Shades of Gray

Author notes

080 - Masochist tease

avsaroke

on March 18, 2008

Today is the day of many notes!

First and most obviously, the new comic style. I'm drawing them a bit differently with hopefully more animated faces and poses…. though the poses thing doesn't really apply here because they're just sitting around and talking.

The style of shading I was using, though nice and quick, wasn't nearly as accurate as I would have liked and was starting to get too dark. This is Ten's story, and he sees the world as generally a bright and happy place, so I needed bright and happy shading. What I'm using here is a form of simple cell shading, and god did it take me forever. It defines their faces a bit better though, and I especially like how it looks on Ten. It gives him the firey yellow-orange eyes that I want him to have without making them look stupid. Jael's eyes need to be smaller though. They looked fine on paper, but as soon as I added the dark green… jeez they look huge.

Anyway, I'm still experimenting with the new lines and shading, so any criticism/advice would be much appreciated.

And now I'll tell you why this page is a week late…

Last week was my spring break, and I drew this thing up on my first two days off, planning to color it Monday and Tuesday. Unfortunately I underestimated the sheer time-sucking power of the various things I had to take care of.

First off, I got my first car. Wheee! (and nuuuuu…. debt!) It's my new shiny baby, and I spent a good three days visiting car lots to find it, negotiating loans once I found it, then calling up insurance companies in an attempt to find rates that weren't in the "haha… you're joking, right?" range.

Then, (the whole reason I got a car is because I'm taking summer classes on campus and need transportation) I found out that the loans I was supposed to get this summer so I COULD take classes and afford the car were parent loans, not the government loans I'd been getting for the past 2 years. Parent loans are a big no-no. This resulted in about two days worth of panicking and trying to figure out how to come up with five grand in the span of 2 months. Everything will work out, but man… not fun.

Then, THEN! My bearded dragon went on a five day food strike (this was going on during car and loan fun time) and we had to take him to the vet. Turns out he had a massive infection on his jaw that was hurting him too much for him to eat anything. So we had to give him pain killers, an antibiotic, and force feed him three times a day with a syringe.

Good times, good times.

And that's why this page is a week late.