20100120 (4) – Initial assembly from strips 133 – 136. 20100126 (2) – New line of dialogue added to panel eight. I mucked around with it for a good long while – leaned on, leaned off, tweaked, tweaked, tweaked… and eventually settled for keeping it. While it’s not strictly necessary, it does add a minor detail to the narrative – …
20100120 (5) – Initial assembly from strips 137 – 140. Strip 140 was jpeg’ed on September 27, 2008 – sixteen months ago. Amusing (to me, anyway) that the comic with the biggest production gaps will resume before the “main” work does…. though like TD2E, it’ll be awhile before these pages are up, and more time before the comic resumes in …
Discounting the new pages and fixes generated for TD2E, this is the first New Art since September of 2008. More to follow – given the nature of this particular project, you’ll be seeing new strips on the DCR website before they show up here. Strip 141 – I never stopped working on DCR, at least on paper. The story is …
Rendered Monday, drawn Tuesday, shaded Wednesday. I’ll probably process most of the next page the same way, in order to iron out text and visual consistency issues prior to committing the strips. The idea is that this will make for less cleanup and readjustment of the proper DCR Pages. In a change from previous practice, this is the writeup. Strip …
Funny – page wrapped, writeup started…. and The Men Who Stare At Goats is on. More appropriate than funny, I suppose. An appropriateness that’s now been name-dropped and will become progressively more obvious as the story unfolds. Whoever said sci-fi gets One Big Idea can jump off a cliff – throw anything of interest on the compost heap. Feed it …
Less than 24 hours between installments? Awesome. Not my favorite page, but hey – HUGE SHOVEL-LOADS OF PLOT! Huge, steaming loads. Strip 189 – Good thing I only gotta draw James’ messed-up face the once. He’s Phantom Of The Opera-ing for the rest of the scene and will be either similarly patched or moderately healed in future scenes of DCR. …
I love the feel of triple-strip pages. And I love the fact that this page eerily mirrors recent work events, despite the script being completely finalized and laid out well before the reality lined up with the fiction. Strip 192 – The second copy/paste/shoop-a-new-expression for Yang in two three pages. Get used to it, I plan to do it a …
In the wad of metadata attached to the previous page I mentioned Taking My Time and Doing It Right and all that. At the time I found the prospect of a sizable volume of linework to be daunting. Today, it came easily – roughly six hours on the art end, all told. Which is about how long it usually takes …
Funky challenging page is funky. And challenging. No focal linework, two one-off environments, some major deviations from the scripted layout. The first deviation is the actual background in panel two, which bears only a vague resemblance to the thumbnail. Easier to fit the text, honestly – given the juggle that can occur with more detailed full-environment renders, I felt it …
Renders were ready… days ago. Art last night, followed by a massive script addition which then Sat Here until just after 2pm this afternoon. By that point I’d checked the additions against the rest of the scene and realized I needed to just post the damned thing and get back to work. My blog post has, it turns out, been …
Have I ever mentioned that one of ATC’s core themes is the corporate and ideological exploitation of mental health? That point is pretty obvious, I think – though I honestly don’t recall if I’ve ever commented on it in any measure. Better I don’t, really – to the extent that the work voices any opinion I may hold, it does …
Finished – more or less – around 0330 this morning, with a little more cleanup post-wakeup. Went to bed with the last render of the next page running, having spent several hours noodling with minor adjustments to this one. Several small fixes and tweaks post-shading, and a good chunk of time running through shirt options for Jesse. I went through …
Rendered on the fifth, drawn on the sixth, shaded on the seventh and posted on the eighth. Pretty time consuming in the drawing department – 21 character drawings plus a copious number of unique silhouettes. Only one dupe in the lot, and one bit of art cloning – Jesse’s head in panel five is a dupe of her fixed-up head …
The initial background prep was done earlier this week, in concert with the previous page. Camera “matching” and basic setup work was done early Saturday afternoon. I spent the rest of the day hanging out with my mom – lunch, a hike in the park, Target (new battle shorts!), Super 8. Pencils, inks and cleanup Sunday afternoon, then a father’s …
Initial assembly a few days ago, shop-up on the 20th or 21st, most of the line art creation and prep yesterday, and shading this (relative) morning. The goal is to get two more pages done before Monday, if the printer holds out. I’ve mentioned this multiple times previously, and multiple times previously it was just a “low ink” light. The …
Quite a few changes from the script, though the page picks up and ends in the same place it did in the original draft, so it’s all good. Photo source around Boulevard of the Allies and Smithfield wasn’t as thorough as it could have been, honestly – fortunately the changes resulted in less work, less juvenile wish fulfillment, less between-the-lines …
The very best part of this page? Line three of panel one is completely true, even now. Fourteen years later. I think. Jim was still at Eide’s the last time I was there, anyway. If you’re a Burgher, try this out – write down the bands listed in panel one, or the record label, go to Eide’s and ask Jim …
Some minor scale/perspective issues, but nothing I can’t live with. Also fairly minimal on the line art, which ought to counter-balance the next couple of pages. Possibly the next seventeen. While a few pages ought to be fairly straightforward, the rest of the chapter is as uphill for work as it is downhill for pages. It’ll also be a bit …
Panel one could have been more breathtaking, I admit. It’s about as breathtaking as I can get it – two different shots comped together (railing and backdrop) plus the usual scrubbing and 1997ing. It’s not 100% accurate for perspective, but it looks better than the railing shot and matches up with panel three fairly reasonably. The challenge of this part …
Two pages in one day? How does that happen, you ask? Preparation, preparation, preparation. Oh, and getting all of the previous page done during the work session that began on the fourth. I wrapped that around 0500 and decided to go to bed rather than work up a blurb and post the page. Still, I managed to get another page …