CQ Retrospective (Chapter 3 - Part 2)

Welcome back, and thank you for waiting. 

I mentioned this in the last episode, but I didn't really have a solid foundation in my mind for how I wanted the colors in Rosemaster's lair to look, so they ended up a bit muddy.

This real significance of this scene is Rosemaster being a mean mom and a nice mom back to back. Also, this is one of my favorite outfits of hers.

I think I wanted to avoid making Rosemaster's visual style too "graphic," but this is the best visual representation of her lair, looking back.

This scene has a lot going on. Honestly, it's a little bit of a mess, but I like how ambitious it was.

The "g" in the first panel is hard to pick out, but if I recall correctly, it's one of the two times Rosemaster starts a sentence with a lower-case letter. (The other time is when she's been defeated by Carrot.) It's just meant to show hesitation.

I know, I know, the pixel Rosemaster head looks bad. Pixel art has never been my strength. (After this, I put some effort into learning the basics, but I fell off it...) The pixel "Fatigued" was meant to convey that Glitchmaster was playing Rosemaster's voice back to her. Also, the shift to purple in the last panels is meant to suggest that she's being passive-aggressive about the Nightmare Knight.

The "glitch" effects were created by a hodgepodge of Photoshop filters that I can't fully remember.

I had a file where I just generated as many awful patterns and overlays as I could, and I used it for all of Glitchmaster's appearances in this chapter.

Originally, I wanted Glitchmaster to have a face like on the left here, and for her influence to make the whole comic look pixely and jpg-artifacted like Cucumber on the right. This didn't work out for a number of reasons, but mostly printing concerns. As for the face... well, who knows?

Rosemaster and Glitchmaster's visual styles were meant to clash, but I could have executed it a bit better. Anyway, Rosemaster's "influence" is meant to give way to Glitchmaster's by the end of the scene, so the colors get harsher.

This page is just plain hard to read. I was sort of throwing whatever at the wall to see what stuck. Also, yes, there was an attempt at antialiasing.

I commonly ran into the issue of dark panels on dark margins making the page hard to read, but it worked out okay here. It's pretty clear where one moment ends and the next begins, even if the layout is kind of working against itself. I also think these drawings of Rosemaster still look nice.

The rest of this scene is very cluttered and expository with one-note colors, but I will say some of the glitch effects individually look pretty cool. I just wish I'd been a bit more tasteful with their use.

I regretted using this bright red immediately. It's an unnecessary strain on the eyes.

(If it seems like I'm being way down on myself in this episode, please don't get the wrong idea. I've never done anything wrong in my entire life.)

This area is underneath the big tree at the center of the ruins, so the walls are roots. There's meant to be a conspicuous gap in the party here where Nautilus would be.

I probably could have blurred Almond more in the foreground of the last panel for depth, but I wanted her expression to be prominent.

This was the earliest reveal that the Nightmare Knight was into baking. Some readers just assumed the sweets were store bought or something.

So, you probably know the gag with this character is that he's a photorealistic rabbit under the hood. Did I overlay a photo of a rabbit on the second panel here just to make sure that one glowing eye lined up in a believable way? I will leave you to reach your own conclusion.

I remember having some doubts about the Hocus Crocus as a plot device--it is awfully convenient, after all--but nobody seemed to mind because it was pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I've learned that sometimes a magical macguffin or nonsense plot contrivance is fine if the emotional payoff is worth it.

The scene where the Nightmare Knight meets "Gary" had been vaguely planned at this point.

The aforementioned photorealistic rabbit. This was a gag I had planned for a long time:

By the way, this all takes place in Queen Lotus' garden, Lotus being the first queen of the Flower Kingdom. I think that originally, they were going to meet her ghost in the ruins. (Cucumber wasn't present in this version of the scene because there was a whole subplot where he got poisoned.)

I had to reference a lot of photographs of rabbits yawning for this bit. I didn't do very much realistic painting at that point, so it was actually kind of a challenge.

I don't know when pink became Almond's representative color, but it seemed to make the most sense here. It's a little hard to read, though, since it's so light.

Boltergeist was something I came up with partway into the chapter, one last weird gag before the story got more serious. He's one of the more "Paper Mario" characters in the cast, probably. I think there was also a good amount of Paranatural influence here.

Anyway, he's nonsense and he doesn't matter, but he will make a future appearance anyway.

His design was very "one-and-done", but weirdly, I'm proud of it.

Mr. R's office is a bit phoned in, since it only appears in two pages, though I do like the color scheme and the "R" motif on the back wall.

This scene is really simple, but I still like it. I think this is a more graceful color shift than most of the transitions into Rosemaster's lair throughout this chapter.

Did I mention that all the scenes in Rosemaster's lair have a texture overlay? I think I must have intensified the effect for this scene--it seems a lot more noticeable all of a sudden.

This panel is a way better blending of Rosemaster and Noisemaster's visual styles than the previous attempt I made at the start of the chapter. Also, by this point I had fully realized my desire to make Cucumber look cool sometimes.

This arc where Carrot has a crisis about standing around and being useless was kind of meta, I guess. By this point, Carrot was my least favorite character on the team, and I hadn't really decided what I wanted to do with him until this chapter.

I got a little carried away with the glitch effects in a way that made it hard to tell what was going on in this scene, but I was having fun.

The first two panels "dip" into the fifth here. I don't think it caused any major confusion, but the composition does work against the reading order, unfortunately. Still, the sequence on the bottom row is one of my favorites in the whole comic.

This is the first time the actual structure of Botanica Springs and its position relative to the ruins is shown. I'm not sure if it would have been better to illustrate this sooner, if it would have made the reveal a little clearer.

