deadwinter

Comic Report #49.2 - Ready For Action

Here is the customary textless version of this page before I do all the letters.  Normally after I post these I'll set to work actually writing the dialogue for a page, careful with my word choices to make sure the text fits around the main subjects' art without covering them up too much.  I always try to prevent covering up my characters because I think the depth and form from all my painting pops best when it's not obscured by any other layers.  

As mentioned on Friday ...

Comic Report #49.1 - Back At It Again

This week I shifted back to working on the comic page again.  It still surprises me how difficult it can be shifting between animation and painting mindsets, but I find that going back and forth as I have been for the past few years has improved my work in both fields tremendously, so the difficulty in jumping back and forth is worth it. 

Due to the economy of space on this page I opted to put word balloons in before I painted backgrounds to make sure they all fit where I need...

Game Journal #92 - Just One More Thing

This week I had planned on finishing up the comic page I had in the works but when I opened up photoshop I paused and thought, you know....  if I had one more week on gamedev I can knock three big items off my to-do list and be done with it.  Jason has been out of town this week and we're planning to make a big update push soon, so I figured if I take this week to just wrap these things up I can be available to help with the work push instead of waiting to build assets.  Since ...

Comic Report #49 - Pre-Fight Banter

This week I started work on a fairly complicated comic page.  Normally when I have pages with lots of panels that page is meant to focus on action, and when I have a lot of dialogue on a page I try to keep the panel count smaller so I have room for more word balloons.  On this page I want to have a bit of back-and-forth dialogue between Lizzie and the Ponchos that needs a bunch of camera turns and moment shifts to capture correctly.  I guess the best way to describe what I'm tr...

Comic Report #48.2 - Showtime

Here is this week's textless final page!  I'll be brief with my writeup so I can get to writing and put it up on the main site before bed.

One of the hardest things about working in a painterly style like this is how long it takes to see a piece through to completion.  Complex artwork looks awful to the artist's eyes- at least to mine- until it's about 80% finished.  You know in your head what you want to do and for so long the work is just flat tones and blocked-in shape...

Comic Report #48.1 - Progress

This week my focus was entirely on comic work.  I fleshed out the sketch I had from last week, inked it and began work on painting the page.  As seems to be the rhythm of these pages, I expect to have the finished page posted by Tuesday at the absolute latest, possibly late Sunday night at the super-earliest.  There aren't too many panels to do and sometimes I surprise myself by how quick I get something done.  This is a pretty standard "halfway-finished" page state so I'l...

Comic Report #48 - Dramatic Confrontation

This week I'm back on comic duty for another page.  I got some gamedev stuff squared away so I'll be working on the comic until its completion again.  Splitting my work time up into two projects has made things slower than I'd like them to be, but I still plan scenes and encounters the same way I always have, so even if I can only get one comic page a month done I have the whole scene planned out in thumbnails so I know the pace I need the comic to move at and what kind of moment ea...

Comic Report #47.3 - All Cleaned Up

Here is the textless version of this page.  I got finished a bit earlier than I expected.  In fact, the whole page went by much quicker than I thought it would considering the number of subjects I had to draw.  The 80/20% approach to drawing backgrounds worked out pretty well, I have less fine detail to worry about while I'm drawing panels. I'm gonna try to remember to do that on the next page as well.

I'll keep this update short and get back to lettering.  There's a...

Comic Report #47.2 - The New Guys

This week I continued to focus entirely on finishing up the comic.  We had a small bit of gamedev progress but it was all coding, I didn't animate any new assets. I did make a lot more progress on this page than I thought I would, so I will post a bit about that!

Every now and then when I am in a hurry to get work done quickly- usually when I'm already late- I'll paint in a method where I'll just leave the backgrounds ~80% finalized and then sweep back through at the end to do a fi...

Comic Report #47 - Back To Business

This week I managed to actually sit down and start work on the next comic page.  Sorry again for the big gamedev derail, I'll be working exclusively on the comic page until it's finished.  When I switch gears between animation and painting it usually takes me a bit of time to get my brain in the right frame of mind for the job at hand- when I'm animating everything is in a fixed camera position and I can be a little loose since I'm drawing an action across multiple frames of time, a...

