POYEKHALI!

And we're off! The art archives of Gloria Reynolds: crone, engineer, body horror snob See my comics at turbofanatic.com

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Sheesh there's like, three pages left including this (plus drawing the covers and interior stuffs). Weird feeling like Aphelion is coming to an end at the same time my life is drastically changing in other ways.

This comic was started when I was sick and depressed, then really sick and depressed, then recovering, and then finished while I was pregnant and then taking care of my child.

A lot of times I thought that sort of thing was impossible for me.

I don't talk about it too much, but I was able to start crawling out of that hole when I went on a diet for diabetics. I don't have diabetes, most tests come back fine, but a doctor flagged some insulin resistance and mentioned I should try it. Weird. I'll probably never know what was wrong but I'm glad it worked.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy Aphelion.

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Apologies for the messy sketch but I like this concept and I'm prioritizing what little free time I have for finishing Aphelion.

Some sort of jet/dragon/person that might show up in Remediation. Something like a big ramjet/PDE engine in the torso, diverters probably lead back into the augmenters or something, I dunno. Nuclear powered and directly uses the heat for thrust, with the wings and blood acting as radiators if needed. Capable of fairly high supersonic flight, because I'm giving it bullshit heat resistance. Maybe it uses blood to cool leading edges and dumps waste heat into the augmenters as well.

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Page 20 is now done! First page entirely completed after the baby!

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Actually made some progress! And I'm still somewhat sane (for now)! Still posting from the queue so I hope you're all doing well in the future.

I realized I could use spatter brushes for clouds and have leveled up my rendering.

I don't know if this should be tagged as gore or not. It's robot gore. Oh well.

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More work on page 20, this time using this paper to get a bit of a handle on hypersonic retropropulsion. It's pretty neat stuff!

I'm pretty sure I'll post the next page (depending on how quickly I can work on it) on here, but I'm debating saving the pages after so the ending isn't spoiled. Between baby and me being slow it might be a while to finish.

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First post-baby update! Though this is queued so you're reading this long after I wrote it. Hopefully I'm still sane. I'm trying to sneak away a little bit of art time when I can, but don't expect a lot. Babies are messy. I mean, I knew this, but they're really messy.

Bunch of sketches, what a mess! I swear this all means something to me.

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Page 19 is done!

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Refining a bunch of stuff and adding in images of the earth being lit up by the explosion. A lot of the high-altitude nuclear tests mention that they lit up the ground beneath them like the sun, so that's a neat image I wanted to include.

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I spent a lot of time looking at high altitude nuclear detonations for this image. Technically it's not a nuclear explosion, but the Asher is releasing stupid amounts of energy as it gets shredded so it's the closest reference I can think of.

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Some tricky perspective work here so we're already at three layers (including a perspective warped cross section of a Hellflower I'll be using as my base.

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Page 18 complete! A rabbit binkies while hyperkinetic kill vehicles take out a kaiju.

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Going to be busy for a while...

Big announcement (for me at least), I had a baby! They are adorable and I feel like I've been hit by a truck.

I will obviously be busy for a while, but I've been building a buffer of Aphelion progress pages. These should post automatically each weekend for a while, and hopefully I'll be back to drawing before they run out. But I might not be responding to much for a while.

Oh yeah, and I've also made significant progress on another short comic, but I want to reveal that when it's done.

Bye for now!

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Okay, so, I love physics simulations. Love to model structures torn apart by absurd forces. And I feel like making these things look at least semi-realistic really adds to immersion, or at least it means you're giving the reader something new instead of "generic explosion effects."

So this is Widdershins tearing through an Asher. Semi-truck sized rods of lead launched in an elliptical orbit that intersects with earth's orbit during aphelion except going in the opposite direction of travel. I don't want to think about how much deltaV that took. The answer is lots. Maybe the hives did some cool tricks with solar sails and orbits to help save on fuel. All the rods have some maneuvering capabilities but it's minimal so the hives don't have a lot of opportunity to use it because the earth gets in the way, and like, they live there.

So this is something like a bunch of 60,000+ m/s lead projectiles impacting something made of almost-diamond. And while I got a rough estimate of the speed of sound in diamond (18,000 - 15,000 m/s) it's a big range so maybe the angles of the shocks aren't quite right, and I'm not sure if things would shatter, or melt, or turn to fine dust, or what. But I went with shattering because it looked kind of cool. Anyways, I tried, there you go.

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The nice thing about working digitally is that you can do things like just add layers on top of layers. Like a digital onion. Don't like a thing? Just fix that one layer!

Of course, then you end up with 50+ layers and you'd better hope you labeled them well.

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Oh nice, I get to use one of my old mandelbrot images I generated years ago. Thank you past Turbo.

The order I use for sketch layer colors goes: blue, red, red-purple, indigo, then green. Most of the time at least. Some people have asked if I make 3D digital models and I don't. Haven't learned blender yet and my professional experience is with programs that would be terrible for art. Sometimes I make clay models, sometimes I drop in a pre-made CSP asset (usually like, a bust, or a simple shape) to get things roughly correct. Everything else is just lots of layers and a pretty good knowledge of perspective (it's just math really).

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Page 17 complete!

Pleased with this one. I always worry about how hard it is to include various subtle effects. One being that the lightning halo is diminishing as they gain altitude. But like, it's not super plot relevant, so it's fine if it doesn't come through.

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I LOVE all the gradients and complicated lighting of views of the earth from space, but I also like to work with black & white + fairly simple shading techniques, which makes things... interesting.

When it work's it's great. It's all about breaking down the underlying structure, but that's sometimes easier said than done. Seems to be working here though.