Paint The Town Red Volume 1 Re-inks

I thought I would drop in... actually its a bit funny I seem to always feel the urge to make a post like these come Thursday?? Maybe we'll start giving this segment a funny little name like Thought Process Thursday-- LOL

I think i want to start off by saying that I am... not always the hugest fan when artists choose to go back and redo pages of their comic, it can fall into a vicious cycle where you feel compelled to redo pages over and over until they ~feel right~ while never actually getting to finish the project. I was once told in a class that some guy spent years redrawing his graphic novel 5x before sending it to print and ... wow that was a bit scarring LOL. The dedication that takes is a bit astounding but the two of us have so many ideas..... i don't think we could ever actually Do That ourselves.

ALL THAT BEING SAID-- we'd talked a LOT about Volume 1 for PTTR. We made this issue while the two of us were both learning to work together on comics, I was inking in CLIP??? back then and digital inking was still a massively foreign landscape to me. Tas was trying to develop a more mature style for the comic to keep it a bit more separate from Sancirc & allow us to feel more flexible with mature themes.

This was also nearly 5 years ago before we developed our workflow... and we've been noticing a lot lately how folks really err..... rely on a Good First Impression for a comic series (no shade no shade it is what it is). The first volume just doesn't have the same feel as its later two volumes and it was something that was kinda picking at the back of our minds.

We decided that best case scenario and to keep a lot of the charm from the first volume I would simply re-ink it to fit the current character models and Tas could 'recolour' them to at least fit Volume 2's aesthetic.

this makes things shift and shape just a little bit while maintaining some of the integrity (you can see all these images much bigger in the slider above). I don't have my old inks stockpiled elsewhere so its maybe a bit hard to see the adjustments but here they are side by side for folks interested!

While we still have a LOT of the original volume 1 artwork in print currently, this was primarily prompted by the fact that we've been looking into translating PTTR into French (since we now both live in a mostly francophone province) and were considering a consolidated first three volumes into a single one to save on printing and on costs in general!

This really kind of highlighted how starkly the artwork in volume 1 contrasted with the later volumes. We figured it was a prime opportunity to kind of get this thing that's been bugging us sorted. We're not really speed running this at all. We're still looking for a translator. I'm squeezing this into my schedule around more important projects but I thought I'd share a little bit of this for folks interested! 

That's not to say we're getting rid of the old artwork entirely. There's still a LOT of charm in these older pages and honestly I have vivid memories of myself inking all of these way back when we first started the project so we'll be keeping them up as a PDF on the shop once we sell out of the volume 1 physical run we have. (For those who wanna make sure they get a copy of the Original Artwork-- this is your heads up that when we do sell out of this physical run we WILL be reprinting with the new artwork-- snag it while you can-- its 30% this month too!)

But What About Volume 4???

What about her? (Kidding kidding) I've just finished the script for Lab Partners and will be thumbnailing the rest of Augustine chapter 2 AND Lab Partners but Volume 4's script is next on the roster. The two of us just have to sit down and do a proper brainstorm and this baby should be well on her way~!

Happy Thursday Everyone~! Stay safe and cozy out there :>