It seems like it’s about time for an update, don’t you think? It’s been eight months since the release of book one, and a lot has gotten done. Not nearly as much as I’d like, but that’s how it goes, you know? I’ve been streaming three days a week for 4+ hours, and that consistent schedule (combined with an unbelievably supportive and joyful chat) has facilitated much progress. I try to work between stream-days too, but my attention is still somewhat split.
If you’d like to help me spend even more time on this, and get book 2 out faster, Ko-fi takes 0% of donations to creators. It’s like Patreon, but way chiller and better for me. Alternatively, sharing my work with other people is just as important. Hell, people seeing this is the whole point. Get that yourfaceispretty.com page open on their phone so they don’t forget to look; share my work-in-progress posts on twitter with the person you know who loves flooding their feed with colorful art, or surreptitiously leave my twitch stream running silently in the background when friends come over – “Oh that?” you’ll say, “That’s just my super cool art buddy” and then you’ll lean casually on the wall in your leather jacket, like the popular kid you are.
Anyways, I’ve forced myself to self-promote for long enough: PAGE UPDATES!
Scene 4 Page 5: Perfectionist in action.
Scene 4, Page 5: Minor changes to 1616’s face. There’s been some wiggliness to their features over the last twenty pages. Breen too really. I’m still getting comfortable in the specifics of their faces.
Scene 4, Page 6: Fixed continuity error. 1616 has both hands cuffed. I drew one arm free, like a fool. :P
Scene 4, Page 7: Inked and colored… I’d say complete, but there’s some jankiness in the expressions and hands.
A sampling of characters designed by chat!
Scene 5, Page 3: This is huge, but it looks like nothing. On Twitch, my chat and I designed enough tertiary characters to fill this ENTIRE plane with absurd and memorable faces. Currently, there are just notes about who’s going to go where, but *puts flight attendant outfit on*, “Seating for the flight will begin shortly.”
Scene 5, Page 4: Okay, I’m refusing to update this one. The top half was basically done already. I did a little work on the bottom panels, but I dislike the faces SO MUCH, I can’t stand to put them live. The sketches are better, trust me.
Scene 5, Page 5: Finally happy with the last panel. It was killing me. It’s not anymore. And I added a background. That just leaves yet another massive crowd panel to do in the middle. Yay.
Scene 5, Page 6: The final panel is roughed in, and many of the faces on the plane are in place… though notably… not the main characters. xD
Scene 5, Page 7: *sings song* Minimum Viable Praaah-duct! Yeah, just blocked in all the color. Final panel still looking good.
Scene 5, Page 8: Got some of our art-buddy-created characters in. Otherwise, still all sketchy… but now featuring sketchy color!
Scene 5, Page 9: Kaya and “Pop Top”. Pop Top’s ear was not messed up in prison like you’d think. He had a pet rabbit that got angry with him one time. So sayeth the chat, so be it!
Scene 5, Page 9: Rough color. Completed two panels. One featuring a chat-designed charact. Some fun Captain face stuff. Good stuff.
Scene 5, Page 14: Complete. The end. Heck yeah.
Scene 5, Page 16: I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble with this page. I messed up the background in the first panel (they were standing inside the fence – like… did they teleport twenty feet forwards since the last panel? What the heck?), and it three different attempts to get that composition to look decent again. Meanwhile, the last panel makes NO sense. Jesse is completely blocked by Breen, and there’s an enormous amount of dead space that’s doing nothing for us. Like… negative space is often good. But this isn’t the good kind. It’s the awkward kind.
Scene 5, Page 17: Breen’s face is extremely good. This page is extremely done.
Scene 5, Page 18: Slight layout change and lots of inking and coloring.
Scene 5, Page 18: Slight layout change, I gave the spot reaction panel to Jesse instead of 1616. The audience is more familiar with him, and is going to feel more grounded getting his reactions to things. No problem though, because 1616’s body language is very clear. Final panel is still in a rough place, as I’m figuring out all the blocking for our tertiary characters throughout this scene.
Scene 5, Page 19: Roughed in some color, trying to get a hold of the lighting in this scene. Otherwise unchanged from sketch.
Scene 5, Page 20: Roughed in the colors for the bottom panels. Still haven’t dealt with the dozens of background characters milling around.
Scene 5 color shift.
Scene 5, Page 21: This is a good example of how I changed the lighting in this scene. I generally prefer things (specifically main characters) to stay the same color page-to-page, so I can track action better (as I’ve said before, my eye is very distractable when I read comics). But with my background in lighting design, and the amount of positive feedback I get from going hard on the moodiness… how can I not have fun with a misty purple morning?
Scene 5, Page 22: Lighting shift. Also the backgrounds are pulling together. We’ve got a tree and a water tower and a fence and everything.
Scene 5, Page 23: Changed the lighting, inked and colored. Probably done. We’ll see.
Scene 5, Page 24: EXISTS! Huge win. This chunk is now blocked, and we got started on one of the more complex panels.
Scene 5, Page 25: Added a page here. It’s about half done. Colors are blocked in, and portions are inked and colored.
Scene 5, Page 26: The page formerly known as page 25… is still not done at all. I’m struggling with acting problems. :P
Scene 6, Page 1: Now we get into the fruits of our labors during the infamous Censored Streams! This page is complete.
Scene 6, Page 2: Just a little inking and coloring here and there. Not the best in either case.
Scene 6, Page 4: Best panel in the comic…? I haven’t been able to add background characters very easily during stream, due the amount I have to censor. :P
Scene 6, Page 3: Forgive the gaps, when I work on these pages on stream I have to keep certain areas covered, which makes it almost impossible to deal with gestalt composition, and easy to forget to detail/shade the covered areas. The middle panels are nearly done. The others have some inking, but a lot of missing background characters. Honestly it’s been really tedious to try to draw this on stream, and in spite of how hilarious it’s been, and how much fun we’ve had, I may need to move to a streaming platform with less archaic rules about artistic nudity in order to get this done in a timely manner.
Scene 6, Page 4: This page was almost entirely empty before, I figured out the complex blocking that needed to happen. I may have to finish the panels with background characters off stream, since I can’t look at the full image while working in public, it’s hard to figure out good group tableauxs like that.
Scene 6, Page 5: When planning the page before, I was able to hit enough beats that I could get rid of the top-most panels of this page, and make the first panel much larger. This was very good, because Breen is very tall, and difficult to fit into layouts with other characters, especially with a heroic gesture like this, which basically demands a low angle to make him look even taller.
Ugh. There are other pages that are looking pretty good, but between this page and the next one that’s legible is a sort of desert, where the pages are nearly illegible. How frustrating. Usually when I do these, it makes me realize how much I’ve done. This time, even having colored in all the little pages on the timeline to show how far I’ve come, I feel like I’ve barely moved forward at all somehow.
Oh well! I’ll just assume that’s just mean brain telling lies to slow me down. Nothing to do but keep drawing!
(And maybe find some good corners to cut… darn perfectionist that I am…)