PAGE PROGRESS: BALCONY SCENE
Just like with the Doorway Page, I will first show the timelapse, then talk about the process step-by-step. Unfortunately, I sadly have to upload it VIA YouTube as the file is too big.
I started this page out the same way as the Doorway page, by taking the reference that Talisman gave me to make the panels.
As this reference included a lot more panels, it was more of a challenge to make sure that the panels didn't end up too small.
However thankfully I was able to figure it out, and do a decent enough job.
After this I moved onto the sketch, thankfully the reference included the general poses/layout that Tali wanted for each panel.
I wasn't fully sure what the three pages in the middle were, so I asked Tali if I did it correctly while in the sketching phase.
Talisman confirmed that I misunderstood the reference, hence I went on to change it.
I am not very good at drawing muscles, much less people flexing said muscles. But I still tried my best using shapes.
Talisman said it looks fine, hence onto the final sketch I went!
As it is visible in the timelapse and previous screenshot, Luz originally had different poses, however I changed them during when I was doing the line art as I believe they differed too much compare to the others. I sadly only remembered to take the screenshots of the process after the page was finished, hence the original final sketches of Luz are only seen in screenshots of conversation and during the timelapse.
Tali approved the sketch, hence I began on the line-work.
The line-work took a lot longer than the one from the Doorway scene, partly due to the amount of characters, and also the fact that I had to change Luz' sketch midway through it.
Tali said she loves it, even with the small changes to Luz, which made me very happy. The line-work took me multiple days hence I ended up partly forgetting the brush size I was using for most of the lines at points, hence why some of the lines look thinner than the rest of the comic. Some are intentionally different, as I use a smaller size for things such as clothing wrinkles, face details, effects and smaller details.
The colours ,to put it frankly, were tedious to do. This is again mainly due to the fact that there was so many characters, which made me take up a lot of time by just having to keep switching between character references.
Tali was very happy with is so far, which made me extremely happy. As I was a little worried I might mess up with some of the colours due to contracting hues between the characters. I then did the backgrounds so that I could ensure the line-work details will fit in with said backgrounds.
Since the main focus of this page are the characters and their reactions, instead of how in the Doorway page it was more-so the scene itself being the main focus, I decided to simply make the backgrounds of each panel to be just colour gradients, ones that match the emotions and colours within each panel. This is because I didn't want the backgrounds to be too boring, hence I believing matching them to the emotions of each panel made them slightly more interesting than just a singular flat colour.
Talisman approved of the backgrounds, and even said she believes that the colours for said backgrounds make the expressions of the characters more comical.
With this, I was able to move on to the final details.
I mainly used the colours I already had from the references for each character, and otherwise tried to simply use colours that would go well with the rest of the panel. However I wish I used a bit different colours in some places, as it can be hard to see some of the effects.
Talisman said she has no notes for this page, hence I was done with it.
Total time taken: 13 hours.