deadwinter

Comic Report #126.2 - Back On The Grind

Happy Pride Month! I'm back from my little trip to Chicago- I feel really relaxed, and I can recognize how burnt I was making myself grinding out all my obligations, I think the time off was healthy for me. I'd pressed to get my stuff for Kitsune Tails in throughout May and I got word on the project that it is now "feature complete", that now we just need to fine-tune it and refine what's there but that we actually did achieve our goal of putting the completed product together, and we can s...

Comic Report #126.1 - Going Easy On Myself

Hello again, thanks for waiting for me. This week I've got the bulk of this page drawn together, and after I knock out the last panel I can get it inked and flat-toned before my trip to Chicago for Combo Breaker. I'm going to be away from home this weekend so I don't think I'll be able to post an update next Saturday, but I'm hoping to have progress towards a finished page on the week I come back so a mid-week update next week will hopefully make up for it. I apologize for the disruptions ...

Update Notice: Gotta Push It Back!

Hello! I wanted to pop on here real quick and just let you know that I need to push the full work report back until tomorrow. I didn't want to leave you hanging here without a notice, though, so here's me letting you know you'll see more from me on Sunday. Lots of good news to share, though!

Sorry for the delays, and thank you for your kind patience! A small bit of the good news: I've hit my targets to finish all art assets for a feature-complete launch of our game! I'll talk more...

Comic Report #126 - Back To It

It's been a short week this week, where I updated on I think Thursday? And here we are, back here today. I hadn't planned to put out a bunch of thumbnail phase updates but we're rolling with it until I can get past a work breakpoint in the coming months, so thank you for bearing with me. Things are going well on my end; this boxing class is kicking my ass but I'm acclimating to it slowly, we should be releasing a game where I have developer credits on it soon, it's my birthday month and I'...

Comic Report #125.3 - Concensus

Here's the textless page! It's almost 5am, I think I can get this lettered before sleep and not after it. Quick writeup, then back to work.

I'd initially penciled this page in with Lou in the background of the last Monday panel, but when it came to inking I thought that having him there might distract from Monday's silhouette, and lessen the impact of him looking at Lizzie. I opted to render him as a kind of shadow blob, and let the background fade into darkness around him. I felt l...

Comic Report #125.2 - Under the Wire

Hello again! I've got progress on the next comic page to share with you today. The end of the month is coming up soon so I'm gonna push myself a little to try and get this done either at or just after the first of the month. I've been pushing hard to get all my Kitsune Tails responsibilities finished in time for launch- I can't post about that here, I have to keep my secrets, but I'm gonna have to focus on that work, work that I can't share, until we're over the finish line. You can tell ...

Comic Report #125.1 - Space

Hello again! I'm happy to say I have progress to share with you this week. I've been crunching away on my Kitsune Tails tasks, and if you've been looking forward to that game, I am happy to say that I'm hitting some kind of milestone this week. I can't say what, I can't say a lot of what I've been working on, and I really wish I could, but the line is "it'll be out before September of this year" and I am working hard to ensure my art tasks complete early enough to make good on that. That g...

Comic Report #125 - Monday

Hello again, it's a bit of a short week today but I always want to have something to share here so I hope today's offering is okay. I spent the time between the comic going up and now working on pushing some final Kitsune Tails assets, trying to finish up those obligations as soon as possible. I'll probably need to focus a lot on that this week as well, but I have my thumbnail for the next page plotted, so I can share that with you today. Every now and then I share these, it's an important...

Comic Report #124.2 - The Witching Hour

The textless page is here! A little later than I'd hoped but I'm not unhappy with it. I always say "I'll keep this brief" when I'm posting these at 3am but I've really been pushing hard to get this page out as soon as possible, and I've really crunched on a few other projects this month, so I think I'm gonna "keep it regular" and let the art speak for itself. The apartment looks nice when it's full of people like this, when Lizzie and Alice and Stacy and Mr. Cuddles have everyone over to c...

Comic Report #124.1 - Follow The Line

I've been pushing myself kinda hard this month attempting to accomplish everything I wanted to get done. A lot of it has been completed, but the comic is still in progress. I think it might end up finishing a little into April, like on this coming Tuesday at the latest, but I'm gonna do what I can to get it done over this weekend.

