Slow but Steady

Issue #23

A Change of Pace

Once again, two weeks have flown by. Unfortunately, this time it’s not because I’ve been working on the comic with laser focus. No. I started my regular job. And, as I feared, a regular job sure does sap one’s energy to work on anything after getting home from a long day….

That’s not to say I’ve done nothing. But I’ve certainly accomplished far less than I’d hoped. The need to work a regular job again has definitely thrown a wrench in my estimated completion time, and it’s certainly going to make completing any chapters going forward in a reasonable time a challenge.

But, I need money, and I want to make this comic. So, long days and nights of working it is.

That drudgery aside, what I have accomplished is pretty good. I’m two and a half pages away from being finished with a “part one” of chapter one if my schedule really doesn’t pan out and I need to get something published on New Years. My goal on the day I’m writing this is to spend the day hammering out those pages.

The big water scene turned out pretty good. I can feel proud of it.

One of my “problems” currently is that the first part of chapter one is loaded with several difficult scenes and shots. Scenes that are heavy with visual effects, panels with lots of details or sets to design.

And if there’s one thing that slows me down, it’s making design choices. So let’s talk a bit about that for this issue.

An Interior Designer I Am Not

Remaking The Chosen One’s Mentor came with a long list of redesigns. I had never felt 100% happy with the design of Levi’s nursery, and most of my set designs felt pretty rudimentary for a palace setting. I wanted to correct that in the remake. But I wanted to correct it in a way that wouldn’t drive me insane every time I have to make a panel with a background visible.

3D models are my savior here. I used to be team “3D models are for lazy artists”, but I quickly changed my tune once I was making my own comic on a regular basis. 3D models help save a ton of time by getting proportions and perspective done for you. Two things I am notably quite poor at.

And, fortunately, Clip Studio Paint, my comic-making art program of choice, is loaded with tools for using 3D models. It’s been a real lifesaver to be sure.

Now it just takes a few hours of tedious linework to create my backgrounds, and then I’m ready for color!

…Which I’m not that good at.

Looking back at my old work, my eye for color has certainly improved. Especially when it comes to picking out colors digitally. But that still hasn’t made it any easier for me to pick out colors for my sets.

The thing is, I want these sets to look good. It’s a palace, after all. They can pay people to make every room look nice. But I don’t want it to become distracting. A busy background or colors that are too loud can distract from the real focus: the characters and the story.

I want my viewer’s eye to see the backgrounds, but not be distracted by them. They should know at a glance where the characters are in a room relative to everyone else in the scene. They should know what room they’re in. But, beyond that, I don’t need to get crazy with it. And, most importantly, whatever colors I do pick for the room shouldn’t cause the characters to fade into the background if I accidentally dress them similarly to the wallpaper.

To that end, color palettes have been a godsend. The internet is loaded with color palettes for room decoration. I just ask the internet for a color scheme, scroll through Google Images, and find the one that works for my plans.

Granted, I usually have to desaturate the colors a little, because the colors they provide are usually meant to be real paint, which will naturally take on a desaturated tone once painted on a wall and under room lighting. So there’s still some adjusting to be done even after I’ve found a palette.

Palettes are what helped me pick the colors for the opening hallway scene.

Though mostly obscured by fire, they helped me color the birthing chamber.

And, most importantly, they helped me figure out the colors for the nursery, where the characters will be spending a lot of time in the coming comics.

Though, just like in the original, don’t get too attached to the current color scheme, because there’s some wrecking and remodeling to be done to this poor nursery.

I’ve definitely found as I’ve picked color schemes out that I favor warm tones and yellow or white accents. I want the interior of the palace to feel warm and inviting to match with the generally lighter tone of the series. That way, when something is given a cooler or somber palette, it stands out as a tonal shift.

Designing all these new sets and coloring them has definitely slowed me down. But, I’m pleased to find that I am working faster than back when I was first designing sets for the original run of TCOM. My eye for design has improved, and my ability to create a room that’s both visually interesting while not being distracting and allowing the characters to fit into the environment has improved tremendously. I know I’m only going to get better from here, too.

Project of the Week

Now for the real benefit to keeping this newsletter alive: project accountability. Without it, I definitely would have let some things fall by the wayside in light of recent developments, but I pushed on and made sure to at least hit my minimum project quota: getting one piece done by the time this newsletter drops.

Last time I’d shared that I was working on a series of dragons in bathtubs. I still haven’t gotten around to sketching the final two, but I at least managed to set enough time aside these last two weeks to color in the first one. So here it is.

I think it’s looking pretty decent. I might work on it a little more with colored pencils, and perhaps hit it a little with some color correction digitally. First thing, though, I have to create a setup for properly photographing my physical work at a quality that will translate well to digital and printed mediums.

Once I do that, the next phase is figuring out printing and distribution. Exciting! I’ll probably talk more about that in a future newsletter, but for now I’ll leave it at this. Next newsletter I expect myself to finish the second piece in this set. I’ve written my oath for you all here. Now I have to deliver in two weeks.

That’s all for this update, gang. Thanks for reading.