deadwinter

Comic Report #95 - The Call

Hello!  A new Friday is here and so I have a whole bunch of work report to write up for you.  I ended up doing a -lot- of work this week, both for comics and games,  so I'm gonna type up as much about that as I can.  Firstly, though, I have a big plan for this weekend: poking through my site I found an old mechanic that I can repurpose to put all the minicomics on the main site without interrupting the main comic flow.  I'm gonna be tinkering with that tonight or tomo...

Comic Report #94.1 - All Wrapped Up

Hello!  Here's the textless version of the new page.  I'll keep this post brief so I can get it lettered and posted during these hours where everyone is awake.

Going into this page the panel I felt I'd have the most trouble with was the mall interior shot, but I think it turned out pretty good.  You can get a sense of how all the curtains are hung up over all the store entrances to make private little houses, and the theater on the third floor is all darkened out to give ...

Comic Report #94 - New Beginnings

Hello!  Happy New Year. We made it to the end of 2021 and we're on the threshold of a fresh new start.  This has been a very full and very busy year for the comic, particularly in the last third, so I was happy to enjoy some rest before the new year starts.  I had intended to get this comic all-the-way finished before the new year but I think that was slightly overambitious of me.  I have the comic sketched for today, and then over the weekend I should have it inked and re...

Happy Holidays!

Hello!  This week I had originally planned to have the sketch for the last intermission page up tonight, but it's the holidays and I've been working extra hard since September trying to get these scenes drawn in short order.  I don't want to rush work or grind through Christmas so I'm taking it easy. I did a little sketch I plan to finish up tonight to share tomorrow, which you can see above.  I think I've drawn these three hanging out in their living room before- it's such a c...

Comic Report #93.1 - Quick Introductions

Hello!  Here is the textless version of the next page.  This is probably a record for this blog for the fastest turnaround from a page being posted, a page sketch going up and the finished thing being posted.  I was going to wait until Friday to post these but I'm pretty impatient and I'll be putting the full thing up tonight.

These intermissions have been fun to do. Between the last time I did these black & white pages and now I ended up drawing one hundred minicomic...

Comic Report #93 - Party Crashers

Hello!  Here is a rough block-in sketch of the next page, which I expect to have finished before next week.  This is getting into a very fun part of this mini arc so I am genuinely excited to get these scenes down on paper and move forward. So anyways, about the new page!

From the top, we move from the theater interior into the lobby. One of my favorite gags to draw is that Looney Tunes sort of peeking out from different places and just invisibly moving up across them. I think...

Comic Report #92.1 - Multipass

Hello!  Here's the textless version of the next comic page for you.  This will be going up tomorrow, so later tonight I'll be trying to pencil the next page to post on here for you as well.  

Inking this page has been a real challenge. I like to do these pages in black & white so I have something a bit easier to work with, but then I went and decided, hey, I can set this scene inside a movie theater, neglecting to consider how many seats I'd have to draw.  I just...

Comic Report #92 - Intermissions

This week's a fun week of stuff to share. I've got a new comic page sketched for you, but I also have a plan of action for the rest of December, but also I have some new gamedev stuff to share as well in another post after this. 

The first thing: my plans for December.  This week I did planning and layouts for the next three pages so the whole intermission is plotted.  The idea is, I can post a sketch this week, then I can get the page inked and finished relatively quickl...

Comic Report #91.3 - Finally Here

Here it is at last, the textless final page of the chapter.  This one's been a bit harder for me for some reason so I'm happy to finally reach this point where I can breathe a little bit and let a complete chunk of story exist as-is.  It feels good to hit this point, like if someone were to find the comic for the first time there's a complete endpoint for them to land on after reading it all.

When pulling up references for that final shot I needed to look at what was over ther...

Comic Report #91.2 - Aaaalmost There

I'd hoped to have this page finished by today but it seems I just didn't have it in me. I've been pushing hard on work since August and I might just be a little bit tired, but I am excited to be very close to the end of this chapter.  I have a three-page intermission run planned which I expect to be able to finish before the end of the year.  I'm thinking about how to approach the intermission pages- I can definitely have them drawn and inked in one week cycle, but I'll probably jus...

