Chapter Five Inking is Done!

Chapter Five of PRACTICAL DEFENCE AGAINST PIRACY is now all inked up, from beginning to end. If you want to take a look at the inked pages, they're displayed in full in the carousel above. (Is the Patreon image carousel any good for looking at this stuff?) Obviously, lots of "spoilers," so do as you will. More about the pages below, sandwiched between two quick tangents.

[ All those pages from the "to do" shelf? Now they're on the "done" shelf. :D ]

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First, I've been watching SEVERANCE, a show full of mystery and tricky questions. In Season Two, they've been running Behind-The-Scenes interviews, and I got to say: I don't care for them. All the mysterious moods fly out the window when an actor says, "gosh it sure was fun running down those corridors." All the magic fades.

Then I thought, "I hope my Patreon posts aren't like that for people." When I talk casually or clinically about a sequence of (hopefully) steep drama for our characters, I hope it doesn't ruin the fiction for you. I don't want your enjoyment of PRACTICAL DEFENCE to be sullied because I mentioned, "ahh shoot, my brush wouldn't hold a tip on this page!" while, say, Alexandra is weeping with her mother as flames encircle them. I can see how that might happen, though, like it did for me with SEVERANCE.

But you are a smart person, and are probably doing what I'm doing: continuing to enjoy SEVERANCE while skipping the Behind-The-Scenes stuff.

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Speaking of Behind-the-Scenes stuff, here's the first page of Chapter Five — we're starting again with a big splash page (below). Adhering to the goals from day one, I'm trying to keep the value composition front-of-mind. The line art on the left is what I might have drawn in the past, telling myself I'd worry about the values later. This time, I did some value sketches first, so that this opening page would be as striking as possible. I thought some pencil texture with inherent "speed lines" would look good.

Wanting to avoid the risk of messing up my ink lines with the pencil, and wanting the additional flexibility, I drew the shadows on a separate sheet. Here's a quick comp (below) — it needs some cleanup, but I'm kind of surprised how well it turned out.

I've used this technique elsewhere in the book, but this is the most ambitious example. Jillian Tamaki must have done the whole of THIS ONE SUMMER like this, though, so I'm not expecting any gold stars (still: gives self one gold star).

Below: Alexandra imagines summoning the forces of Barathron to aid Archipoli. Elephants are so much fun to draw.

Another panel I quite like (below). It's tricky, trying to figure out how much of the foliage to draw explicitly, and how much to suggest. I blacked out the far-background foliage because it'll get blacked out anyway — another benefit to planning the lighting ahead-of-time. (Full disclosure, though: if you look at the rest of the pages, you will see I am not always as diligent about doing this.)

The great challenge with this chapter has been finding ways to make sure this imagery of Alexandra and her father on a horse does not become too repetitive. Thinking about it now, though, it's not a question of "did you use enough different angles." If the story is boring, there aren't enough angles in the universe to make it interesting. There need to be questions and surprises, emotional movement and shifting motivations. And then, visually, I can add in something like this owl (below) to ask you, the reader, to generate some connections. What does it mean? How meaningful is it? What effect does it have on our characters? I look forward to showing you soon!

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My happiness about finishing the inks was almost immediately ruined when I plugged in my year-old external Samsung SSD to find that it was now transferring data at two megabytes per second, which is slightly less than the eight thousand that I was used to.

For reasons I would need a therapist to unearth, this stuff gives me anxiety wayyyy out of proportion to the scale of the problem, and if there is one extreme downside to being an independent artist / "business person," it is doing my own IT work. I don't even mind all the troubleshooting and researching, except it snatches time away from things I'd rather be doing, funnelling it into scouring Reddit pages of unknowable trustworthiness, and it does so at unexpected intervals. This is not how any of us should be spending our lives.

Here's me, in the middle: thinking about how Chapter Five is completely inked:

And then here's me, in the front, thinking about managing my digital tools:

Fortunately, no important data was lost (I'm pretty sure, knock on wood). I keep a number of backups that most IT people would describe as "overkill." Regardless, I shake my fists at the heavens and scream, "but I just want to make comics for people!" And that is what I will keep doing.

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What's next: I have to scan these pages now, but I'm not sure when I'll get to that (I'll explain why later), so in the meantime I'm going to take another look at thumbnails for Chapter Six and maybe get going on those pencils!

I hope you're all doing well, keeping your work backed-up thoroughly, and looking forward to the changing of the seasons!

Until next time,
I remain,

Too in-a-hurry to preschool pickup to remember to add a sign-off,

TC