Speaking of "work that has been completed", we just put the last bit of polish on https://titan.g...

Comic Report #124 - On The Horizon

Hello again! This week I have two things to report, one is a big one and the other is the next comic page. I've been going pretty hard all month on like four or five different things and I feel a bit tired, but my work is not done yet. I can share a little of what we've built so far, though, so please have a look if you'd like.

For the past year or so I've been working on a side project on Cohost, building a little sci-fi universe, as a way to draw quick and easy things that aren't s...

Comic Report #123.2 - Illuminating

Hello!  I've got the textless version of this page ready for you to see.  Seeing as this is Thursday night I don't think I can get anything meaningful for a Friday update tomorrow, so this is gonna have to be the update for this week.  As far as things to share go, I feel like this one is pretty good, though, so I hope that's alright this time.

I'm really happy with how the atmospheric lighting on this page came out.  I feel like I managed to capture the depth of the...

Comic Report #123.1 - By Leaps And Bounds

Here's where I've landed this week.  I keep waffling between "this page won't be so bad" and "oh I really did get myself into trouble with this one".  There aren't that many panels, the backgrounds are fairly simple, but there are a lot of very specific characters here with a lot of very specific lighting, so I'm just gonna have to grind through it.  Needless to say, I'm grateful this year is a leap year, I got one extra day to plug away at this.  

One of the points ...

Comic Report #123 - Get Everyone

So we got a lot of gamedev stuff knocked out this month, but it's time to get back to business and prepare the next page to be posted before March rolls around.  Over at Lucky Raven we have a project in mind for March I've been slowly prepping assets for around some other things, but it's time to put those chainsaws up in the air and juggle back to the main thing we're all here for.  This one's a big one, so let's get into it.

In my slow, deliberate sort of way, a bunch of thr...

Comic Report #122.3 - There!

Hello again!  I've got the textless version of this page ready to roll.  I'm gonna keep this short like always so I can get back to it.

The scene after this page is done will shift to an indoor shot, which I'm looking forward to, since I'm not 100% on the snowflakes painted in this page.  I think the effect looks good in depth of field shots, where I can put a lot of little flakes far away and a few big ones up close to simulate depth and volume of space, but the shot wit...

Comic Report #122.2 - Basically There

Progress is moving forward on the next page, this week I've gotten the art all the way up to the background-pass phase, and I expect I can have it all done by like, tonight or sometime tomorrow.  It's been nice not having to worry about the end of the month creeping up, but again, next month's the short one so I'll have to take advantage of this time savings until I can make it through that one as well.

Going into the last phase of the comic, I'm actually not certain if these backg...

Comic Report #122.1 - Early Start

It's Friday again and I've got a progress shot on my comic page for you.  I'm real glad I started this one early, I don't feel too pressured leading up to the end of the month- my posting deadline- and I think the lighting and the final composition is gonna look real nice.  This week I put a bit of time into working on assets for Kitsune Tails (that is this project: https://store.steampower...

Comic Report #122 - On The Windowsill

This week I put a lot more focus onto working on this comic page. I made some headway on a gamedev task but that can probably best wait for a more complete achievement for its writeup.  Today I have a followup to last week's header image, where I'd just posted a page thumbnail and then said "I rested this week."  Well, THIS week I got the ball rolling on that page, and there's enough figures in it that it's probably better to get started on it sooner than later.  Last week I sa...

New Years Medley Post - A Little Of This, A Little Of That

Happy New Year!  Today I have something of an atypical write-up for you.  I make sure to have something to share with you every week, and this week I really just took some time to just enjoy the end of the year and go easy on myself.  I worked on some things this week but very little of it was "work", but I'm gonna share it with you anyways because, that's what this place is for, to show you what I did every week.

The header for this week's article is a thumbnail plotting...

Comic Report #121.3 - Happy New Year!

Here we are, more or less when I expected to have this ready, it's the textless version of the new page.  It's 4am here and I want to have this up before bed, so I'm gonna let this one be extra quick and get right to typing up the dialogue so I can get to bed before 5am-ish, that's my target.  Thanks for checking in with me this year, and I hope 2024 treats you well.  I'll see you on the other side.

