deadwinter

Comic Report #11.5 - Page Preview

Hey! I just finished the art on the latest page so I thought I'd put up a wordless preview. I don't want to destroy my sleep cycle too much so I'm gonna leave the words for tomorrow and put it up then, but for now you can enjoy some lovely paintings!  Thanks for your patience, I swear to God the next page won't take quite as long (I think I spent more time on panel one alone than on the entire rest of the page).

Comic Report #11.4 - FINALLY

Okay, weeks later and Panel One of this comic is done!  I fleshed out the detail on the buildings, added the floodlights on the night side and ran wire all around town to power what's important.  I realized in the background of a few pages I had trees, like moving south from Lizzie and Alice's place (on the west road) towards the river, so I had to remove some buildings and add some others, but every background element should be present and in the right place. Lou and Monday's place is...

Comic Report #11.35 - The Original Plan

Just for fun, here was my original town plan, you can see how much it's deviated from the sketches.  You can see how much things have changed so far, and maybe why I need to nail down where everything actually is now, since my old plans are basically useless now.

Comic Report #11.3 - Almost There!!!!

Well, I went through my comic a hundred times and I think I have all the buildings I've already drawn where they ought to be. I had to make a few adjustments on the fly- like there were buildings behind Lou and Monday's place, and an alleyway that Liz and Alice met them from, so I had to rearrange that interior plot and shorten the eastern building of it to allow roadway access to it, for it to make sense.  I originally thought I'd have the road where Sheriff Tanner's house was further west...

Comic Report #11.2 - Shaping Up

I wanted to get this part done earlier but it was a holiday weekend and, well, you know.  I took the weird blob shapes and I sharpened them up into actual buildings and I roughed in my lighting. The little white dots represent where the spotlights in Tombstone are and I used that as a reference to block in light sourcing in the night-to-day shift from left to right. Now that it sort-of looks like how I want it to end up looking I can go through my notes and detail the buildings I know are s...

Comic Report #11.1 - This Panel

As I might have mentioned before, the shot I need to start the next page is a bit of a pain to put together, so I thought I'd capture some progress shots on it and grudge my way through it, posting them here as a bit of motivation.  The idea of the shot is a panned-out panel of Tombstone, which means that I have to go back though the past 70 or so pages I drew and pick out specific landmarks I put in the background of scenes (which I generally try to keep track of anyways) and put them in a...

Comic Report #11: Transitions

Now that I've got a moment out of the way I want to push time forward and set the next arc of the story into motion.  I have the next bunch of pages planned out to crisscross a lot of narrative threads in what I hope is a coherent way, but before I can do any of that I need to move from one location to another.  The way I planned this page in my head involved a pan-out shot of the town with a night-to-day transition and then a zoom-in onto our first focal characters, Lou and Monday. &n...

Comic Report #10.5: Better Ideas

When the current page went up I'd typed a whole post about my choices for using EKG waves as a mechanism for showing increasing tension within a scene, but when I posted it the post vanished in a Patreon hiccup. Which is probably for the best because a few hours after I realized I wasn't entirely satisfied with my original idea for tension (pictured above) because it ruined the sense of 1st-person perspective I also wanted to capture. Sometimes I only get a better idea for how I could have handl...

Comic Report #10 - Going Out With A Bang!

Here' the sketch phase of the next comic! Convention season is largely over for the year so I'm not in any particular rush to animate things for the game, so I can focus on Just Comics for a while. This comic is definitely the end of establishing Tombstone as a setting and the beginning of the next arc, which is (backwards for spoilers) yretsymredrumnufa!! I don't know if I posted that already on these blog posts or not, but everything I've been setting up should make a lot more sense soon once ...

Comic Report #9.5 - The Deadline

Last weekend I promised that I'd have a finished comic by this weekend, and dammit I held myself to that! Here's the letterless art for the next page, which you can see before anyone else does! Oh I wonder what will happen!

In my earlier comic days I used to push myself all the time to stay awake and get pages out the door on time, it's how I used to update like clockwork. It was also incredibly bad for my health. I haven't lost that power, however, I can still push myself without s...

