How It's Made: Archer of the West, Page 4

It's a new week and a new page of the comic is up. Below are the pencils:

You can see I've left a lot of the backgrounds out. I figure a lot of that will be painted in high contrast when I get to do the actual painting. So I just focus on getting the characters drawn as best I can. As I write this post, I realize, one of the frames, shows you something that I don't want you to see yet and it has a different treatment in the final painted version, but since transparency of the creative process is one of the things I'm going for with the comic, there you go. You may actually not know what it is but if you lurk around the website, you may find some clues.

I really like how that tall frame worked out. I enjoyed painting the tree bark and I think Kamiko's shoe against the tree is a nice way to re-introduce her into the scene and break up the tree bark. The way Natsumi is standing before the forest is pretty cool too. This is definitely one of my favorite pages that I've done.

Script

This page is a combination of the previous page's script and this below:

Frame. Kamiko pushes between them and stands at the mouth of the dark forest.

KAMIKO

Finally, you've stopped! [I left this out of the final page -- seemed extraneous]

NATSUMI

What, what is this feeling? It's like I"m cold...but cold inside! (Relating her physical sensation)

Frame. We face Kamiko with the kids to our backs.

KAMIKO

That means you shouldn't come any further. This isn't a place for mortals.

Publishing

I haven't talked about this yet, but publishing the pages are a pretty big weekly event for me. It usually takes anywhere from 90 minutes to 3 hours. Once a page is done I need to cut it from the original LIP file. Here's how that processs works:

1. Cut the high resolution final page. Resolution: 5198 x 7349 px. You'll probably never get your hands on it. If there's ever a printed book, this is, in theory, for that.

2. From the original LIP I also crop a version for the main site. It's scaled down to 1140 x 1612, but I make it 1140 x 1608 px. The size matters for me since every page is that same size (although some of the earlier pages are 1607 px high). I also use this page for tumblr.

3. I make a crop of the page without word bubbles. Sometimes these turn out alright, but to save time I often don't draw what the bubble hides, but going forward I may always paint behind the bubbles for completeness. If the page without bubbles looks decent I post this to dA and tumblr instead of the final page.

4. I also make the pencils like you see above. It's meant to be used with the blog posts I do about the behind the scenes for the page.

5. I resize the main site's page to 940 x 1326 for Tapastic and save a copy.

6. Once I have all of the pages, I run them through tinypng.com which does an amazing job of chopping 75% of the file size down for the final PNGs. That means that images load faster which is definitely key when you're on the web.

7. I schedule the pages on each site for Saturday at 8 am on the main site, dA, tumblr, and Tapastic.

8. I write the "How It's Made" blog post and schedule it for the following Tuesday. IFFFT actually follows my RSS feed for blog posts and it'll redistribute the post to tumblr.

9. If I find some old Mortal Coil art, I also schedule that. The Artwork appears on the site on the following Wednesday. I might do a How It's Made post for the artwork if I can find the reference images and WIPs and that becomes a Thursday post.