Clubbing WIP - Page 4 Thumbnails

GenreChowderStudios
Jan 12, 2018
2 min read

The thumbnails for Page 4.

Somehow, this comic became very much about backgrounds. In a sense, that is to say. In "A Simple Escort Mission," it (the comic) was meant to look somewhat like an animatic. The focus was more on the characters' movement from panel to panel, so the background stayed static to help reinforce that. Here, they're always changing. The passage of time is a part of the gag. In order to show said passage, it's necessary, or so I feel, for Jay and Sheriff to move from location to location. And, like I'd mentioned in my previous post, Jay and Sheriff stay in essentially the same positions.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I'm not much of a background person. I love good backgrounds, but I don't do them so well, generally speaking. Thankfully, over the years, I've gotten better at atmospheric things like lighting. And I guess I could render objects decently, given the time. It's just that I'm never quite sure what to put in a background. Tables, chairs, and windows? Sure. But what's on the tables? What shape of chair did the owner buy? What kind of curtains are hanging? It's that stuff that gets me, really. What's more, how do I make them look casual and not "I'm a chair at a table!" or "I'm a vase for decoration!"? It's one thing to be able to draw a room, but what about drawing a messy room?

Come to think of it, to show the passage of time, I wonder if I need to change the time of day. In the last handful of panels, that's part of the gag. I wonder if having another change in daylight earlier on would detract from the moment later on.

To briefly touch on this particular page (and a bit of the next page), there's a moment when Jay holds exactly the same pose and expression for several panels. That made drawing them a bit more straightforward. Here's the thing, though. Because she has to maintain the exact position for every related panel, all the background have to be designed to keep that in mind. She can't obscure something important. All important characters have to be naturally placed away from her without them being crowded out. No tangents. No strange overlaps that aren't tangents. Not only does this mean I have to get her position correct from the start, it means I have to get the panel size for the majority of the strip correct from the start. Balancing act...

Well, that's all she wrote. Four down, one to go.

Thanks for reading.