Game Journal #85 - Oops! More Revisions

I feel like I need to preface this post with an apology.  I was like, okay, revisions are done so I can get back into comics, I just need to finish up the little bit I started at the end of last week.  And then I started plugging more things into the game engine and I had more things to do, so I thought, okay, I'll just push these last revisions forward while I still have momentum and then start the comic closer to Friday.  I ended up pushing another week of game development, s...

Comic Report #46.2 - Framing The Scene

Hello!  Here's the textless version of the new page real quick.  It took a bit of effort to paint in these last three panels but I think now that they're done they're worth the effort.

I made a couple changes to the panels compared to the block-in versions I posted on Friday.  The penultimate two panels I realized I was supposed to draw a "nose" style bus, rather than a "flat front" bus, so I cut the bit wall I had Lizzie walking around down to reflect the correct bus sha...

Comic Report #46.1 - Moving Forward

Okay, so for a little while now I kept saying, oh, I'll make this next week all about the comic and then I kept getting sidetracked with game work, but THIS week I absolutely did nothing but focus on the comic, and I'm going to keep focusing on it until it's done.  It's a bit hard to switch back and forth, especially when the game is reaching a point where it's almost ready to be real and it needs my attention, but I never want to let the comic languish, it's an important half of the pro...

Special Work Report - Various Items

Hello again!  Last week I was in Seattle on some gamedev matters so I wasn't able to type up a post.  Since I have a mix of some gamedev items and a smaller bit of comic work I thought I would combine my report into one post this week for all patrons.  Thank you for your patience!

The first item I'd like to cover is the whole reason I was in Seattle in the first place.  In addition to being our programmer Jason is also our sound and music wizard. We have a few music ...

Comic Report #46 - Turning The Page

This week we're back in comic mode until the next page is done.  I want to start off with a quick disclaimer: next week I'm going to be traveling to Seattle to work on some gamedev things and also to visit ECCC, so I won't be able to type up a Patreon post next Friday.  I'll be home again on Saturday, though, so I'll get to work having a more meaningful update the Friday after next, rather than rush an update off a half-week of travel.

I'm approaching an action scene in the co...

Comic Report #45.2 - The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

I genuinely don't know if I used this kind of wordplay already but I love light puns and these pages are all about flashlights.  I'll keep this update short so I can get back to work on the text- I say that all the time too but I love my work and it's hard to keep myself away from it.

The most interesting point about this page compared to the Friday update is the first panel. I saved this panel for last  since I knew it would be a pain to paint, but I got it all done today by ...

Comic Report #45.1 - The Middle Of The Road

The siren call of working on game work is really strong these days, but this week I focused on getting work done on the next comic page, so this week's update will be all about comics.  

Last week I had about one day's worth of a sketch put together, so I started out this cycle by fleshing out the rest of the page before I jumped to inking it.  In particular I needed a good shot to open the page- I wanted to convey that a good bit of searching has been going on before ultimate...

Comic Report #45 - A Rough Start

I'd planned on spending this whole week working on comics but a number of urgent gamedev items came up that needed my attention, now that we've got the kernel of our game getting back into shape a lot more features are coming online and they need some art asset or stat adjustments so Jason can expand on his end of them.  This week, however, I will definitely commit my full time to finishing this page, but for now I wanted to at least block in the pace of the comic so I know what I'm work...

Comic Report #44.2 - Very Illuminating

Hello again, here's the textless version of the next page.  I typed up a bit about this yesterday so I'll be brief on this one.

I love painting limited light sources, so the last panel was a lot of fun to work on.  When I paint a panel like this I'm essentially pointing the highlight of every shape at the single light point- like if you imagine a bunch of dice cubes, all the sides with one pip are pointing towards a single candle, that's how I approach single-lightsource shots...

Comic Report #44.1 - Keeping Perspective

This week I focused on getting the next comic page done, and I fell short of my big ambitions. I was hoping to have the whole thing done by today but I hit a snag in the middle two panels. It's something that happens to me a lot whenever I need to be very precise with environmental details, I get fatigued cross-checking my references to make sure the right buildings are in the right spots.  All of my characters are loaded into my internal RAM, but environmental details are like pulling u...

