cage -3-
posted 2008.12.17 at 12:38
Nothing short of a total redraw and reshade will unfuck this page... panel three, anyway. It sucks! Though with SOME hacking I was able to make Val look less dopey and more pissed, so... I suppose it's an improvement. A minor tweak made for a MAJOR improvement to panel two, and panel four continues to be the "win" panel* for the page. Huzzah.
That said, the hair SFX and some more Energy Porn have been splattered in for effect. In the context of the past couple of pages, the end result - while not my best work by a long shot - gives a much stronger visual indication of what's actually happening in the scene.
Scary.
* I don't recall giving voice to this before (though I almost certainly have), but it's become obvious to me over time that every page of The Dualist has a Good Panel, a Crappy Panel, and a bunch of in-between panels. In this case, the crap is three and the win is four. For the next page, it's three and four for the win. My overwhelming urge to raise the overall quality to "all wins" with no crap is one of the major reasons for this redux - while it's plunged me into a seemingly endless purgatory of No Actual Progress, I am finally hacking away at all those little odds and ends that bug me every time I pull up a page. Some pages need more help than others, obviously... and fortunately, I feel no compulsion to do this with what's been produced of Transitional Voices.
First Edition Metadata
OPD : 2005.04.21 @ 22:22
While not without its flaws, the redux is an improvement over the original in every way.
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Originally hammering -2-, done 28 May 2003 and back-published 2003-05-23 15:01:21. Like hammering -1-, a rework of an earlier draft:
While the previous page was inked with - I believe - a 01 Micron in one pass, this page was a horribly failed attempt to use a brush tip for inking. To say that this failed horribly would be one hell of an understatement - I have a tendency to slow down and increase pressure when I don't want to fuck up my inks, and as I'm sure you can imagine, this doesn't exactly work when you're trying to do fine detail with a brush. You don't get detail - you get the pile of ass that was originally hammering -2-.
Later, you figure out an inking method that works for you and you come back and redo the fucker.
Original post text:
Hammering on the Gates of Nothing -2-
Rework of the original page. Obviously, if you saw the first version. Experimentation with brush pen, which obviously didn't go terribly well. The thing's too big- I'm going to run off somewhere else and see if I can find a smaller one. 3 will likely be mixed media sort of thing, experimenting with line weights. This marks the first use of the sketchbook for source material- top and bottom frames were done on card stock, middle in the dev sketchbook, which is taking a bit of a beating lately. :P
I still need practice, obviously. :D