This is a group shot of several of the current models with some rigging

They’ve got a few issues, and the silhouetted characters are very incomplete (and unclothed, thus the silhouettes), but it’s all coming along. Oddly, the nonhuman characters like Tyron are far easier to rig.

I’ve run into a few issues where my 3D software crashes incessantly if you glance at it wrong, but that’s helped by saving early and often (which I try to do in any case)

Here’s another Art Day post.

This is the base model for Gaxurea, like Uri.  Right at the moment, it’s just a fairly ordinary bird.  Since the male and female Gaxurea look different, I built this model first, and when I’m happy with the rigging and such, I’ll modify the mesh to suit each sex.

I’ve also refined Shadow’s model since last week’s Art Day.  I’ll post that again when I get further along.  The previously posted version pretty much had a semi-realistic face with cel shading applied.  The face  was rebuilt and looks more stylized, more consistent with the drawn comics (for whatever that’s worth).  Character design wise, I’ve never been shooting for anime style in particular for Shadsly, but it seems to be what I gravitate toward, so I might as well just run with it.

She now also has hands, eyes, and ears, and I’ve improved the surfacing (it looks a more like today’s pic).

I think it’s fairly obvious that my last attempt to continue Shadsly did not go as planned (a combination of artistic frustration, frustration with Google’s apparent unwillingness to list the site, and general malaise).

Part of the problem with Shadsly up to this point is that I’ve never been fluent enough with drawing to do the thing in a timely fashion or with satisfying results.  I’m well aware that the only solution to that is practice, but my mental image far outstrips my actual ability to the point that it kills my motivation to do so.  I have to constantly fight to get something even vaguely close to satisfying, and it doesn’t help that I have to take shortcuts to get even that done on time (which is why those early comics still aren’t colored).

As such, whenever Shadsly returns (no promises when, but I’ve certainly not given up on it), it is likely to be done with a completely new process.

Since very early on I’ve debated turning Shadsly into a GMod comic, albeit one with mostly custom content, but there’re were a number of issues with that, including both process complexity and aesthetic concerns.   Still, the idea lurked in the back of my mind, and came out to dance on my skull whenever I got frustrated with drawing.

I have always considered myself to be a terrible character modeler … the picture of Tyron elsewhere in this gallery was probably the best thing I’ve done until recently.  Even that took ages and didn’t have a very good mesh flow.

However, I have been putting the downtime to good use, building up my skills and trying new things, and seem to have recently finally started to break through my character modeling “block”.  I have decided that if I go this route, I will skip GMod entirely, and just do the thing straight in my 3D app.  I would pretty much have to use the thing in any case to make stuff for GMod, and with my software I have far greater control and the ability to do comics on my decrepit laptop.  The price is less ability to use props from the Source Engine, of course, and more effort spent making backgrounds.

This picture, an (incomplete) test of a 3D model of Shadow, is part of that effort.  It’s not spectacular (and is already out of date), but it’s better than some of the cringe-worthy drawings that have ended up in the comic already.

Making friends quickly, isn’t she?

Story Notes: Not much to say here.  This page is pretty self-explanatory.  Shadow appears to be reasonably safe in here, but she is, of course, trapped.  I’ll leave translating the inscriptions as an exercise for the reader.

Art Notes: I wish every panel could turn out like panel 2.  All-in-all, though, the page turned out pretty well.  Had to redraw panel 5 a few times.  All of the blur effects on this page made my machines SLLLLOOOOWW.

Jumping the wall was perhaps not Shadow’s brightest plan.

Title Reference: It’s a horrible punnish allusion to The Prisoner for no good reason.

Story Notes: Shadow’s Tell wasn’t really meant to be much of a surprise to anyone except Shadow (certainly not to most of my current readers, as many are aware of the origins of this motif).

The implication is that she only wears a glove on that arm because on some subconscious level she has always been aware of her nature, she just hadn’t understood it.   That’s why she took Tyron more or less at face value when she met him (after the initial shock), and why she put up only a token resistance to what he was saying.

This doesn’t mean she necessarily embraces this stuff, however.

Art Notes: I’m not overly happy with panels 1 and 4, but the rest of it works pretty well, I think.  Especially the coloring on panels 2 and 3.

It’s hard to see, but in panel 1, Shadow is holding the pepperspray I mentioned last page.

Oh, and if you wondered why there’s sometimes no rain, and sometimes lots, the storm varies its intensity every so often throughout this whole scene.  There probably shouldn’t also be mist at the same time, but hey, artistic license.  It makes the backgrounds less flat.

In Shadow’s town, you can’t throw a rock without even odds of hitting a cemetery gate.

