOURS. There's so much here I wish I could just rework again, but this page is now GOOD enough to go. And it's time to move forward Amadose.

Silly thing to note: Judy's ears have been DOWN for the whole comic so far: it makes sense in her blissed state. But here, I was really proud of her drawn shoulders and didn't want to cover them up ;D

If you made it this far: there are two zips attached. One has the files with words on them if you'd like to see that!

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Patreon sometimes shrinks images, so check the attachments for the higher-res images!

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