Comic Report #91.1 - Closer

This has been something of a short week for me, since I needed to take care of some holiday things, but I did make a bit of progress on the next page. I'm aiming to get it finished before the end of November, but at the latest this page should be done by next Friday, so it's on track to be finished in fairly short order.  

When I'm painting a page I usually don't use the same exact values of grey for different characters over and over again, I tend to build them from scratch on eac...

Comic Report #91 - Closure

Hello again!  I've got the start of another comic page to share with you today.  This one is the last page of the chapter, which means there will be three intermission pages to follow it.  The relationship thread between Lizzie and Alice has been a very long one, so it feels a bit odd to have it decisively tied, but this also means I get to write them together moving forward, which is new and fun.  In that regard this page is sort of an ending and a beginning point, but I'...

Comic Report #90.1 - Here We Are

Hello again!  I've got the textless version of this page ready for you. There's not a whole lot of text to type on this one but somehow I don't think it's the words people are anticipating about it.  This is a Thursday night update so I'm not sure how much I can hammer out for a Friday work report, so I might not have anything to share then- I hope these images above can suffice on their own this week.  

Last week I had the color part finished, but since then I decided to...

Comic Report #90 - The Big One

So this week I got a bit further than just a sketch phase to share with you.  This page is a particularly significant moment, which has been- God, it's been thirteen years in the making.  One thing happens on this page but it's a big thing so I'm gonna spend today writing about the thought process and the buildup to this moment.  Quite a few people have been waiting for this moment for a while, and so here it is.

Between the two of these characters Lizzie has been a bit b...

Comic Report #89.2 - Here We Are

Hello, I'm back again with the textless page as promised. I feel good about getting this page finished before midnight, or before the usual 4 or 5am posting time.  There's not many more pages in this scene after this one but I feel like people will really like the ones coming up. I hope they like this one too.

A fun little detail about this page: since I was emulating the old painting style in the little flashback shots, I opted not to paint in the little outline glows I put on mod...

Comic Report #89.1 - Trick or Treat?

Hello again!  I've got a fun progress report for you: this comic page should be ready probably between now and Halloween, so you'll for sure have a nice treat by Sunday.  I honestly would have had it done today but my other gamedev job needed a bunch of work done so I had to spend some time over there; I -did- make some more progress on the Dead Winter game stuff, which I'll be writing a post about after this. Busy busy.  Right now let's talk a bit about the comic, though.

Comic Report #89 - The Other Side

Hello again!  This week I've got the beginning of the next page ready for you to look at.  Fun story: last night I went to open this file and found it was corrupted! Oh no!  Luckily now that I'm a Clip Studio Paint user a backup of a previous state of the file was saved automatically so I was able to recover my work and pick up on the last 20% that didn't get recovered.  It was real late last night too so I was very worried about not having anything to show today, but inst...

Comic Report #88.2 - The Moment of Truth

Hello!  Here is the textless art for this next page for you!  

I was thinking I should do some write-up stuff for this but I got the dialogue specifics percolating in my head right now and I think this page in particular should speak for itself, so I'm just gonna go type that up for you.

Thank you as always for supporting this story!  I hope you enjoy this finalized page when it goes up.

Comic Report #88.1 - All Downhill From Here

Hello again!  I made pretty good progress on the comic page this week.  I was tied up with a multi-day jury duty summons this week so I lost a bit of work time I'd wanted to use on gamedev stuff, so for now this is going to be a comic-only week.  The good news is I've gotten the whole page inked and my main character pass painted, so that just leaves the backgrounds and such to go and this page's backgrounds look very very easy to do, save the first panel.  I expect this p...

Comic Report #88 - Let It All Out

Hello again!  Last time I said I was probably going to focus on gamedev stuff for this one day between the comic updating and now, and I did do that (so keep an eye out for the gamedev post to follow this one!), but I also had some time and I was like, you know what?  Let's keep the momentum going and knock out that other page sketch.  

I didn't get the backgrounds all sketched in but that's fine, I got the meat of this page plotted.  This page is extremely important...

