Well, it’s finally up, even if it took me all week to finish it. I really hate it when I don’t post on time, but I hate it even more when I only end up posting one comic for the week. Even so, today’s comic took over ten hours to complete, and it was like pulling teeth to get myself to sit down and work on it. At my best, I’ve never been exactly what you’d call a self-starter. It’s made even worse when I have a bad week health-wise. I’m not trying to complain, though. I think today’s comic came out pretty well, and I’m really happy with how Dr. Jols came out. That one big panel of him took me over an hour to ink (so did the space station), but I put more detail than usual in him. You can’t really tell so much in the shrunk down online version, but you can in the print version.
Page 101 marks several changes. The only real noticeable one is that it’s not in grayscale, but a cool, blue-gray. The pure black and white pages were just too harsh and cold. The biggest difference, which you can’t tell here, is that this page was done at standard American comic book size. I figured that using the smaller manga size would be harder to get printed as there’s no real standards from one printer to the next for manga. So there’s no telling if you can easily get it self-published. This also meant that the file size was actually much larger than what I was working at before, especially when you consider that I do the actually inking and toning at 150% of the final size (approx. 10″x15″). All the inked lines look better when they’re shrunk down. Another difference is that I inked it at 1200 dpi instead of 600 dpi. I couldn’t believe the difference in Manga Studio Debut, of how much more fluid and realistic the lines were at the higher resolution. Of course, it all got shrunk to 300 dpi for toning so that I could keep the file size reasonable . Yet, it’s easier to do more detail at the higher resolution, and it still looks good when scaled down in Photoshop. None of this probably matters to most of you, but I thought I’d mention it just the same.
I spent some time reading the script to remind myself what’s coming up next. It’s kind of refreshed my zeal for the project because I was starting to feel like starting a new project. I don’t mean quitting Far Reaches. Rather, I have been thinking about doing a short, eight to ten page mini-comic with new characters and a new universe. I’ve just got some ideas mulling around in my head of something cool. I don’t have a story yet, though. Just images in my brain. Still, I think I need to work at getting faster before taking on extra work. I’ve had a hard enough time just doing the two FR comics. Speaking of which, I’m going to really make an effort to be on time next week.
Just scribble down your ideas on some notebook paper; it helps bring the ideas together.
The black and white stlye is okay so far. Just keep working with it, and I’m sure you’re find a style that works just right (Gilrec 2.0 lol).
You’re write about scribbling down ideas. I actually need to sit down and do that for several things including a subplot I’d like to add. A little brain storming is always helpful.