…and here we are at part four of Drake and Hildy’s romantic tale. Just one more vignette to go. Aren’t you excited?
A bit of business first. The sharp-eyed will note that the Kill Bob poster on the back wall is from the outstanding webcomic, “Marooned.” If you’re not reading it, you really should be. The “poster” is actually one of the desktop wallpapers that he offers free on his site.
The even sharper-eyed reader will notice that Hildy was viewing the Ardra website before going to bed (weird that she doesn’t seem to use a screensaver or shut off her monitor, though…). This only makes sense as the creators behind Ardra are back on track and making new comics again! (Go there!)
So… this comic today was a… pain. It took me TWELVE hours to complete… five of those hours were spent on the background room alone… and it isn’t even very detailed. It all started as an exercise in perspective. I had the script written, of course, and thought that I’d just draw the room in on large panel (5100 x 4000px) and then lay on the characters for each scene… kind of like those old Colorform playsets with the vinyl clings that we (we = old folks like me) used to play with as kids.
Of course, I forgot that the room would be no larger than 400px wide in any given panel, so most any detail I put into the very large image would be lost by the time it was actually in the panel… five hours wasted. I probably could have just freehanded the darn thing and gotten equally good results in an hour. Oh well… it’s good practice.
The remaining seven hours… characters and shading… characters and shading… Quick, thy name is not Dave!
The end result of those twelve hours is pretty impressive, though 🙂
Also, as an alternate hypothesis, it’s possible that Drake was the one visiting the Ardra website…
I’m just playing the odds. If he has the choice between staring at the real, live, half-naked girl or reading a webcomic, I’m guessing he’d opt for the girl…