Some nights I have a lot to say. Some nights, I don’t. The work is done, this is ultimately the afterglow. I’ll see what I can come up with.
Strip 207 – That visor really throws a spanner in the traditional shortcut bucket one uses when drawing a reaction shot. Bugged eyes being the big thing, followed by eyebrows and mouth… which looks like more of a sneer than anything else in this case.
Strip 208 – Most CG renders get heavily, heavily photoshopped before hitting a state of usability. Before this shot, this environment was pretty much immune – one adjustment layer and that’s it – quite seriously minimal. This is the first Seriously Shooped Shot – a render sammich with varying degrees of blurring to fake up a depth of field – something the 3d software can do, if I had a few weeks to get it Exactly Right.
It is, indeed, a solid block of something.
Strip 209 – Panel two is somewhat similar to the last strip – mild touch-ups. There’ll be a progressively more of that over the next several strips.
I “cheated” a bit on the art – one body and two expressions for James. Lang got the same treatment between this strip and the next. There are those that would grief strenuously about cheating and shortcuts and copy/paste. It’s likely they’ve never read Tumbleweeds, Doonesbury, Garfield or pretty much any print comic strips beyond Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, and Bloom County. While I’ve done this for a number of good solid technical reasons, it’s also a commentary on the “boilerplate” art of such strips. DCR is a comic strip (at least at the moment). It’s also a College-Themed Webcomic, and bears as much of a resemblance to other College-Themed Webcomics as my time in artskool did to the skooltime of the artists and writers of more “traditional” college comics.
My interest in sequential art began with The Funny Pages. Dad worked for a newspaper, see – my interest in comics came later, and my love for comics blossomed well after that. Maybe book one of ATC will present as a series of pencilled or watercolored single-panel captioned comics, along the lines of the works of Charles Addams or Gary Larson.
That would rule.
In the meantime, DCR is becoming less Strip and more Page, to good effect – it does need to transition as seamlessly as possible into The Dualist, after all.
Strip 210 – I LOVE PANEL ONE. It is nifty.
New? Operative -8- for panel dcr_210.1/c_224.8 context. The doom-cube does a light-up thing.
Out of buffer. One more page in the bin, and it’s a bit light on the line art. And suspiciously similar to a scene of The Dualist. A fact I REALLY should have caught a hell of a lot earlier – ultimately if it becomes too big of a thorn in my brain I’ll just delete or revise the color scene, as this is vastly more important. I just need to make sure that psychometry doesn’t become my Stuck In The Holodeck or Time Travel Episode.
The page after the last of the buffer is In Progress, and a bit more of a challenge than I’d imagined it to be. The technical end is done – it’s down to rather a lot of rendering.