Comic Report #121.2 - Sneak Preview

We're nearing the end of the year and I'm happy to say, I'll definitely be able to have this next page done before loafing around all night posting "Happy New Year" across a dozen different discord communities, as is my tradition.  You will almost certainly see another one of these posts from me tomorrow with the textless version of the page.  It wasn't planned this way on purpose but it's been nice to have a visually lightweight page to paint land on this month, the restive end-of-...

Comic Report #121.1 - It's Time For Us All To Rest Easy For A Little While

As the year draws to a close I'm really looking forward to pausing for a bit and just taking a breather, preparing for the start of the new year.  We have a lot of stuff in the pipe for 2024, a lot of "things we've been working on for a very long time that we can finally put in people's hands" kind of stuff- if you're a long-time supporter of this account I sincerely thank you for your kind and patient patronage.  For this weekend coming up, my goal is to rest.  I think we've a...

Comic Report #121 - Tying Threads Together

It's been a big week this week!  My teammate and I have been putting together a hub project to connect our various projects we've worked on over the years, as well as highlighting current projects and showcasing future projects that are still in the works.  It isn't quite ready yet so I don't want to put it fully on blast until everything is just right, but we're looking to have it ready for the new year.  Dead Winter has been kind of its own thing for a very long time, so it's...

Comic Report #120.3 - Happy December

I'd planned to have the textless version of this page up before today, but today hit and I didn't think it made sense to post an in-progress and then the final textless at the same time, so I just waited a bit to combine both posts into one.  There shouldn't be too much dialogue to put on this one so it'll be on the site shortly after this post goes up.

I had some fun with this page.  It ended up being sort of a slow crawl on the updates from the thumbnail to this finished com...

Comic Report #120.2 - Holi-dazed

I'm home from holiday travel today and I've got some progress to share.  It's not quite as much as I'd have liked but, well, it's a holiday week, what can you do?  I am basically all clear to coast downhill into the end of this comic, though, so I'm looking to try to have the whole thing done before this time next week.  It's a thirty-day month, right?  I'll hit my mark, no sweat.

There's been two posts about the content of this page so I'm thinking about what I can ...

Comic Report #120.1 - A New Approach

This week I wrapped up some outside work projects and got back to moving the comic along towards the deadline.  I've got a little list on my desk of jobs and commissions I've been scratching off one item at a time, and it's mostly scratched out now, so I feel less under pressure in the moment.  With that said, I've been able to move forward on penciling the next page, so let's hear a little about it as something other than a thumbnail sketch.

I've been building up to being abl...

Comic Report #120 - From Humble Origins

It's not often that one of these posts ends up being the thumbnail phase of a comic, but this was a short week and this is about where I'm at in the process, so we'll work with what's on hand.  I'd mentioned on the Tuesday post that I'd be working on gamedev tasks Wednesday and Thursday, and what that ended up being was finalizing boss animations and boss stage art assets for Kitsune Tails, which I wish I could share here, but it's NDA and I don't want to get in trouble.  So instead...

Comic Report #119.2 - Happy Halloween

Hello again!  I've got the textless version of this page ready to share with you on this spooky hallow's eve.  This one's gonna be quick, since the dialogue on this page is basically two words, I'll have it live on the site before this notification hits your email box!  Maybe.  It'll be pretty fast, regardless.

One of the major visual things I wanted to achieve with this page was to build a sense of coziness.  the opening shots of the snowy exterior at night is ...

Comic Report #119.1 - The Little Windows

Another Friday is upon us and I've got some work progress to share with you.  It's the 27th, I've got five days until my work deadline and I think from where I'm at right now I can hit that easy enough- there is a hiccup I'm anticipating but I'll go into that in a minute.  I've been juggling work on the comic and game sprite animation for my dayjob on Kitsune Tails, but Dead Winter game art is on hold until I get this page wrapped up.  There's so much to do!  But I persist...

Comic Report #119 - Rise And Shine

I've had a productive few weeks wrapping up my gamedev tasks in bringing Alice to color parity with Lizzie, but now it's time to get back on the comic horse and ride into the sunset of this month cycle.  I don't have quite enough new stuff to share about Alice's sprites that I didn't show off last week, but here's the capstone little cheer animation for you:

Look at her go!  She's rea...