deadwinter

Comic Report #68.1 - My Line Of Work

Hello!  This has been a busy week for me, but I'm happy to have a substantial update for you today! There's a little bit to share so I'm gonna just jump right into it.

Sometimes when I'm working on comics I also need to supplement my work with other work, so I'll hop back and forth between projects.  I'll usually work until I hit a milestone point in my process, then shift gears to start another project until it hits a milestone of its own- like a sketch phase or inks or what ...

Comic Report #68 - Thumbs Up

Hello again!  It's been a half-week since the previous page went up so today's update is a bit different from usual.  Normally if I don't have enough time to sketch a whole page between an update and a Friday I'll just do a gamedev post since that is easier to make small incremental changes on that end but I've been on a good comic streak and I didn't want to let up, so this week's update is a look at the thumbnail phase of my writing process.

Before I start work on any page I...

Comic Report #67.2 - Packed In

Hello again!  Here is the textless page real quick before I finish lettering and post the comic to the site.  I'll make this write-up short so I can get right back to work.

Now that the whole background of characters in that fifth panel are drawn in the crowd looks a lot more impressive.  I tried to reference the shot from page 600 as much as I can to keep everyone in relatively the same positions, since I always like to maintain that kind of consistency in my work.  ...

Comic Report #67.1 - Work The Crowd

Hello again!  This week I made progress on the next page, inking, flatting and making my 80% detail pass on the first half of the comic.  I expect I'll be able to have this page finished by the end of this weekend so please look forward to that!

For a lot of the comic living characters have generally been significant people who are explicitly designed for their purpose in the story.  By contrast, Tombstone is full of incidental background people who give character to the ...

Comic Report #67 - The Lads

Hello again!  For this week's work report I got the sketch phase of the next comic page all drawn up and ready to ink.  Since I don't have as many obligations on my plate at the moment I'd like to push forward and try to get another page up as quick as I can.  At my usual pace I can jump from pencils to a finished page in about a week and change, so we'll see where I am next Friday, but for now let's jump into today's write-up!

When I write Dead Winter I tend to write in ...

Comic Report #66.2 - Dramatic Entrance

Hello!  Here is the textless page for your enjoyment.  It's about 4:30am local time as I type this, I'd like to get the word bubbles in and put the page up before going to bed so I'll make this post nice and short.

When I was planning these post-600 pages I wanted a shot that let me draw the back-slash-front of Lou's new red hat.  Lizzie has a somewhat elaborate jolly roger design on her bandanna so I wanted something cool and fitting for Lou, so I opted for a tow truck d...

Comic Report #66.1 - Juiced Up

Hello again!  This week I've made a good bit of progress on the next page.  I expect to have this page finished by the end of the weekend, or Monday at the latest, so keep an eye out for that.  But for now I'll talk about what I've been doing on this page so far, so let's jump right into that.

This scene I've set up for myself has had just a tremendous amount of characters all in one spot. It's a bit of work to keep track of them all so I'm just focusing on foreground, im...

Comic Report #66 - Quartets

Hello!  This week has been a busy one for me.  I took a bit of time to tie up some loose ends with my gamedev responsibilities and then got to work on the next comic page.  A fun note about the gamedev items: I've drawn everything I need to draw for the next milestone demo we're working on, so any other gamedev tasks moving forward are a lot lighter on my plate.  I write very in-depth articles on that process here on this Patreon, so if you'd like to pop up a tier and read...

Comic Report #65.2 - Family Reunion

Hello!  Here's the textless version of the next page!  It's pretty late right now but I want to get this page finished and posted before I sleep so I'm gonna be quick with the text post.

One of the big things I mentioned I was struggling with was how to render a nice daylight sky. I think during this phase the approach I'm going to try taking is something stylized- you can see in some panels where I have a skyline background, rather than individually render clouds I put in a b...

Comic Report #65.1 -

Hello!  Here's the progress on the next page.  Since I'm on the other side of a few key moments in the comic this week I'm going to write a little bit about the art challenges I've had in the past and what I'm planning to work on moving forward in the comic.

This week I got my page inked, which is always a bit of a tedious step for me, and started work painting in panels.  Since the comic is taking place during a new day after a long stretch of night pages I need to make ...

