Another page down. After nine pages of the same environment and the same characters, it’s nice to have some variety again. Nice, but not without its downsides – this particular hunk of scenery is a lot more work than the BMRI compartments. Lots of fixes, lots of test renders to get the lighting reasonably okay or consistent panel to panel, lots of post-rendering tweaks and even more post-shading tweaks.

Strip 218 – You just knew that line was going to crop up at some point. A tedious render sandwich – wound up deleting or tweaking glass and blinds, photoshopping the blinds back in to get them to look decent. Didn’t realize until I got to the renders for the next page that the outside perspective is from the eighth floor instead of the sixth, but to be honest it doesn’t make that much of a difference, I think. I hope anyway.

Strip 219 – After nine pages of dudes, finally – a change of pace! The shading and composition went together a lot quicker and easier than I’d expected it to, honestly- the couch is one of those things that needs a lot of tweaks and work to Look Acceptable, and it needed more of it on this panel than it did on the rest of the page.

Strip 220 – Panel three of this strip turned out to be the Bad Art Panel for the page, despite some fairly extensive tweaking. It’s Good Enough, at least for the time being.

Strip 221 – Panel two – I’m sure I’ll catch stick from the two people who’ve been grousing about the (very small) handful of Chibi illustrations in The Dualist for the past several years. Frankly, I don’t care – the whole point of comics – and of ATC being somewhat stylistically ‘neutral’ – is that a face can totally Go There when the script calls for it. What expression would be on your face after slurping a tomato sauce bloody mary? If it’s ^_^, I may need to hit you.

After the last few pages, well… I’m definitely glad there’s only three left of the chapter, as they’ll probably take considerably more time than the last scene did!