Comic Report #87.2 - The Setup

Hello!  Here's the textless version of the next page.  I've been working hard to get these pages ready in a reasonable time, I hope you've been enjoying them!

These pages have been taking me a bit longer than I anticipated.  All these little background buildings have been a bit of a time hole for me, but I think it was worth it.  Having an atmosphere set by the river with the little warehouse shapes and the lamps , I feel like it is the perfect place in the town to g...

Comic Report #87.1 - Big Leaps

Hello again!  I've got a pretty large update since last week. I've been focusing exclusively on working on these comic pages to try to get this scene drawn in a relatively short amount of time.  I'm planning to expand out into more gamedev work soon but after wrapping up the minicomic obligations I wanted to just do this scene for a bit, it's important.  

Last week I only had a rough framework of how I wanted my page laid out, but I've made a lot more progress since then ...

Comic Report #87 - Hardhat Zone

Hello again!  This is a short week since the new comic page went up.  I wanted to get this page all-the-way penciled for today but I took a day to just rest and then I focused on thumbnailing out the next few pages so I make sure I can pace it right.  I have a partial construction of a page to share today which means today's write-up will be about P R O C E S S again!

I'm not going to share the other page thumbnails until those pages are ready for spoiler reasons, but whe...

Comic Report #86.2 - It's Time

Got the textless version of this page done for you.  I really want to type up the dialogue here and just get this posted so I'm going to be uncharacteristically brief with this writeup.  Here it goes:

All these little buildings.  I always forget how much work it takes to paint all these little buildings.  It looks great, though. I think the atmosphere is perfect.  But hoo nelly, all these little buildings.

I'm gonna go write some really love-brain dialogue...

Comic Report #86.1 - Double Time

So this has been my first week in a fairly long time where I didn't have anything else to do except work on the main comic, so that's exactly what I did.  Incidentally, after August's month of slow progress on a single page, I'm pleased to report that a week after posting the sketch phase of this comic I'm already nearly done with it.  I got all the main figures painted and I'm on my background pass, with the top two panels already drawn.  I expect to have this page finished th...

Comic Report #86 - Lunch Date

Coming off the conclusion of the 100 minicomic run, I feel a weight lifted off my shoulders.  I don't have the additional project to budget my time with.  And just in time, as we've finally arrived at a long-anticipated scene for many readers.  Between finishing up the 100th mini and today I was able to get the next main-comic page sketched.  Since I don't have my huge other-project work crunch with my gamedev stuff right now I feel like I can get these next few pages done...

Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #40

Okay so here it is, with about 20 hours to spare before my deadline for this thing.  Just like with the main comic I wanted to make minicomic #100 a bit special, but instead of animating it I made it 2x as long- two four-panel strips so if I ever print these up it could be split back into two pages, but otherwise it's presented as one big strip.  I've mentioned before how future side comics I wanted to do involved telling longer stories, this one is sort of a proof of concept for th...

Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #39

So funny story about this week's minibatch: I've actually burned through my entire buffer just as I got to the last week of this project.  It worked out well, starting out with a 20-strip buffer meant I could post these without worrying too much about them during this month's work crunch.  I'm actually over the fire now until I get strip 100 done-  I just finished this one now and it's going up for a Discord server preview on Monday.  I updated the main comic on Friday but...

Comic Report #85.4 - Finally Home

Thank you for your patience this month.  The next textless finished page is finally here and ready to share!  I just need to letter this and put it up on the site and a huge, tremendous weight will be lifted from my shoulders.

As a little art topic to post about, there is a fun and very old oil painting technique I used on this page to help make the art pop.  In the very last panel there is a closeup of the Mayor where he is lit from the back.  The old trick in paint...

Comic Report #85.3 - One More For The Road

Slow but steady progress continues on this page as I round out my do-or-die hell month of gamedev tasks on another job.  Thank you again for your patience during this time, once I am through these momentary hurdles I'll be able to put out main-comic pages much, much more frequently.  I should have this page finished and posted before this time next Friday, it's nice to have the finish line in sight.  I am running a bit low on juice I can post about regarding this page, but I'm ...