weasyl.com · 2457995:9370461

And so that's the end of chapter 1!

Important info : I am planning on taking a break from this story because it was a bit exhausting. As you might have understood, I had trouble with a lot of pages. I wasn't really in the zone. It was a struggle. That's hard to keep up for 20 pages, never mind 200. Personally, I am still missing a lot of practice and my process is terrible, so it's hard to pump out pages consistently.

Chapter retrospective

I will spread the "behind the scenes" stuff throughout the chapters. For now, here's a bit of technical stuff :

Page setup

I have this insane setup in Blender to create a page with different number of panes and shapes and everything. It renders everything separately (3D backgrounds, mannequins, borders, text) and then I combine it in Krita. I could use the backgrounds as-is, but I prefer the look when I paint over it. I think only pages 20 and 21 have the actual Blender background slightly visible (50% opaque) to add a bit of texture on the wood. It's most obvious on page 21.

On my pc, pages are 4000x5000, but that's like 10-20MB and it starts to be slow to load. I uploaded at 2000x2500 because I don't really see a difference and the file size is much smaller (~4MB). A 4K monitor is about 2000 tall, so there's no real point going past that for a comic. I don't want people to scroll all the time.

Page style

About half the pages are full page paintings. The reason behind that is :

Hopefully the thumbnails will be easier to see and might get people interested to click on it. Honestly, when a comic's thumbnail is too busy and it's hard to make out because there's a bunch of panels or text or whatever, I'm not really inclined to click on it because I have no idea what it is.

A full page isn't really longer for me to paint than a small panel.

I prefer to showcase art than to cover everything up with speech bubbles. I want this to be visual art foremost, and not a novel.