A few things this week, as I’ve not had any time to sit and gather my thoughts. Possibly cos I’ve just moved house – the wife and I gave up our happy Den-O-Slack and warm nights in front of the teev, for a large, cold two-storey duplex. I now have the overwhelming compulsion to buy a really loud lawnmower, and get up at the crack of dawn on Saturday to push it around a bit.
I’m really thankful for being able to cue up work (pages, tutorials, etc) so I can do what I have to do IRL, while there’s this internet presence which keeps on keeping on. (I was genuinely surprised to find an email notifying me that there were new comments on the updated pages).
I’ve just completed three more pages for the buffer, and while that is nice, every Sunday seems to be coming way too early, and it means I need to put another set of pages there. Speaking of pages: I found a few quite easy to do, and I’ve quite getting the hang of the hand-drawn ones. The downside is these were all after a big bottle-neck page. I’ve spent about two weeks preparing page seven, and it’s not because it’s gonna be any great shakes. It’s because I’ve had to invent objects, scenery, and technology. I had the basics in my head, but now I had to bring it into visual reality. I redrafted this page no less than four times. I’m still not totally happy with it, but I have to commit due to time. This is what’s great about this format: it forces me to make a decision and go with it, lest I hold up the rest of the story.
So instead of letting that page stop me from going forward, I skipped it, and completed the following two pages in just a few hours.
One of the things I will elaborate on in a future post (as well as a process diary video) is how I use Blender to produce many of the elements for the pages. There’s quite a bit of set up, and then further work to separate out passes (Color, shading, lines). I do a quick comp to get an idea of how it will look, but the majority of that work is done in GIMP, later on. Here is a quick preview of the nodal set-up I have in Blender:
So far, updates are coming along nicely. I have thumbnailed almost the entire first chapter. It is currently sitting around 20 pages. which means I will either extend it out to a full 24 pager, or try and condense some of the story beats to get to my 18 page format I had worked out a little while back.
I hope you’re all looking forward to Page six this week. It’s so far my favorite one with a really nice KA-BLAM!