Comic Report #9: The Beginning of The Beginning

Hello! We've been tying up some loose ends with the game, getting it ready to play at the end of this month, and I've started work on the next comic page.  Here's an ink preview; I'm looking to have it done and posted by next weekend, but you can peek at it now!

Over the past I-can't-believe-it's-been-years I've been working to set things up in place for a fairly complex and ambitious story arc, and I'm just about ready to topple the first domino! I won't say how it'll all fall...

Comic Report #8.75 - Mostly Done

Hi guys! I'd thought about what I could do to make Patreon posts more meaningful to patrons and I thought, well it wouldn't be -that- much more effort to just paint all my backgrounds in behind the speech bubbles, that way patrons can see the art uninhibited. I think it'd be cool, and I'm gonna try to do it for future comics moving forward.  Anyways, here's the textless page for this update!  Thanks for sticking with me.

Comic Report #8.5 - Inkredible Progress

Hello again! I just thought I'd make another post here with the inked version of the page I just posted about.  As mentioned in other articles, I don't put too much detail into my inks since I let my tones do a lot of the work. I'm particularly excited to work on this page because I not only get to draw Lizzie's dream-self (a reunion of the id, ego and superego, thematically speaking) but I get to add a splash of color to the archives again, possibly for the last time in the story.  I'...

Comic Report #8 - Curtain Call

I finished up my game sprite obligations so I'm switching back to comics, so here's the sketch phase of the next page. This one knocked out quickly compared to the last few I've done because it's pretty final, it's the end of a day arc before I start setting things in motion tomorrow, so I can just end it on a cool note.

While planning out the job-introduction day I wanted to segue from closing to home in a way similar to the start of the comic, highlighting a few key differences between Page ...

Comic Report #7 - Lights, Camera, Action

Here's a look at the current page (544) without any word bubbles- this time rather than wasting a bunch of time painting in background I was just gonna cover up I added my speech beforehand and used the bubbles to "cheat" and not have to render anything.  This normally isn't a very big deal but since I have a fixation on rendering every single background in a contextually-consistent perspective that can add up to a lot of little details I don't have to do simply because someone is a bit of ...

Comic Report #6 - Drawing Conclusions

When I posted my last strip I wanted to get a second one done and uploaded within the same month, and I feel like I can almost do that, but I hit some snags along the way. Here's the sketch phase for the next comic-in-progress. Of all the narrative elements to write I always have the hardest time drawing closure. Establishing the scene at the diner and building a sense of the place as a hub for information within the city of Tombstone was the last little bit of fleshing out the setting I wanted ...

Comic Report #5 - Details

I'm just about ready to finish up the next page of my comic, we just need the lettering done and it'll be ready to go, so I thought I'd put up the letterless page for you guys to see beforehand! This is attempting my new method of painting the whole panel at once, and not just the foreground and then the background. Things felt easier for me, and with other obligations on hold I feel like I can get a second page done this month, so here's hoping! One thing I'm still really torn on is the light o...

Comic Report #4 - A New Approach To Painting

For as long as I've been making comics I've lived with the guilt that I was making them "wrong". In my schooling I was trained as an oil painter, and one of the foremost things we learned was to paint our backgrounds first, and then paint our subjects, or at the very least paint things in a holistic way. When I make comics, somehow in the process of my artistic development, I learned to just paint my figured against a flat grey background and then build the background tones around them, to "save...

Comic Report #3 - Sketching a Page

Hi there! I've been super-busy lately traveling to cons all over the place but I'm back on my current work cycle (sun-tue freelance, wed-thu comic, fri-sat gamedev) and I've got the next page blocked in to share. I've got about two more pages I want to spend fleshing out the diner, since it's going to be a centrally-important location for the comic's immediate future, and after that I'll be shifting focus to the next piece of the puzzle. Lately I've been very conscious of my figures' expressiven...

