The writing comes way more naturally to me now. I didn't notice how badly I had gotten myself stuck, but now it's so obvious. I kept drawing panels despite not having gotten far with the outline because I didn't know how to continue the story.
The new beginning I'm working on. I think the old beginning was more suited for an action-focused story given how hectic it is, a remnant of my original inspiration (the dragon isekai anime). This one sets the right tone. It's a story of living life and dealing with strange impulses and memories that make no sense. I also decided to switch to first-person present because working with past tense got really unwieldy sometimes.
I'm so happy I found this. This comic does so many of the things I want to do with mine, from the narration to the contents of the pages (actions instead of dense dialogues). This is a huge source of inspiration.
I think the fact that I picked up reading again after 15 years (holy fuck) now comes with the nice side effect that I'm learning about different methods of storytelling. It's harder to draw relevant knowledge from comics because they tend to rely a lot on character interactions, but there are all sorts of written stories and I have focused on ones where it's mostly the protagonist and whatever is going on inside their mind.
I found a comic whose cast are dogs living life very much like humans, and I can't help but keep thinking how impossible everything they do should be with those dumb paws. Beautiful art, though.
It's annoying when my brain crosswires different issues. I kept adjusting the head shading, but now that I fixed and shaded the body it looks fine to me
Doesn't look like much changed, but I experimented a lot with the shading to understand what works. I usually put the light source more in the background because it leads to shading that gives a lot of depth. But now the light is coming from the foreground, so that took some getting used to.
I'm still figuring out the panel density. Comics optimized for mobile have hilariously few, while many regular ones I've found use about 7-8 on average. I started with 3-4 and it felt like too little was going to happen per page. So I adjusted the yawning panels to be smaller, made the cave larger and removed one from the next page to make it balanced. Looks good to me now.
I feel pretty good about this draft. Still so much more to go, which feels pretty overwhelming until I remember I can take as much time as I want for this
I got an idea for that as well. Now I'm working on getting used to showing intent without spelling it out explicitly. The latter is key and something I never needed to think about. It would be easy to add a narrator bubble to say "I was thirsty". Or I could add a thought bubble with a symbol to indicate thirst. But none of that reads well. It would be like a list of instructions. The best option, rather, is to have one panel with the protagonist panting to indicate thirst, then showing a water source in another panel where he looks at.
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@areon@icy.wyvern.rip
Beautiful art, though.