Backgrounds were done the same day as pages 401 and 402, the veil work in panel four at some point after that, and the effects work to panel three yesterday. A hell of a lot of setup work for a relatively simple page, layout-wise – the sidearm was modeled on the 10th during a bit of unexpected downtime. I designed the body armor early last week and did the prop implementation yesterday during another squirt of unplanned (and believe it or not, unwanted and deeply inconvenient) free time. The inconvenience held through today, which gave me time to both bask in the the glories of page production and deal with the real “Dammit!” of the page (and the scene) – the Veil character effects.
Given that I’ve been working on work-work and commission-work for the last… (checking file creation dates…) fourteen days straight, I consider it to be one of those “good problems.” The original Veil effect dates back to the start of the comic – while I improved on it over time, it’s a plot concept I haven’t had to think about in awhile and an art process I haven’t performed in even longer. While it was tempting to pull a Daedalus bridge and just retool the entire process without comment, I ultimately opted to improve on the original effect rather than aping it or tossing it completely. Silhouettes just aren’t gonna work for this scene.
Grayscale, however, works awesome.
I’d love to take a stab at when the next page will be up. I usually have some notion of a reasonable timeframe, but in this case I’ve got squat. Hell, I haven’t even blocked out the layout yet. I have all the assets I need – time is the major factor. At this point having some would be great for DCR but terrible for my Real Job. I don’t have much control over free time or slow time on the current project – but I can control (to some extent) what I do with that time.
Hell, writers block or not, this thing ain’t gonna finish itself… and I’m not gonna hit DCR.100 or ATC.500 if I blow all of my “free” time on video games and illustration work. Both milestones can still be hit inside of 2011. As to the block, I’m clueless. If I had a clue, it wouldn’t be a block. I’ll admit, I haven’t made much of an attempt to address the issue. The script is bagged out to the Big Milestone, the layouts between here and there are either Sweet or Serviceable, I’ve been breakdown-grade busy (but holding it together), and life has been generally pretty hostile to the scriptwriting form of creativity.
Speaking of script – Panel one is spot on. Panel four got tweaked a bit to improve the composition, and panel two… oy. I would have loved to have gone with a shot of the Byham. It’s a beautiful building, but that neck of the woods has changed considerably since 1997. I used the only period-applicable shot I could get – and much to my surprise it turned out to be the one shot I didn’t have to photoshop logos or advertising or people out of. Not that the other shots needed much work, mind you… but a good shot of the Byham would have involved photoshop work well beyond my available reference and source material.
