Yesterday was a sort of impromptu test. A friend has been streaming his work in real time for his Patreon backers. Sometimes this can be really interesting to watch and sometimes less so, but it is an attempt at building community. I've streamed once and had some people show up. I never did again because the kind of work I do, mostly in Illustrator doesn't seem all that interesting to me. It's almost like watching someone connect the dots. Most of the 'creative' part comes from the penciling, or so it seems to me. Still, after starting to work on the above illustration for about a half hour, I decided to give the streaming a try. I posted a link on my tumblr account and Facebook and then texted the above friend just so he wouldn't be able to say I didn't tell him. I also emailed Vince (thanks, Vince!). I had the sound on, so the viewers could hear me and I could respond to texted chats. It was actually a lot of fun; it felt like having a studio-mate. I'd toyed with the idea of making a Patreon of my own just for the possibility of building a community of my own. Will I always get even the two people I did? Perhaps not. It was still fun to do and something I should think of doing more regularly. There's nothing lost letting people see me work and swear.
The other part of the experiment was something visible in the two images above. The biggest change is the pose; the above friend noted that while the figure was good, the silhouette, the most important aspect of a pose in animation was ambiguous as drawn. With Illustrator, such changes are no big deal, so I changed his one arm. The more useful thing, though was playing with the layering options in PS. They're not available in AI, which is rather annoying, so this means that I'm not only going to have an extra step for "Ghiroy," but if it ever comes to being published in print, I might well have to redo all the output pages to meet the demands of printing. Still, one of the problems I've had in the past is using a transparent overlays. While they unify the palette and add feeling, they tend to make the image more chalky. I have to bump up the contrast in PS after the fact and that can do weird things to the high end of the tones. In this case, I made a silhouette of the figure in bright green, brought just that over in PS and pasted it atop the figure while changing the layer option until I got a much better look. In this case, I think the figure on the left looks a lot like he's in moonlight. While I want this world to feel alien, my partner thinks that I need to keep from going nuts when doing this kind of thing. He might be right.
Lastly, I was timing this as the style I've finally chosen for the comic is rather detailed and as such I was worried that it might take too long to render it all. It didn't, though it took longer with an audience. The image is only half done as the background is missing. Still, this represents a full page as I've found that as I go along, I don't really like panels all that much. I can't think of the last comic I did that had them. I prefer big images occasionally with floating images above for my 'panels.' Don't know why this is, but I've moved away from them since Tamino. The other thing I've been working on is the text. I've seen so many comics that are lovingly rendered that just have a word balloon with comics sans slapped on top and it's so visually jarring. Also, when I read comics, I can feel a mental disconnect when my eye moves from the image to the text. I'm going to try and integrate the words into the image, much like I did with the Smatt and Terry comic, though I wasn't even thinking about that at the time. In this case, the choice of lettering style is going to matter a lot. Each character will have their own. In other words, I have a lot of work to do.
