074: Exchanging Pleasan-trees
May 8, 2024
For this comic, I wanted to have a simple back and forth between two characters, but have a unique setting for each panel. I also wanted to practice drawing the new characters at different angles – side, back and top especially. I spent some time sketching various simple shapes and lines to divide up the frames. I picked the best four, and then proceeded from there.
I spent wayyyyyy too long drawing Laurel, but given my relative lack of practice drawing women, it’s bound to take some time. I’m sure her ‘look’ will evolve over time as they all have. It’s part of the process. She’ll settle into something more permanent after I try her out in another 5–10 comics. Her character design contains a lot of little details—her skirt is 13 shapes, her muddy feet, her antlers and her ‘tendrils’—they all take a lot of extra attention to detail.
I like the variety in this one a lot. It wasn’t an exhausting amount of extra work to do all the pre-visualization sketching, either. The ‘rough’ stage is really really good at trying out new layouts and compositions.
