The Team Up

A New Chapter Begins!

They're not gonna get along are they?

Behind The Scenes

Four Point Perspective

I began this comic by playing with four-point perspective which is how I tried to illustrate the first frame of the comic. Whether I was successful or not is another story. But, with practice eventually I should get it. Here's the undersketch for what it looks like:

I freehanded the four-point perspective. I suppose I could make a grid and get everything accurate.

Okay, maybe next time I can try that...

Skintone

For years now I wondered how I should render people with darker skin when I was really only dealing with one color. I know there are other accent colors in the comic such as Catherine's green eyes (which is the same shade of green as some of the ghouls we meet throughout Mortal Coil, hint, hint). If you read the Rabbit and the Moon there are a few more accent colors such as red and blue.

When I thought about it the problem of depicting skintone I was very rigid in the idea that it should conform to the one-color rule (ignoring the accent colors). Being really stubborn, I really didn't want to break that rule, but I didn't like any of the solutions I came up with at the time.

Really the answer came to me when I could face the issue head on.

Originally, I thought I might depict Helena the same as Natsumi and Catherine, but since I was doing the art and I could experiment on the canvas, it made it easy to test things. Honestly, if there's a lesson, I feel it's that you need to keep an open mind and be willing to break your own preconceived notions of what's right or wrong -- not easy to do. For Helena's skintone, I'm using the same single color at a lower opacity (about 66%) and I really liked how that turned out, and looking back it feels like the obvious choice.

As for Helena's hair, I did all the kinks and curls by hand, no special brushes this time.

Scriptwriting??

Haha.

Speaking of letting go of preconceived notions...

What script? I threw together something over winter break, but we're largely in an improv space at this point. A lot of these new comics begin with a drawing or series of them and then I place bubbles around them and begin to "improv" the dialogue until I get something I like.

In terms of where this chapter is going, I only know the very big picture of what should happen. Each week I begin with nothing. No buffer, no whatever. It's only what I can produce, if anything at all.

I think it'll keep things fresh... for me at least.

It's probably not the way to write a webcomic (or any comic), but I'm running with it. Rules are meant to be broken after all.

That's all I got for this second Saturday of the new year. I hope you're having a good one. See you next week!