Page Deconstruction #2: Golden Hour

In this series, Veronica will summarise the most interesting pages from old chapters and explain some of the process that went into making the final thing! This time, we’re getting into Golden Hour!!

Page 6: Madison was a new character and even though I already did some concept sketches of her in the past, I still didn’t feel fully comfortable with her design and was struggling with her at first. I “finalised” her design prematurely and instead of altering it into something I WAS happy with, I thought “well I HAVE to use the premature design from now on for consistency.”

The reason behind that is because of the fireworks poster we did for the Volume Four Kickstarter!! The Madison that appears in the fireworks poster was done in a rush when I still didn’t have her figured out. I was under a strict time limit and couldn’t really spend too much time playing with the new design. I later added little sides on her hair to combat what I thought was an annoying “Sandy-looking” hairstyle. Her original look looked like a mop of hair over a bald cat head.

It’s annoying because if I didn’t include the side hairs, she would have the features of Sandy I found annoying, but on the other hand if I DID add side hairs, people would think she either looks like me or Molly, because girls with glasses and brown hair are the same I guess.

I was fighting against consistency with a design I didn’t like, so you can notice in the sketches Madison still has her “proto” design from the print. I later amended it to have the side hairs. But you can see even on the side of the page I was STILL fighting with Madison’s design and trying to get something I wanted. The sketch in the fifth panel shows me actually accepting the side hairs and sketching them out. They were easy to put in the other panels, but the fifth panel had them flowing dynamically so I had to sketch them over her.

Page 8: I can’t really understand what Madison is saying exactly on panel 8 (THANKS FOR COMBINING THE LAYERS SOUPPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), but I remember REALLY struggling with that dialogue. I wanted Madison to be angry at Paulo’s advances, but not be TOO spiteful and bitter, and I couldn’t really get that balance right. It took one of our friends to come up with “I rather catch a disease”, which was PERFECT. It’s silly and mean but also not being too mean.

Well, that was short! I guess that’s what happens when half of it wasn’t finished properly. (One day, it’ll be done!) So, uh, here’s a bonus from Table for One:

Page 1: I love the ghost Abbey floating in the background of me clearly tracing over Dial Tone’s first page.