Whateverland USA

Author notes

Page 17

Indybot

on Jan. 20, 2010

I GIVE UP (on this page). There is ABSOLUTELY no way that I can finish the background in panel three without spending another infuriating week of non-progress. Oh well. I was GOING to be proud of this page. Other than my utter failure to finish a single, THREE PANEL page, I’m very happy with this week’s installment.

What follows are the notes I wrote as I started working on this page, back when I was still full of hopes and dreams*.



Omigod omigod omigod. Guys.
GUYS.
Hey guys, guess what?

I like this next part.

For those who are into floriography, the flowers in question include morning glories, bell flowers, “amaranthus caudatus,” and marigolds. The original plan also called for black and yellow roses, but then a FAIL happened. MAN I need to get with the program and start coloring these comics.

I had a grand time learning how to draw all of these plants. I think they came out rather well.

And for the record, I love Mitch’s facial expressions throughout this page, especially his “what exactly are we looking at?” face in panel one.

Also: on this page: New pens, and a new scanner to call my own. I’m liking the options for tweaking the color input/output. In particular, I dig the prospect of making the lineart look a little slicker, without having to get rid of the original pencil lines. I like sketch lines. I’ve never been thrilled with how “hand-made” these comics tend to look, so I’m excited about getting to walk this line between sketchy and clean lineart. Still need to work on getting things to look a bit sharper, though. This seems a tad blurry to me.

Much of panels one and two was inked using my housemate’s helix pens. The plants and most of panel three were inked using my new microns. Still not sure how much I like felt-tip pens, especially since I can now use the scanner to fudge my inks a bit (i.e. hide the textured lines left by roller-ball pens.). I admit, the microns are pretty nice, though. I also picked up some nicer roller-balls, so we’ll see how it goes.

And that business going on with the horizon in panel two was my attempt to show said contrast between this dimension’s “local flora” and the mystery flowers. It would work better if the previous pages had any sort of background.

I would also just like to announce that Leech’s eyebrow in panel two was tragically consumed by her hair during the inking process. It sucks, because I really liked that expression, too.

Finally, as I said before, updates will be coming slowly for a while. Slower than once a week, at least.

-Indy Out.

*The void left by said hopes and dreams has since been filled with burritos and rage.