A lot of things happened in November that kept me from finishing this up. Had 250 new vocab flash cards, a new puppy, handling bookkeeping for my dad, I think there was more but I’ve already forgotten.

The second half of the two-page spread. Such a mysterious clothing shop… The story takes place in an intentionally vague location, but it’s clearly the Canada/America region and yet it sells a Japanese serafuku? And it’s not even a cosplay story… how mysterious… As always, I implore you to not think about these things too deeply.

I said I wouldn’t do two-page spreads anymore, but I lied. I’m a slow worker, so it takes two weeks to do four full-body images. I also did alternate colored versions, though since I’m using the multiple/glow layer technique it didn’t really add to much to the time. I’ll include them below, though.

I don’t usually color the dialogue text, but I did it this time just to make it more clear who’s talking.

First page since I updated the website. Still trying to find a good balance for some things, like how much to blur layer I’m putting over everything. Also tempted to add a noise effect to everything, but I don’t know. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.

In theory it should be a unisex store, but most of the assets I could find were for women’s clothing, so pretend the menswear is off-screen.

This took so long to do because I had to do three backgrounds… I tried various techniques including a new coloring process to make things go faster, but in the end the background are the killer. They’re so difficult to, I completely messed up the scale of everything.

I’ve been looking into Sketchup, Acon3D and Snaptoon but the models get kinda expensive. I could use cheaper/free models and arrange the settings itself but it’s kinda pointless if I’m going to be spending hours finding assets and setting them up… Speaking of the backgrounds, I ended up blurring them because everything was feeling too busy so here they are below.

On the topic of the new coloring process, I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about it yet so we’ll see if it sticks. Kinda feels overworked and cluttered, with the background coloring completely blown out… Maybe I just need to play with it a bit more. I’m really bad with the add glow and glow dodge layers. Everyone always uses them well but when I do they always look overdone and blown out.

Took a few shortcuts this time, such as silhouetting them in the last panel, so it went a but faster. Thanatos’ face was cuter when I didn’t shadow the nose though… regrets.

This page took quite a long time, since I had to do two backgrounds… Several upcoming pages are gonna test me like this. Why do I make layouts that require scenery? Why can’t I just draw everything on blank backgrounds? (Because it wouldn’t look as nice, obviously…) But when I have to draw something with too much detail, my brain starts to short circuit. My brain’s vram is 512mb… Not even 1gb. And I can’t even upgrade it… What’s worse, I didn’t remember to check my layout, so most of the second one is covered… All that work for nothing. I’ll add the full backgrounds below, so it’s not a complete waste.

It’s a very busy page, isn’t it…? I hope it managed to get across what I was aiming for. If it makes you feel a little overwhelmed and anxious than I’ve succeeded.

For this one, I tried to skip inking and just used a tidied up sketch, in order to try and save time… The first couple of panels look a bit messier, but I think I got the hang of it by the end.

I’m always trying to desperately think of ways to make creating this faster… Each panel is essentially a full color digital illustration, if you consider it usually takes me 6-8 hours per illustration, at best I can have a page finished every other day, and that’s if everything goes well which it usually doesn’t. Complicated backgrounds will immediately increase that time too. The fact is, a single person really can only do so much on their own. So I keep trying to take short cuts, like cutting down on blending, or random details like hair strands or gradients, but then I usually end up experimenting and trying different things out anyway so it usually results in a net zero. In the end no amount of changes to my workflow will fix my personality.