Comic Report #44 - The Little Pages

Here's the sketchup of the next comic page.  I didn't get a page done in December, but I was also putting a ton of time into getting some gamedev work done, and then it was a holiday, so I'm fixing to get another page up ASAP in January.  In the eleven or so years I've been making comics this sort of time pressure has come up often, but ever since my old tuesday-friday and then my later once-a-week update schedule suffered breakdown I haven't really taken advantage of the solution t...

Comic Report #43.2 - Actions Speaking Loudly

Okay so I have a confession: last night as I was finishing this page I felt a surge of fatigue right when I was in the home stretch, right around when I would normally post the textless page to Patreon, and I made the decision to just power through the rest of the page, get it posted and go to bed.  I only had enough batteries for one of the two things I normally do and I chose to finish the page and post it.  I apologize, but now that I'm awake I wanted to get the finished, textless p...

Comic Report #43.1 - Background Check

Hello! This was a bit of a short week, since I was traveling to be with family for the holidays, but I did get a big chunk of work on the next comic page finished.  The hardest thing about this page is probably also the easiest- the repeating background- so I'm happy to get it all done and out of the way in time for this update. 

For as long as I've had art classes one of the hardest things for me to focus on has been repetition.  When I learned stippling or shading with little ...

Game Journal #70 - On The Mark

This week I went back to take another shot at Monday's victory animation, and I'm happy to report that I got exactly what I set out to achieve in the first place!  It's a bit of a bummer that I lost the first week on failed attempts but this end result was largely a result of those past failures, so if you ever feel bad about your own ideas not immediately panning out, be comforted in knowing those failures will make you stronger as well.

The first thing I did when I tried to set up this ...

Comic Report #43 - A Grand Entrance

Hello again!  This week I started work on the next comic page, and I think this one shouldn't be too long to actually finish up.  This page is also a fun change of pace from my usual method, which I'll just jump in and explain the details to right away!

Normally when I construct a scene in a page I take a great deal of care to keep my camera movement fluid and cinematic, I believe I've mentioned a few times in past updates.  I always draw backgrounds because that gives a point o...

Comic Report #42.2 - A Light In The Dark

Hello!  It's technically kinda-sorta Monday on my circadian rhythm but here's the textless version of this page.  I always like to post these because I feel like if the art can tell a narrative without words then I've done a good job, and then I can go in and add the words and just really make it feel complete.

This page is a lot of single fixed lightsource illustration that I love to work on but there is one panel in particular that I think captures something I don't often talk abou...

Comic Report #42.1 - Just Around The Corner

Hello again!  Thank you for your patience with the last week.  This week I got my inking done and painted about half the page.  It's been a while so I'll get right into posting about my process right away!

When I was planning this page I knew there would be two "difficult" panels to paint, specifically panels 2 and 4.  Any time there's a depth of field shot I need to be conscious of lighting within space and it takes me more time to build, as opposed to shots where the came...

Status Update

Hello!  Sorry this one's a bit late and a bit sparse, I didn't want to leave you hanging on my weekly update.  This week I didn't really have time to get anything comic- or game-related done, I had a wedding to attend over the weekend and then a pair of commissions I needed to finish by today, so I've been slammed with private obligations.  I'm over that hill, though, so I will have a meaningful update for you next week.  My apologies again, and thank you for your patience. &...

Comic Report #42 - Tactical Espionage Action

This week I did some pencil work on the next comic page, and boy am I excited to get these finished and painted!  Probably the next ten or so pages are going to be action shots and I'm so extremely excited to be drawing them; action is the thing I love to draw the most and a big part of why I started making comics.  It's not that I don't like drawing the social moments, but I'm just really energized by the work I have planned ahead for this scene.  

When I write dialogue scenes ...

Bonus Post - Character Outfit Timeline

I want to maintain a schedule of always posting on Fridays, even if I post something earlier in the week.  I finished my comic on my Tuesday waking cycle but I didn't have time to put together a meaningful new post, so today I thought I'd do something fun.  Going back through the comic archive I put together a chart tracking the evolution of the main characters' outfits and designs throughout the course of the story. I always like to keep a character's personal equipment and gear kind ...