Comic Report #65 - The Gang's All Here

So I gotta say, since around late April/early May I've been more or less nonstop working on animation, either for comics, games or a part-time side job I've been doing (top secret), it's been nonstop making components to moving pictures.  With 600 in the tank, I'm relieved to actually be able to sit down and draw just plain old static art again, and that's what today's update is going to be about!

One of the things I wanted to allow space for following page 600's update is a reunio...

Comic Report #64.4 - The Big Finale

Hello!  I just want to make a real quick post about the next update.  I am in a home-stretch right now and I think either tonight, or tomorrow, but probably tonight, I can have this page finished and posted.  To give myself as much time and energy as I can to achieve this, rather than break down the remaining panels of the comic I would like them to be a little bit of a surprise, so this week's update is just going to be The Update.  Preparing the mockup animations to post...

Comic Report #64.3 - The Long Road

When I take a long time to make something like this I sometimes feel guilty about how long it takes to put together, but when I step back from my workspace I can see that the long work time is because of how many small moving parts there are, and they all take time to make; the end product I want requires those parts and so if I want to realize my vision I have to put the time into making sure all the little gears and springs are in place.  This week's art push has taken me about halfway...

Comic Report #64.2 -

Hello again!  This week has been further progress on this 600th page.  It will probably take me one more week and change to chew through everything I need to prepare for this animation but right now I am fully in the phase of inking, painting and finalizing assets, so from this point on it's all just downhill until the finish line.  Today I'll talk a little bit about how I am approaching this process and the challenges I'm working around.

When I draw a normal comic page w...

Comic Report #64.1 - Gears In Motion

Hello again!  This week I've been making headway on the page 600 animation; this is going to take me a little while to get through so I think these will end up being next Friday's update as well, but I will absolutely have this piece done inside the month of June.  For now, though, here's where my process has taken me this week:

Patrons who follow both my comic and our gamedev work may find the header image of this article a bit familiar, the format is closer to my gamedev pos...

Comic Report #64 - Getting Down To Business

Alright!  After a bit of a detour into getting some animation work done following the previous page it's time to start work on the Hell Task of animating page 600.  I haven't documented a 100-page animation process on this Patreon before so this week I'll do my best to outline my process.

One of my primary rules for animating comic pages for as long as I've been doing them is that the page needs, absolutely needs to be able to function without the animation.  The motion i...

Comic Report #63.2 - Rudely Awakened

Hello!  Here is the textless version of this page for you!  My next task after writing this little update is writing in the dialogue and putting it up, and then I'm going to be on the hook for page 600.  I'm not entirely sure how to present the process of creating one of my animated pages on Patreon yet, but I'll figure that out then I get there.  For now, though, I'll post a little bit about this page!

Between the last time we saw some of these bedroom setups and no...

Comic Report #63.1 - The Home Stretch

Hello again!  This week I spent a bit of time wrapping up a large commission job, but I've hit the halfway mark on painting this page and getting it ready to post.  Sometimes I worry about taking too long to make pages, but I expect to have this finished by the end of the weekend and that would put me well within having two updates within a month, which is actually a good mark for me. Wrapping this page up will put me on the clock for the big 600th animation too, so I've been both i...

Comic Report #63 - On The Threshold

Hello!  This week's update is a comic page.  I started the week working on gamedev stuff but I have some mental gears I need to turn to get into that workflow- I'm ready to begin animating human enemies and I need to develop a plan for doing that, since until now I'd been making undead enemies who could be floppy and kinda loose in their animations.  For human enemies I need them to have personalities and move like upright, living people, so my approach is going to have to chan...

Comic Report #62.2 - Up Late Feeling Great

Hello!  Here is the textless version of this page.  It's about 4:30am my-time as of this writing so I'll be brief and get to the lettering so I can get it up to share before going to bed.

In doing archive dives to research my comic I look back on the way I used to paint pages and I like to observe the ways in which my painting has changed over time.  I used to put a lot of meticulous shading into comics, using lots of gradient layers to round things out, but these days it...

