 mien gott
posted by Christopher on 10.10.2004 - 12:37 pm
it's not that i can't believe how much time this strip took - i mean there were so many different objects and effects here. no, what i can't believe is that i DID put that much time into a single one of these. yes, it's true that i spent a lot of time messing around w/ an unfamiliar program, but i'm guessing that i put maybe 40 hours into this comic. that's kind of a lot.
so, i guess i'll talk about it a bit. the backgrounds for the office scenes were done in a 3d program that i'm learning for use at work. i hate doing backgrounds by hand, but i like doing them in 3d. they integrated a lot better with the hand-drawn characters than i thought they would, but i still see room for improvement. so that covers the first three panels.
panel four, a.k.a. "the portfolio piece" of this comic, took awhile. this was mostly because i wanted it to look like the rest of the panels without having to model any of it in 3d. so yeah, the cars and everything were hand drawn here. funny thing about the VW beetle in the background. the reference photo i was using was a back view, so i drew the whole thing as if you were looking at the back right corner. soon after the coloring, and a dinner break, i came back to it to realize that i'm not in australia anymore, and people drive on the RIGHT-HAND side of the road in these parts. so, fortunately the new bug looks about the same from the front and back, so with a little tweaking, it was very easy to turn the car around. more than i can say for the ferrari in the foreground.
panel five has a cool reflection effect in the glass, but even with that was probably the easiest panel of the lot.
in panel 6, i decided to experiment a little with the closeup head. the black ovals for eyes aren't expressive enough for full-panel mugshots, so i decided to add a few detail lines around the edge of the eyes and lighten the skin color inside where the whites would be. this, of course, means a lot more time to get the expressions right, but i think it was pretty successful in this case.
anyway, i think i'm going to stop before i push dante's rant off the entire internet. this is the last strip i'm going to be putting an exorbitant amount of time into until after busy season subsides at work. hope you enjoyed it!
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