After an eleven page photomanipulation marathon, it feels good to hit a quick page. Fairly minimal work, and a mix of grave-robbing and atypical production too!

The grave-robbing is the last panel – I yoinked a background setup from a page of Transitional Voices and tweaked it a bit. The atypical production would be the first three panels – to get everything to hang together right I opted to process all three panels as a single entity at scan resolution – something like 9500×4500 with concrete whitespace. Thad was shaded once, three different blood progressions and some of the splatter added, then the mess was dropped into the page to be scaled and tweaked accordingly. If this were a cartoon the scene transition would be a zoom towards the blood as it spills out of Thad’s head, then into the blood, with the reflected sun flaring into the fourth shot.

This is where the scar on Thad’s forehead originates – this page and the last two do quite a bit to set up the basis for his behavior in The Dualist. Fun fact – the majority of chapter three grew up around this scene. It’s one of the pieces that was here from the jump, and one of a small number of scenes to persist from inception to execution with no major structural revisions.

I threw out the final draft layout for the previous page – in this case, I threw out the script. The dialogue for this page fucking sucked, so I tossed it. The final dialogue is much betterer.

Aaaaand….

That’s it for the Big Holy Crap It’s Pittsburgh Scene. While there will be at least one more critical daylight outdoor scene in DCR, at this point it’s only a couple of pages, and quite a ways out.

Well… thirteen pages out, really. Fourteen if you count the chapter four cover. The rest of Leitmotif is going to be a grueling CG slugfest, with one easy page to kick it off. Then it’s three environments and a set re-dress. More on that in the blurb for the next page – I’ll need something to talk about, dammit!

Until then… the chapter is 2/3 complete! Woohoo!