Comic Report #2 - Backgrounding

Sorry for the delay in updates, I had a bit of an issue with my computer (the motherboard had a meltdown) but I'm back in the saddle and finishing up the next page ASAP. Back in 2007 I decided to start making this comic, and I chose March 13th as the first update day because I wanted the comic's anniversaries to potentially fall on Friday the 13ths, and those often happen in March. This coming Friday is the comic's 8th birthday, and I'm really striving to get a page done in time for the big day....

Comic Report #1 - p.542

So I took your guys' advice and instead of spending a long time thinking about, drawing references for and typing up a journal post I just took all that time and started on the next comic page. I'm pretty pleased with the expressions on this page. We're getting to know Lizzie's new coworkers, and the role the Jade Garden plays in the town of Tombstone. This should probably be close to done next weekend or early next week. I've budgeted my weekly schedule to always have time to make comics so fro...

Feedback Request!

Hello! I'd first like to say thank you to everyone who has supported this Patreon over the past however many weeks it's been going. You've really made a tremendous difference in my life and enabled me to work on a lot more things stress-free, and for that I am extremely grateful. I'm also reaching a bit of a burnout point as far as typing up weekly art journals goes. Somewhere along the way I got it into my head that I should document as much of my process and the way I think as I can, and a lot...

Art Journal 038: Interconnectivity & The Human Face

Our faces tell a lot about us.  We can convey whole ideas with just a turn of our brow or the pull of our smile, and the look on our face can mean the difference between “I’m fine!” and “I’m fine…”.  The expressions we wear are a window to a deeper condition of our soul, so in comics having good expressions is a fantastic way to amplify an emotion or hint at a deeper subtext.  The trick of it, however, is knowing what detail convey the specific expressions y...

Art Journal 037: Intermissions

Back when I started making comics I actually stuck to a rigid twice-a-week schedule.  Every thirty or so pages I’ll try to find a story beat to close out a chapter on, and for three updates I’d run Intermission strips.  These strips served a couple purposes: firstly, they let me take three pages and explore some of the peripheral characters of the setting, which helped flesh out the world I was working in.  Second, they let me practice working in a different method- s...

Art Journal 036: Negative Space

My comics are usually very visually dense.  I’ll pack as much detail into the backgrounds as I can basically all the time.  But even as noisy as my pages might get, I’m always thinking about the negative space of my compositions, so this week I’d like to write a whole bunch of words about nothing.

When I was younger I had a problem with some of the real-media drawings I would do on paper.  I’d start with a central figure, which I’d draw just fine, but then...

Intermission Update

I've been going really hard for a long time but I feel like this week I've finally hit a wall where I had so much other work to do and I'm stretched so thin that I would take a breather from big wordy updates, just for one week, and catch my breath. I don't want a week to pass with nothing, though. One of the things I want to get out of the way is to finally set time aside and just finish up the latest comic page, so I started painting it up and I decided to do something fun. Normally I'll add d...

Art Journal 035b: Comic Progress (cont)

Here's a page progress update since last week. I've had to split my time up between a couple different obligations and get some contract work out of the way so I didn't have as much time as I'd have liked to get everything done, but I should be able to knock out the background this weekend and have a finished page posted by next week.

Art Journal 035: Outfits

Everyone has their own approach to character design.  Some focus on using rich color palettes to give a character a certain mood or hint at their personality, while others employ a wide array of abstract shapes to visually differentiate one character from the other. Everyone does a little of everything in different measures, but my favorite aspect of character design has always been drawing outfits, because to me what you carry with you tells a lot about where you’ve been, who yo...

Art Journal 034b: Comic Progress

Here's a current in-progress shot of the next comic page. I'm having a lot of fun with expressions on this one, and it's basically the second time in the whole comic a mop is actually being used as a mop! The last panel is a fun callback to the first panel of the third page of the comic. I'm looking to get a bunch of this done this weekend.

Art Journal 034: Sketch Styles

Every page I’ve ever drawn has started with a sketch phase, to hash out my ideas and block in what I want the page to do, which goes without saying at this point.  But while this has always been the first step in my process, I’ve had a couple different approaches to actually doing it over the years, so this week I’d like to highlight a couple different ways I’ll sketch a comic.  I’ve made pages in all these styles over the years and they’ve all branched off into of...