Chapter: Part 1 - Chapter 3
More fire, hooray. Sorry for the late-in-the-day update, I’m moving to a new flat this weekend so you can imagine things are a bit hectic. Monday’s page might also be a bit late as a result – I won’t have internet access at my new place for a wee bit, though the plan is to come back and squat in my old flat with a laptop… so we’ll see how that goes.
Edit – I completely blanked on this and forgot to mention it: Red Moon Rising has properly joined the Sage Comics collective now! That’s probably been pretty obvious due to the corner ribbon that’s been on the site for over a month, but it wasn’t quite finalised until now since I had to send a bunch of small stuff (banner graphics and things) to Alice in order to be added, but then my site got hacked… I’m sure you can imagine what took priority there. I finally got around to it though, and you should all check out the comics on Sage since they are cool, and also awesome.
This page was twittered about excessively in real time as I raced Metruis of Between Places to see who could get a page done quicker. I lost by at least an hour, but this page only took six hours in total, which I’m still pretty pleased with. She is clearly just some sort of crazy drawing machine. (I’m over here on Twitter in case anyone wants to know what I happened to have for breakfast on any given day.)
I’m making a little attempt to get back to the comic’s cel-shaded roots by trying to get the cel-shading looking good on its own so I don’t have to do quite so much touching up, which invariably makes the art look a lot more painty. Also, I’m trying to be a bit more judicious with my use of the extra shadow layer, especially on the faces. I think it’s looking good combined with the newer lineart method, and the whole colouring process is only taking like an hour and a half now, which is crazy. If only I could actual draw faster…
Page 65*! In which Danil shows that Adrianna does not have a monopoly on random acts of violence. A nice spry midnight update, finally. Back on track for the first time since the new site launched, and I’m feeling good about it. My good buddy Pseudonym, who proof reads and helps edit my scripts, has already coined the term “apple-sassed” to refer to the events of this page. Bonk.
Also, I don’t know if anyone except me can tell the difference, but I’ve made a big change to the way I draw the pages in that I don’t ink them any more – my inking was terrible, and just took up time. Instead I’m simply cleaning up the sketches and colouring over those which, funnily enough, has resulted in a much nicer line weight overall and is saving me about an hour or so in my process. Great success! Anyone who’s interested in the difference (I expect that would be precisely no one) can compare the final linework for pages 64 and 65 here and here.
*Note from the future: This was originally page 65.
Ok, so I lied about having a new vote incentive, I just didn’t have time and it’s like 6:30pm now, faiiiil. There’s something weird about the fact that I was updating more promptly when I was doing a page a day.
For some reason this page was absolute murder to get done… maybe because it has real backgrounds, unlike the last few pages and also probably because I couldn’t decide on a colour scheme. I thought it’d end up more green than this, but hey… whatever, I don’t really like green anyway. Also, the rendering seems to be creeping away from cel-shading and towards being more painterly (again), which I guess I’ll need to keep an eye on, since over-complication is my sworn enemy. My computer kept crashing too. I put off formatting my hard drive to get this page done in something vaguely resembling a timely fashion, but I think it’s really asking for it now.
Well, that’ll teach you to leave the door hanging open.
I thought this page was going to be a lot later than this since I got terribly distracted over at the delightful O31 Ustream, and also Oblivion, and also cable TV. While I absolutely refuse to become one of those webcomickers that stops updating regularly due to gaming or TV or something equally stupid and avoidable, it was nice to just spend the weekend dorking about. Anyway, it’s another case of updating well before it’s even Monday in America (it’s 3am here in Britain), so I don’t feel especially guilty. Hurrah!
I’m having a go at sketching/inking the backgrounds rather than painting them, mainly to see if I can get my interior backgrounds looking a bit less rubbish. I have a lot less trouble with exterior shots (within Red Moon Rising, that’s almost invariably cityscapes or buildings of some sort) simply because they’re easier to boil down to a series of silhouettes. Interior shots are often more detail orientated, which is something I tend to shy away from because it can become very time consuming without looking particularly good. At any rate, for pages like this where the backgrounds are quite important I think it’s probably something I’ll keep working away at.
