Thumbs
Added 2024-02-16 01:31:56 +0000 UTCWelcome all ye newcomers, it's so nice to have your support! I need to rest my hands for a little while after going maybe a bit too hard at Work work and drawing this past week, but I'm eager to get back to drawing lewd stuff soon. In the mean time, I thought I'd share these thumbs I did for the second take at Band Shirt 2.
After I drafted it for the first time, I realised that the pacing was off, and it wasn't reading very well. It suffered because the way I'd laid it out, the two characters were on the wrong sides of the composition for some panels, which makes dialog hard to follow. A huge part of comic making is like, contriving your dialog/pacing/composition so that people are in the right place to deliver their lines from the right parts of the frame. In a proper comic you have more tools at ur disposal (like moving the chars through space, or using the whole page to guide the eye more), but with these, I was committed to the same sorta conversation-in-place format I used for the first one.
In the end I solved the problem by collapsing what were essentially two establishing panels into one, which gave me an extra panel in the middle I could dedicate entirely to the short-haired character catching the other's expression. It let me split mostly the same dialog across panels, which meant I didn't need to cross speech bubble tails (generally a very bad idea), and made everything clearer and funnier.
I might render out the aborted first take for you guys to show you the difference, because I got as far as colouring the first two and a half panels before I accepted it was a dead end. It was also just a bit more poorly drawn than I liked, since I was sorta rusty or something. I had to do a lot more sketches of those two chars before I warmed up (and began to comprehend the shape of short-hair's hair)
