on the road - 4

page 4 already! soon i'll need to set stuff in stone for public releases. it wont be possible to go back on choices when it hits websites that have no edit function. X)

this page I think is looking pretty snazzy! though I've been messing too much with that rainbow panel now that I cant tell anymore wether its good or not XD

you can find the whole comic over here on the drive: Drive Link 

also, I figured, since people were commenting on the car a lot, I might as well show my entire art process. for those interested:

1: the thumbnails, this is where I draw a very tiny version of the pages so I can fit a camera angle and page layout to scene actions and dialogue. you keep them small so you can never get lost and accidentally make details. you want to divide a problem as big as this up into easily managable bitesize chunks, since the task is too big to juggle inside your brain. (takes about 2 days to write 20 pages, and 1 day to thumbnail 9 to 16)

2: 3D renders, for comics these days (since café exposé), to achieve consistency over many pages, I use 3D models for scenery. usually it's self made, but in this case I didn't want to spend another month 3d modeling a car (i've done that enough in school), so I bought one. I filled it up with everything I need to keep consistent in the scene and spend some time finding the right camera angles and settings to match my thumbnails.

for one time backgrounds such as everything outside of the windows of the car, it's way inefficient to use 3d models, so I draw those by hand. (setting up a scene like this takes a day, but saves me hours of constructing a car per page) 

3: sketches. we know what sketches are, but just to hammer it home. construction is required to draw anything, things are built up out of 3D volumes (you can see I included some 3D volumes in my 3D model too to help with consistency), and you cannot cleanly draw these layers of construction, so keep the brushes big so you can't be tricked into drawing detail, keep it messy and fast. (sketches usually take a day to do 2 or 3 pages) 

4: line art, the longest process of them all, takes a normal work day to cleanly put down all the lines for a page like this, it's also the part where I spend most time redrawing hands and facial expressions. and usually draw the backgrounds from the ground up, for anything that isn't covered by 3D models.

5: flats, this used to take over a day first I started comics, but I got down to under an hour with self made macro scripts and nifty tricks. when doing flats you seperate all the layers into easily managable chunks. for this comic; the characters, the car and the background are all seperate line layers and color layers.

6: and finaly the beauty, shading. even the slightest shading layer makes all the difference. it's 2 seperate layers, one for the characters and one for the car. I draw with a soft brown and a light gray yellow and it translates onto the color layer below like this! (flats and shading take me a day for the cover page and a few hours for a page like this)

 I hope that was a little informative XD

in total I spend about 3 or more days on writing, 2 days on thumbnails then 3 days on sketches. to finaly have a pile of pages that I take 1 day to line and 1 day to color each. 4 workdays a week make 2 pages like this!

and with that, my workweek is over, have a good weekend X) and you'll see a new page by tuesday!