Internet! Internet! My flat’s finally been hooked up, well ahead of schedule, which makes for a pleasant change in the trend of bad luck I’ve been having. It’s a late-ish update tonight, but hopefully the last one for a while. My computer is working, my tablet is working and internet is go, so I’m completely out of excuses now. Except for the fact that Oblivion is ridiculously addictive, and the internet came bundled with cable TV. I haven’t had a working TV since I moved to Dundee three years ago, so you can imagine I am somewhat baffled and intrigued by the colourful moving image box.
I decided to move back to my flat despite the lack of internet access since drawing the last few pages with my entire set-up perched on my lap for eight hours at a stretch hasn’t been too kind on my back and neck. Having finally had a chance to try out my new tablet with my desktop computer, I have to say it was worth every penny. I could just sit and draw with that thing all day, it is soooo smooth. I think this page took about four to five hours, which is pretty quick compared to my average, and it was nice and relaxing too. I missed my big office chair. 🙂
Pages will probably be going up around this time (noon-1pm BST) until some point next week when, hopefully, internet will arrive! In the meantime I’m going to try and build up a bit of a buffer and play lots of Oblivion. Can anyone recommend any good Oblivion mods?
I’m slowly beginning to realise that one of the main reasons I’ve been able to produce pages regularly is because I had such a nice office chair that made drawing at my computer for 8 hours every other day relatively painless. Since I’m staying at my brother’s place until my flat gets hooked up with internet I haven’t had that luxury, and maaaan is my back feeling it. The good news is that internet should be forthcoming within about a week or so, and until then I’m just going to complain a lot.
Ok, so the good news: my new tablet arrived! A spiffy Intuos4, and it works just like it should. There’s an excessive amount of pen wear due to the textured surface, but otherwise it’s realllly nice.
The bad news: most of you probably noticed that there was no update on Wednesday. That was due to my laptop imploding on Tuesday afternoon, requiring a format which ended up taking the better part of two days and pretty much killed any chance of getting a page up on time. In the end I decided just to nix the update and try again for Friday. Hopefully that’s the last of my technological mishaps for now, since I think I’ve had a rather unfair amount over the past month or so. I’m running out of things that haven’t found some way of breaking.
Also, I coloured this page in front of a very jolly audience over on Livestream, which was lots of fun, even though it meant a lot of false starts as my laptop’s processor didn’t seem to like having Photoshop running at the same time as the streaming software. I’ll definitely be doing another one (probably on Sunday), if any of you are interested I’ll be announcing when exactly over on my Twitter account. Twitter’s also a good place to garner hints about why the page isn’t up yet, since it’s almost custom-built for complaining incessantly.
Usually I spend about seven hours drawing a page from scratch, but this one clocked at in at just over four hours, which I’m quite proud of! The lineart is getting a lot faster to draw, which I like to think is a sign of improvement. I think it looks good overall too, I feel like this page in particular has hit an artistic level I’m really pleased with, though I’m sure I’ll have changed my mind by tomorrow. That always happens.
Anyway… still no internet and still no tablet. Though the good news is that my new tablet should be arriving on Tuesday morning, meaning that Wednesday’s update should be drawn with it. I’ll report back! As for internet, I’m camped out at my brother’s place, simultaneously leeching off him and flat-sitting while he’s visiting our parents, which is about as close to a good set up as I can get without actually having a connection at my own place.
Sorry for missing Friday’s update – I did note on Wednesday that I probably would since, as I suspected, I ended up having to pull an all-nighter and just barely got that university assignment handed in on time. After being up for forty hours or so I didn’t really want to spend another six to eight drawing a page. I regret nothing, the sleep I got instead was brilliant. Having said that, I’m hoping to get back on a regular schedule as of right now. August has been a big giant mess.
New vote incentive, some of the work I blew off the Friday page for. Concept art for a theoretical cave exploration sort of game thing I dunno.