Finally, some camouflage. I’ve always wanted to put some on a page, but held off till now due to issues of reproducibility. Fortunately West wears this outfit on this page and nowhere else, which made camo totally doable.
Not much else to say, really – this one was pretty straightforward. Worked out the layout and the last of the details last night, implemented everything today. Revised the dialogue a bit and went for photos that gave a better sense of the area than tighter, more character-centric shots. There’s a very strong possibility that this will be the last page of DCR to use photographed backgrounds, so I suppose I wanted to enjoy them a bit. The chosen shots were fairly cooperative – minimal adjustments, not a lot of cleanup. I think I put more work into John’s pants. It feels like I did, anyway – I’ve been mulling over shot selection for awhile so when it came time to finally do it, it went quickly and easily.
Also, revised the Prime transition effect a bit. Or rather, simplified it. The silhouette treatment works fairly well in color, and while it worked okay in grayscale, a straight fade fits the production better. There are a few other methods I’d like to try, but it’ll be awhile before the story hits a point where that kind of experimentation is appropriate.
Heck, it may be awhile before the story proceeds at all – I need to model a one-off environment to move things along, and that could take a bit. It depends on work, it depends on commissions, and it depends on how much detail I wind up putting into it. I’d like to be into renders by the weekend but that might be overly optimistic. I took extreme measures and got the first block of the chapter completely laid out last night – while large amounts of it was already ready to go, this was one of the “needs tweaked” pages, as was the next one. Now that I’m over the layout hurdle I can get down to the business of busting out pages, as time allows.
West and Tantek could totally be an older, more mature, less crazy iteration of Thad and Ornix, except for one thing – they both have varying degrees of actual combat training. Tantek moreso, being ex-military. I figure at this point in time they’re partnered off, with Tantek being “assigned” to Raven at some point between now and The Dualist.
Regardless of how Templar teams normally operate, a squad of Addicaines running around on Earth is Special Circumstances. Doubtless this has played merry havoc with regular assignments, tasks, deployments and partner assignments.
Also, two big guys with a sword and a machete just stepped out of a parallel universe, dripping genetically engineered blood all over Federal Street. And their names aren’t Ron and Russ.
If you don’t know who Matt Howarth is then you’ve been reading the wrong comics. Or your supplier only stocks the big name stuff – either way, you should probably do something about it.
