Part 1 – Chapter 1 – Red Moon Rising – a steampunk fantasy webcomic

Hooray, a highlight colour that isn’t orange. A few more pages and this scene should be over, and we’ll be off to sunnier climes.

The vote incentive is the inking for this page, which I’ve been trying to improve over the last few updates.

It’s page 15*, and you know what that means! That’s right, I’m a quarter of the way to Baconnaise. Also, goodbye grumbly television. The new vote incentive is another quick painting I did of a forest scene. Obviously I should have set this entire scene in a forest rather than inside a dingy flat. I also added some google ads to the site just for the hell of it. Since Red Moon Rising is also the name of an EVE Online expansion, they’re mainly EVE-related ads. Which I can dig. EVE is cool. *Note from the future: This was originally page 15.

Ooh, burn. I haven’t decided what to do about the font yet, though I suspect I’ll probably just end up making my own (a la yourfonts.com) eventually. In the meantime, sticking with Gill Sans. The new vote incentive is another character sketch, though not a main character. Just someone who’s disproportionately important to the amount of screen time she has in the actual comic.

Ha, and you thought something interesting was going to happen. Still, hooray. New character and we’re finally in to double digits*. Also, don’t forget to vote! It’s a new month so TWC has reset, and it’s going maaaad – I’m hoping to stay in the top 200 once the dust settles. The incentive itself is a bunch of messy delightful sketches from the last week or so. *Note: This was originally page 10.

Dun dun dun! A slightly ajar door! It’s a thrill a minute here at Red Moon Rising. For some reason I ended up fully painting the first and last panels. Normally I ink/cel shade the characters and paint the backgrounds, but that got a bit muddled here. I think I intended to do silhouettes for those panels, but then realised that was super lame and lazy and couldn’t be bothered going back to ink them once I had started painting the backgrounds, even though that prooobably would have taken less time overall. Because I am stupid, I guess. The new vote incentive is a painting of the grumpy protagonist that I finished a while ago and then completely god damn forgot to post up anywhere.

Oh no! A delayed title page! What a cop out! I feel bad about this one since I intended to update with this and another page to make up for the complete lack of content you see here, but alas, I didn’t get the other one finished in time. To make up for it, however, the vote incentive has lightsabers. Well, a lightsaber. Singular. Sorry. Also, guilty confession – I really like drawing hands. Hands are brilliant.

We will pretend that this page was not a hair raising example of the tablet driver on my laptop deciding not to work properly all weekend – thus necessitating much scrambling about and drawing at the last moment – and instead we will just enjoy it. Ahhhh. She is so grumpy. Cheer up, emocow. Also, ooh, speech bubbles.

In today’s page I learned that I can paint as much detail as I like in to the backgrounds, but it’s just going to get covered up in the rain overlay. The architecture is all based on Glasgow tenement buildings since, although the whole place is supposed to have more of a Russian vibe to it, I had trouble finding any pre-Soviet architectural references at all. Oh well. Also, I like silhouettes way too much. There’s another one in the next page. I think I have a problem. D:

I’m giving WordPress’s delayed publishing option a go, so hopefully this will be posted at midnight GMT. If not then I guess… whenever I wake up? Edit: Turns out comicpress has a whole mess of options for this, but someone didn’t install the plugin on my account. I’m looking at you, Morgan. *shakes fist* Anyway, my computer kept bluescreening over the last week, usually while I was drawing. I think overall I lost about two hours worth of work on this page as a result, including all of the inking, which I then dutifully re-did. Agh. Also, in the fifth panel “filthy” was originally “grotty”, but I decided to change it rather than risk potentially confusing Americans with unnecessary British slang within the first twenty words of the comic. I’m curious, did “grotty” cross the Atlantic at any point? Edit again: Right, my comment button has gone AWOL. Uh ohs. Hang on. Ok, fixed. Phew.

I feel like this is cheating a bit since I had already drawn the first page* a while ago and it just needed to be repainted to a degree. Still it’s done! Also, it took ages to find the font I was using for the text boxes, so not only has the word “special” lost all meaning to me, in my head that lump of text is being said in a Weebl and Bob voice. *Note: This was originally page 1.