Chapter: Part 1 - Chapter 5

I’m actually pretty happy with how this page turned out, which is unusual at this stage since I generally just want to post it up and forget it exists. Even the binocular effects don’t look that dodgy. New vote incentive! It’s an unfinished version of that map I promised at some point last week. It’s a bit dark and hard to read and blodgy right now, but you can sort of tell where places are. I’ll post up the finished thing as soon as it’s done. It’s probably worth noting that this isn’t an all-encompassing world map, just a regional map of the (still fairly large) continent that Red Moon Rising takes place in. I had a small epiphany about painting backgrounds while working on the first and last panels which involves using the opacity brush settings in Photoshop more fully to get some nice cohesive textures going with a minimal amount of effort. It feels a lot closer to using watercolours (one of my favourite media outside of Photoshop) than I would have expected, and I think I’ll be getting a bit more adventurous with background shots, simply because it’ll be quicker and easier to do that. Hooray! I exercised it a bit in the first panel with a slightly more ambitious viewing angle – the perspective’s probably all over the place, but it’s sort of ok whatever. In completely unrelated news, new Stargate series! Whoo! I am a giant Stargate nerd, and Universe seems like it might not be a giant pile of crap, which I absolutely approve of.