Chapter Five Begins!

Welcome to the start of Chapter Five of PRACTICAL DEFENCE AGAINST PIRACY!

When last we saw Alexandra and her father, they had just leapt on the back of the fine stallion Ataraxes and hurried out of and away from Archipoli. The town had become overrun by pirates who obscured themselves in a terrifying green mist. Alexandra's father told her that "running away" was the best way to help the town, by hurrying to get help from Barathron, the only other town on the island. But it also means leaving Archipoli's townsfolk neck-deep in misery, pirates on one side and the town's awful Provveditore on the other. And it pains Alexandra to leave without having apologized to her mother for their fight — considering the terrors swirling around them, will she ever have the chance to?

Buckle up, because the story continues right now, right here! Enjoy!

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Here's how to read the finished pages and what to expect!

I usually post between four and six pages at a time, depending on what makes a satisfying chunk (that's why this one is eight). You can read the pages in the Patreon image viewer — I'm not sure that's a great experience, but I don't have a better one. All of the posts with finished pages are… collected… in a Patreon "Collection." Chapter Five should run for about ten weeks in this fashion, based on how long it is.

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Some Colour Notes

If you saw the version of page 2 (the big splash page) with the pink lighting in my last post, well, I decided not to implement it in the finished page! That's how these things go.

The big panel on the last page — the crossroads — was a big question-mark for me, too. I wanted to make sure you, the reader, clearly see that our heroes are facing a fork in the road. I also wanted the panel to look like… hmm, how to put this… I don't know, like it looks the way our characters feel about it; the fork is a surprise, and also this is what the landscape means to them, rather than what it looks like. And I wanted to have a change of pace from the way I'd been colouring the panels up to that point; back in the thumbnails stage, I figured you'd probably have had enough of straight-up moonlight countryside, so I thought this might be a good spot to change it up.

Throughout this book, though, I don't think I'd had much luck whenever I tried to make big choices with false colour. They've always taken a lot of fiddling and I haven't been 100% happy with the results.

I had to give it a shot, though, because hey — that's why we're here, right? To make something interesting?

The first step was to spend a few hours painting the scene as it would normally look, based on the belief that it if it looked good that way, it would look good when I started tweaking it with adjustment layers and so on. Here's the "normal colour" version.

And then it took a quick half hour to find the way to make it look the way I'd wanted in the original thumbnail. This was the easy part. The hard part was doing all that colouring wondering if it was a waste of time — was there a better way for me to approach this? It's impossible to know until you get to the end.

I'm happy with the way it turned out. It has an almost "infrared photography" look to it. It's a little surreal… in a good way. It's effective, I think. I'm so relieved! Then I showed it to some Trusted Ghouls and got the thumbs-up, so I know I'm not alone . It's nice to be able to start off a chapter with a victory like this.

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In the next post, find out which path our heroes choose… and why! Will they end up on the right road to Barathron? How much farther do they have to go? Will Ataraxes make it?

I could tell you, but that would ruin the comics.

Until next time,
I remain,
a terrifying green mist,

TC