That took a lot longer than expected – next time around I’ll have to find a faster way to shade glass. That little bit was by far the biggest timesink. Previously when beer has appeared in the color portions of the comic it’s been in opaque plastic bottles – that was space beer, so the containers needed to compact instead of shatter and so forth. This time around, glass – and this this time around, some approximation of reflections.

The last two panels are the “clever” bit – the notion of Jesse speaking the last panel as a form of transition struck me awhile back when the chapter was in a skeletal draft state and persisted through to the final. While the overall composition could have been tighter I’m still pretty pleased with how things turned out. This chapter is rife with opportunities to break out of the existing visual language of the comic, and I intend to take full advantage of a few of them. Hopefully some of these experiments will prove successful and carry over into the color books.

I’ll need to do some more CG to progress the chapter – given my current workload I don’t expect to be able to get to that task for at least three or four days. We’re easing out of the setup and into the serious, so I have every incentive to keep things moving. Point of fact I’ll be spending a good chunk of the evening working on the script and layouts as opposed to not doing these things – hopefully to the benefit of the production timetable. I’ve recently made some headway on the core of the chapter – it’s proven exceptionally difficult to get a handle on, and at this point I’m extremely glad I started chapter production with an incomplete script.

Mastering notes, 2016.12.05 – Tweaked line art and dialogue in panel three.