Test Comic

I started this as a test to see if people liked the style, to see how much time it took to draw a single detailed comic page, and whether it was better to draw the characters before drawing the background. I found that keeping detailed references on screen as I drew helped to stop me from rushing through the lineart, so at some point I'm going to have to draw some new character reference sheets with better quality than what I was doing three years ago.

Adding some red to the base shading really helps, adding it to the inside of the mouth and around her muscles helps to break up what would have just been brown shading. Might have overdone it in places but it's better than not doing it at all. The phone was the difficult bit, I was initially just using plain text to match the simplicity of the original design. Thing is that I drew up the original design under a strict time limit to see how fast I could draw a sequential storyline, so any and all UI design research was non-existent. This time around I was still under a time limit, so I borrowed a bit from x-com and jammed the whole thing together. While not visible when scaled down the screen on the phone was given interlaced lines because it looks cool, if not accurate for a smartphone.

Originally this was just a sketch of Amanda in her ending position, when I decided to test some things. Odds are a lot of people are going to be confused about how friends hanging out turns into that, which is also a test to see if people participate when a work is disjointed and incomplete. Participation counts as a desire to see it completed, not just asking what's going on or making up their own narrative. Getting people involved is what makes this fun to do, I tried stage acting while in school and the thing I disliked was how little the audience could participate in the finished work. Too many video games I guess.

I think I missed drawing something for last month, so I'm planning on finishing up a few other drawings I have sketched/nearly completed.