Comic Report #62.1 - Stuck Indoors

Hello again!  This week I have something different planned for my work report.  I'd been battling the cabin fever of not leaving my apartment for so long, and so I didn't get quite as much work done as I'd like to.  I'm at a point where I can say "I'll have this page finished and posted before the weekend is over", though, which is in line with previous half-finished updates.  I don't feel like I have as much to talk about, and I don't want to post a Friday work report wit...

Comic Report #62 - Bunkmates

As the comic numbers have drawn nearer and nearer to that big 600 mark, I've been pacing myself to land on a specific moment at a specific time, and with Lizzie's mystery-solving job established I have a bit of narrative time to relax and decompress.  Throughout the comic I've paced out days in the timeline with some sort of night-time page, but a lot of those pages have focused on Lizzie and Alice, who have kinda gel'd in a way I didn't plan from the start of the comic.  Monday and...

Comic Report #61.2 - Happy Birthday

Hello!  Here is the final textless version of this page before I get to lettering.  It's about 4am as I type this so I'm gonna be sorta quick so I can post it and get to sleep, but I wanted to share this one with you because it's a very special page!  Way back on March 13th 2007 I put my very first comic page online.  I wanted to pick March 13th so Dead Winter's birthday would fall on Friday the 13th sometimes, and it just so happens that on the 13th anniversary of the com...

Comic Report #61.1 - The Hard Things

Hello! This week I had to do a lot of traveling for personal matters and I didn't get as much work done on the comic page as I'd have liked.  I always try to land on some kind of state of the comic at the end of a week where I can make a meaningful post about some aspect of the process, and where I ended up today was at the "inked, flatted and prepped for painting" phase.  Inking all the characters on this page ended up taking a lot longer than I anticipated, so I thought today I mi...

Comic Report #61 - Loose Ends

Hello!  This week was all comic work as we get closer to page 600.  When I get within about ten pages of a 100-mark I try to plan my pacing to land the narrative right where I want it to be so an animation-friendly, important moment lands on the hundredth page.  For page 600's lead-up I have a bit of breathing room to let characters do non-action social things, so on this page I want to resolve a story beat from earlier!  Specifically on page 513, Stacy was like oh HEY you...

Comic Report #60.2 - Lights Out

Hello again!  Here's a quick look at the finished textless page.  

Whenever I get to this point I always really like how my art looks, I save the glow effect for the very end phase and that always makes the characters pop from the background.  I paint without them so I can get good value contrast internally and then add the glow as an extra detail at the end- it's kind of like a black outline for darkness. Adding that element lets me include a few extra layers of detail t...

Comic Report #60.1 - Illuminating

Hello! This week I worked on inking and painting the next comic page, and I've hit a "pretty close to almost done" point in time for today's work report.  I expect I can have this page finished probably by the end of Saturday or Sunday at the latest, so you can keep an eye out for the textless version to be posted in that timeframe, but for now I'll get into my process and what I did this week.

Since this page is a return to the apartment interior, which I'd just kinda roughed in i...

Comic Report #60 - No Place Like Home

Hello again!  This week I've got pencils done for the next page to share with you.  There's a lot of little details I'm having fun with on this page so I'm gonna jump right into posting about it without any further delay.

Coming off of a big action scene I wanted the next short little scene to be a wind-down, to kinda let the tension settle and nerves un-fray, so the camera cuts back to the gang's apartment above the candy store.  A lot of the comic pre-Tombstone have see...

Comic Report #59.2 - Put A Bow On It

Real quick, here's the finished textless version of the page for you!  I'll keep this write-up short because as of this moment it's 3:20am and I am excited to get this page online for everyone to see.

I think one of the things that gave me the most challenge in painting this page is the helmet guy's puffy coat.  I tend to draw a lot of hoodies since I think they're really fun to draw and I particularly like the shape a hood makes around someone's neck and shoulders, but I also...

Comic Report #59.1 - Fresh Perspective

I didn't get quite as much work done on the page as I'd have liked, but fortunately there's not a whole lot left undone on this page. I expect it to be finished by the end of the weekend, or maybe sooner if I catch a burst of momentum, but even still this shouldn't take longer than Sunday to finish.  Since I started painting the page and it's the last page before a scene change, today I'll talk a little bit about planning lighting for different scenes.

The scene I've been working o...