The crystallization effect here was painstakingly rendered, but...you know, I'm still not very good at rendering gemstone. I guess at the time, I thought, "I'll figure it out in the Crystal Kingdom." (I didn't.)

After struggling with it for the whole chapter, I finally decided I just didn't care for Rosemaster's visual style, so I seized this opportunity to come up with something better. I limited the palette to two hues (red and purple) and tried to emphasize contrast where I felt it was lacking previously. I also wanted the texture overlay to look more obviously like film grain, so I added "scratches" to it. I was thinking of film noir. (Incidentally though, I had just playtested Undertale around this time, so the stark colors took some inspiration from that.)

Some sketches I did for this bit. I was originally going to make that one shade of red the only color on the page.

I'm sorry in advance for laying on my own horn for the rest of this episode, but I honestly still feel that this scene is some of the best work I've ever done.

Weird aside, but Carrot is the only character who says "erm." Is he British? That's for you to decide.

The fact that Almond is wearing the flower in her hair has nothing to do with Rosemaster's magic, by the way. I just wanted to be extremely on-the-nose about it in case it was still unclear.

Rosemaster says this before Carrot falls off the cliff. She's talking to the Nightmare Knight, but I don't think I realistically expected anyone to remember this when it came up again.

This is the very first (and, uh, only) two-page spread in CQ. My website's layout didn't really accommodate it, so I had to split it up into two separate pages for the update. Still, it was nice to have this kind of space to work with for once. The mood was influenced by Kingdom Hearts.

"Normal" scenes like this always feel like they're painted more lovingly after a heavily stylized sequence. Carrot miraculously started becoming handsome here.

Nevermind, he stopped.

When I uploaded this to the site, I included a link to the page where Parfait's letter was shown, just to remind everyone what was on it. In print, this is a bit less successful because that page is in a separate book. Whoopsy doopsy. By the way, the text is literally copied-and-pasted from the original letter.

The composition on this one is a little unclear. You're supposed to read all the way down on the left before reading the three panels on the right. I tried to reinforce this with the conspicuous pink line in the sky, but I still had a "hey, wait" moment when I read this page just now.

I had the thought to do this sequence traditionally, but by this point, I was way out of practice with traditional painting and didn't have enough time to do it in a way I'd be satisfied with. Like with the original letter from Parfait, I blurred the lines in places to simulate a bleeding effect, which helped quite a bit.

I must have drawn those hands on the left from reference.

Carrot's costume change was at least 75% motivated by me growing to hate the original Caketown knight uniform.

This early idea was a little too round... I don't know why I dropped the high heels, though. Those would have ruled.

This is one of my favorite pages. I would say this was the first action sequence that 1) came out the way I envisioned it, 2) was mostly easy to follow, and 3) had characters doing more than crossing swords once.

Carrot fully blossomed into Hot Carrot. You can tell this is the exact moment where that happened because I drew him with a lower lip.

I wanted to show the Hocus Crocus very prominently in panel 2 to make it clear that Carrot was aiming at it. It does look very "video game boss with glowing weak point," but that's appropriate, isn't it?

Carrot's color scheme "resists" Rosemaster's throughout this sequence, but it starts fading here...

...And totally fades out on this page. Carrot's facial expression in panel 3 is pretty striking--I don't think there are many similar faces in CQ.

Rosemaster's steady smile was very important.

I wanted there to be a very distinct pause before Carrot fired at Rosemaster, to show that she was allowing him to. I think I could have made it feel longer by adding another panel, but maybe this is fine.

This transition was very confusing for a lot of readers. It's probably clear in retrospect that it's a flashback, but I could have added an establishing shot or something to define the change of scene.

Rosemaster's costume here is my favorite. It was nice to finally get to lift the shadow over her eyes. Also, white panel margins! Easy!

Glitchmaster becomes this formless pixel mess after Rosemaster's betrayal, partially because she's taken damage and partially because she's just really mad. Since Rosemaster is in control throughout this sequence, Glitchmaster's color scheme conforms to hers.

She also becomes a smooth orb with soft, reflective light once she calms down.

Because I was worried that there might be some ambiguity as to whether or not Rosemaster was a good person, I may have hammered this point home a bit excessively.

It was important to show Rosemaster changing into this look, but I was honestly just happy to draw it one more time.

The final burn. Here are those lower-case cursive letters I mentioned earlier. (The Y in panel 2 still looks a bit like a capital though... Oh well.) I referenced wilted rose petals for her hair here.

This encounter wasn't something I had planned at the start of the chapter. Actually, the Oracle and the Nightmare Knight weren't supposed to interact at all until the end of the story, but that felt too far off.

The effect for the Oracle teleporting is meant to look the same as when the Nightmare Knight does it.

If this panel were in any other scene, I would have just used Peridot's local (normal) colors, but it felt like too severe of a tonal shift here, so Peridot is much more pink/blue than usual.

After the Nightmare Knight leaves, the scene slowly shifts from more purple to blue-green. I'm not sure why I did such a slow color transition... I guess just because the purple was pretty.

There was a period where I got way into painting eyeballs very shiny. I'm not so fond of it anymore, though it does make Almond look pretty scary here.

This sad atmosphere suits the underground ruins more than the usual lighting, I think.

Even without the switch to script format, this would have been the last "normal" end-of-chapter page in CQ. "The Splashmaster days are behind us..." That kind of feeling is what I was going for.

Thank you for reliving this chapter with me. For all its flaws, I'm still very proud of it, and I don't think you'd be wrong to call it Cucumber Quest's high point. But the remaining chapters are also great, because I've never done anything wrong in my life. See you next time for Interlude 3!