Here's some early logo experimentation. I've mentioned before that a big part of my process of starting a new project involves visual design. Frequently that means I spend hours downloading new fonts.* Here, I spent a lot of time looking at fancy fonts, and I briefly played around with making the Os into Ralsei's glasses, but I didn't like the way it looked. At the time I was pulling some inspiration from the visual styling of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers, which has a really cool sequence in issue 2 with stylized sans serif captioning. I wanted to emulate the vibes from that, and settled on Avenir Next as my title/interstital font. Sometimes simple is better.
*When you're doing a project that you plan to monetize, make sure you own the commercial rights to use the fonts you download! Looking Glasses can't be monetized, but I've paid for the font licenses all the same.
This was the first bit of concept art I did for Looking Glasses. The scene where Ralsei is first confronted by the titan was incredibly clear in my head from the beginning, so when I sat down to start working on the comic, it was the first scene I started messing with. This drawing was mostly about experimenting with fonts and effects, so the art itself is pretty rough. My development process tends to start with visual design stuff, so I often spend hours looking at fonts before I get into sketching actual art. I'm really glad that I went in a different direction with this page in the final product, this is pretty visually cluttered.
Going over my old artwork has me thinking about the craft behind that sequence a bit, so I'm going to throw some more thoughts under the cut. It's a two for one.
Let's start with the final pages for this sequence, just to remind you how it turned out
You can see how that initial sketch got divided up into the second and third pages here. This served some practical purposes. To start, I realized I wanted you to be able to see Ralsei's face on the second page, to show how the loud titan voice is hurting him. But I wanted to keep Ralsei silhouetted in front of the titan eye for scale, so I pushed that into the next page.
Let's look at my initial sketches for this sequence.
You might notice some pretty major differences between these sketches and the finished product. Most notably, panel 3 on page 1 and all of page 2 are flipped. That's because I realized I had broken the 180 rule on page one, and it made a scene without any visual landmarks kind of confusing. Of course, I didn't realize this until super late in the process on that page. You can see this in the difference between my flats and the final base colors.
(I also fixed some weirdness at this stage, like Ralsei's head in the first panel was kinda wonky). But flipping this one panel also meant I had to flip the entire next page to keep continuity.
A few more details I think are kinda fun.
On the left, I had added a bunch of eyes to the smoke, a design detail I later dropped because I couldn't quite get it to look good in the colors, and I figured the titan eye showing up on his top worked well enough. He's also crying in this panel, which I also must of dropped.
On the right I really had to work through a bunch of expressions for him before settling on squeezing his eyes closed. At one point he was really angry!
But that didn't fit the vibe. Ralsei isn't exactly angry here, even if he is shouting on this page. I really liked him closing his eyes tightly though, it let me do this across the page-turn:
Which I thought was a cool way to transition out of one scene (and visual style) and into another. Now, is he waking up here because he wills himself to wake up, or because Susie healed him? I'll leave that one up to interpretation.
I'm also kind of referencing Issue 17 of The Wicked and The Divine here, where the POV character closes her eyes at the end of every scene to mark scene transitions (and when she's dissociating).
Anyway, that's the really long winded development of this sequence, from initial concept art to final product.
Here's the background I use for the gutters on light world pages. I wanted to emulate the borders the game uses on console editions of deltarune and undertale. This was an idea I had for Everyone Deserves a Leather Jacket, but I wasn't able to execute it at the time. (Plus it would have just been those orange trees, which would be a nightmare to balance colors against). Here I tried to use really desaturated colors, because I didn't want to distract from the main artwork.
