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)

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.

Whoa, symbol!

Art Notes: I think I need to do some design sheets for Tyron, and work on my overall consistency a bit.  Particularly eyes and noses.

I rather like the last panel, though; it not only turned out to be a reasonable drawing of Tyron, but also conveys the mood pretty well (at least to me).

Story Notes: Tyron climbed to the roof of one of the nearby buildings (where he is less likely to be discovered by a passer-by) to keep watch.

The symbol on Tyron’s forehead and the change in eye coloration only appear under certain conditions, one of which is strong bursts of emotion.  As you can see in panel two, it is already fading.

Thank you for reading Chapter 1: Twilight Child.  Stay tuned for Chapter 2, starting next week.

Tyron, you slowpoke.

Story Notes: Finally, we’ve reached the end of this conversation, and are nearly at the end of the first chapter.  I hearby promise considerably less expository dialogue.  Otherwise, Shadow might blast me.

Raise your hands.  How many people remember that Shadow had a purse?  (It was shown on page 1.)  I wonder how many thought I was forgetting to draw it all this time.  Silly readers, I only forgot to draw it on pages 2 and 3! (Doh!)

Art Notes: Hmm.  A little less funky distortion (mostly caused in this case by my right-hand bias rather than the tablet), though I’m still not happy with that last panel.  Much better than panel 1 of page 11, but not as good as panel 1 of page 10.

Just for those of you that suggested I do something about the backgrounds, this page has several panels that are nothing BUT background (or at least, are sans-people)!

The recent lack of backgrounds was less a stylistic choice and more just a combination of time constraints, my previously mentioned boredom with the environment of this particular scene, and various upheavals with my process (tablet-drawn, vector art being the most jarring) forcing me to expend a lot more energy than usual in getting the central elements done.  As you see starting with this page, I plan to get back to more fully-drawn panels.  The first part of Chapter 2 (which has a somewhat different style) will be more integrated in this respect.

Story Notes: Not much to say about this one.  I don’t even have a snappy comment to make (probably just because of the intense frustration this page caused).  Mostly I’ll just remind you that Uri was placed on guard duty by Tyron several pages back.  That’s what she’s doing here; circling above the conversation in the alley.

Art Notes: Really not a complicated page, considering how much trouble it has given me.  I think the transition to tablet-only has caught up with me.  I managed to get some reasonable bits out of it, like Tyron’s eye in panel 3 and the pic of Uri in panel 4 (which is probably my favorite panel here).

I’m still not at all happy with Panels 1 and 2, though.  I may actually redraw Panel 1 from scratch before all is said and done (though I’ve done that about three times already).

Colored version will appear when I’m less fed up with looking at this page.  Note to self: fix balloon in panel three so that Tyron’s eye isn’t talking.

Cut the poor girl some slack on the homophones, huh, Tyron?

Art Notes: So here it is: the first all-digital story comic for Shadsly.  I’m kind of pleased with how it turned out, considering I could barely draw Shadow without goofy distortion on the tablet last week (using the Intuos rather than the Graphire helps quite a bit, both because of the tablet itself and because the Graphire driver kinda sucks compared to the Intuos drivers).   I’m especially glad panel 1 turned out reasonably.  Panel 3 still irritates me a bit, though.

Looks like I was wrong about there being another dense-text comic in this chapter.  Don’t worry, though, the remaining ones are rather lighter.

Story Notes: Technically, I suppose that a Tail could be a Tell.  It just doesn’t happen to be Shadow’s particular Tell.

If you get the impression that poor Shadow is trying to latch onto any explanation for all this that means she’s normal, you’d be right.  After all, Tyron just got through telling her on the previous page that he could sense that she has power.

Thus endeth the summary of the career of the amazing Black Lantern.

Story Notes: Tyron just completely ignored the Superhero comment, seeing as it was likely accompanied with much rolling of the eyes on Shadow’s part.  (Side note ca. 2011: I drew this page well before I knew anything about the multiple lantern corps thing going on in DC Comics, and certainly long before I knew about Blackest Night…)

Art Notes: If it’s not obvious, that’s Li’l Shadow bapping a younger Tyron on the head, in panel 6.  The artist makes no assertions as to whether that panel represents an actual event in the past, or just Shadow’s mental image of the Urdereg’s statement.

With this comic, I decided to try a new way of drawing the panels (that’s why it may be a little shorter than the others). Instead of drawing the whole page on one letter-sized sheet of paper, I drew the equivalent of two of the tall panels per page, then assembled them in the computer.

I’m not sure I like doing it that way; it seems to create more work for not much benefit, and it makes it harder to judge how things will end up looking together.  I’d rather just draw the page all at once.

I also used Inkscape to color this page (and #8), rather than a paint program. While this means I can color them on my laptop — a multi-layer raster image uses too much memory for my ancient machine at the resolution I work at — this unfortunately tends to leave a lot of little gaps between the lines and the colored part. It’s only really visible in the high-res art, but it annoys me. Fixing it requires a lot of fiddly, annoying editing of nodes along the border of every color, so I may go back to my old method.

Made a slight tweak to Tyron’s word balloon style to make the border clearer.

Title Reference: Superman, of course.  It’s the Black Lantern’s version of “faster than a speeding bullet” and all that.

Note: Since my scanner died, I’m more or less forced to do the entire comic digitally for the forseeable future. So #10 will be the first all-digital comic (though certain non-story pages like Lore #1 and the Chapter intro already were).

Don’t be so sarcastic, Shadow.

Story Notes: Shadow isn’t breaking the fourth wall in panel 2; she’s just making a pop culture reference, ala Buffy.  I was pleased to immediately subvert it by giving a one-line response.  If you want details on Cerement, you’ll have to wait awhile, sorry.

Art Notes: Hopefully the flow of speech isn’t too disorienting in this comic.  Kind of poor planning on my part that led to panels 3 and 5 containing more dialogue from the character that isn’t “on stage”, but I wanted to show Tyron’s reaction in both 3 and 4, and that led to putting Shadow in 5 for variety.

I’m experimenting with my word balloons in this comic, so hopefully that will help.  Let me know what you think of them in the comments.

First I made some new ones with integrated tails, and I decided to add a bit of color to their borders to help indicate who is talking.  Tyron was purple and Shadow was (and is) green.  Then I added a gradient fill to the balloons, but I wasn’t too fond of the parchment colors I had at first.  I’ve subsequently completely scrapped those balloons in favor of doing even better ones in inkscape, and made the fills related to the character in the process.  I changed Tyron to black with purple speech and a maroon border.  In the future the cast may get too large for unique styles to be assigned to everyone, so I may limit it to a handful of standard colors to distinguish some of the characters on-stage.

Drawings for panels 1, 2, 5 and 6 turned out a bit better than anything I’ve drawn here in awhile, I think.  This makes me happy.  Especially Panel 1, as I’ve never really liked how I’ve drawn Tyron before.  Of course, the other panels proceed to return to the other style.  Ah, well.

I was very lazy about the backgrounds here.

Title Reference: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”, of course.  In other words, Tyron may be a creepy finger-spider guy, but at least he seems to know what’s going on and he isn’t buddies with the guys that attacked Shadow.

She’s taking this quite well, all things considered.

Quite heavy on the dialogue, this comic.  That’s going to be the case for the next several, though I don’t think any more are quite this dense.

Basically, these comics are going to lay the groundwork for understanding this setting.  They obviously won’t cover everything, or really do more than scratch the surface, but you’ll get an overview of what’s going on in the world.

Title Reference: Just Tyron’s assertion that he knew Shadow as a young child.