Title Reference: Nothing in particular

Story Notes: Once Shadow has retrieved her purse, she can clean off her face a little.  Soggy Shadow is probably showing a bit more bravado than wisdom here, but climbing the wall isn’t too big of a stretch; she isn’t a complete stranger to entering cemeteries at night, and she’s feeling extremely put upon at the moment.  (She also carries a can of pepperspray in her purse.)

Art Notes: So, this is the page that caused the hiatus of the last several months.   I have effectively redrawn it from scratch, and made some dialogue and pacing modifications in the process, but this is essentially what I intended to draw back in March.

The original plan was to return to full color with this strip, but that may have been what broke my brain.  After the Broken Dolls storyline, the switch back may have simply been too abrupt (color is a lot of work, and though I love doing it, it doesn’t flow as naturally for me in illustration as in painting).

When I started up again, I drew this as you see it here, but experimented with altering it to use a monochrome or two-tone scheme, but I never could settle on one that I liked (all the variations I tried caused some sort of issue).  The next page will return to at least minimal color usage assuming no major snags.

Vaguely familiar symbol.

This is just an art day page I put up to let people know when the comics would resume.

The symbol here is the logo for Shadsly.  It’s a combination of the Cerement symbol and the one that appears on Tyron’s forehead.  It should probably incorporate the symbol from Shadow’s glove as well, but that one doesn’t fit stylistically.  All three of the symbols mentioned here can be seen way back on page 1.

That was … unexpected

Title Reference: Because it’s the end, duh.

Art Notes: That taxed my skills. I’m tired of drawing, forever. I’m going to go take a week long nap now. Then I will start a new comic next week, titled Goth Girls Are Awesome. It will be updated once every seven months.

Story Notes: No more story. That’s the end of Shadsly.  Really.  No, really.  OK, maybe. I’m an artist, I’m a flake by nature.

Fair warning, there will be no new shadsly tonight.

I’ve spent most of the time since the last one either asleep, or feverish, unable to breathe effectively, and doubled over from coughing. I do have a little work on it done, but not nearly enough. I’ll pick up again next week, hopefully.

In the meantime, I am posting this silly drawing that I did last week on a whim.

Moral lessons always go better with Ice Cream.

Story Notes: Void is the girl from the last several pages, of course. As she says in panel 2, she and Heart are sisters. They also have a third sibling who does not often put in an appearance. No, they do not combine their powers and form Captain Planet.

I’m sure it seems like there’s a trend in Shadsly of using nouns instead of “normal” names (Shadow, Heart, Void, Escutcheon, Eucharist), but it’s mostly just a coincidence that so many have shown up all at once. Escutcheon and Eucharist are both code names of sorts. Shadow’s name is a bit unusual for her culture(s), though not freakishly so. Heart and Void are just odd characters, no matter how you slice it.

We’ll soon be meeting more characters (beyond Tyron and Uri) whose names are a bit more … well, not normal, so much as less noun-based. At least what we have now is better than “Mr. Guy”

Art Notes: I am really pleased with panel 4 of this page, given the difficulty with making Void look neither shadowy nor ghost-like. It’s no more accurate as a representation of what is there (Void’s face isn’t invisible, any more than it’s made of blank skin), but at least this way it looks better.

I am also pretty happy with the page as a whole. It’s probably the first page where nearly all of the panels turned out really nicely, and it felt like the style was getting reasonably consistent. Panel 6 gave me some fits (hands again), and panel 7 was very taxing on my laptop due to the sheer quantity of kirby dots (I’ve got entire pages that have less bezier nodes in inkscape than that one background has) and I lost a much nicer drawing of heart due to a software malfunction as a result, but other than that the page went very smoothly.

Both Heart and Void’s character designs were inspired by some girls I saw (separately) at a convention a few years ago. Insofar as Void goes, the girl she is based on was either getting sick or just getting better, so had this thready, weak, and halting sort of voice. That’s how I imagine Void talks all the time.

Before coming out to meet Heart (between this page and the previous one), Void put her hair into a ponytail, just in case you were confused.

I enjoyed doing this story in black and white. As some of you may have deduced, I did it in large part in order to make the red on page 18 more jarring (and perhaps a bit of a relief from the oppressive greyscale); it was originally planned for this page, but I saw the opportunity to do it earlier, and that meant I got to focus a little more on Heart and Void here. At any rate, I seem to work much faster this way (though still not “fast” by any stretch of the imagination), but I actually do love color, and we’ll return to that next time.

This page concludes the first arc of Chapter 2. Next we check back in and see what Shadow is up to.