Comic Scenes Part 3 + Cliff Scenes

26 January 2014

I created several new scenes over the past week and halfway through discovered something that potentially makes the scenes look much better - remove the black outlines.

I should be happy, but when I realise that I've already drawn several scenes out, I don't feel like returning to the old scenes to correct them.

Above is the first scene I drew without black outlines. It looks very good when I compare it to my other forest scenes.

 Above was a comparison I did halfway through while producing the scene.

This is my forest template. I put all my forest-related assets here, so anytime I create a new forest scene, I just have to drag in and re-position my assets. It saves a lot of my time! The character templates are also commonly used, so I just put them here as well.

I have currently 21+ completed scenes, and barely halfway done. I can see this taking up a lot of my time. But I have completed about 90% of the Forest scenes, and I have started moving on to the Countryside scenes. I've already drawn out a few frames of how the comic looks like on paper and now I have to digitalize them.

While not in the comic, I also found this particular picture having great potential so I decided to take a break and work on this. I relate to it a lot.

I really like this scene, and the above is a screenshot taken one day ago.

This is a very familiar scene, and I had created several such scenes over the years. I looked through my ancient "My Pictures" folder and was struck with nostalgia as I recall pictures that date back to 2010 (4 years ago). I did a compilation of all the "Cliffs" for fun and here's what it looks like:

All of them are to scale (in terms of size comparison with each other) except CliffEdge, which I had to scale down to squeeze in here. I just noticed a trend as well, and it's that the pictures got slightly bigger over time. I think it shows the transition of me using MS Paint to Photoshop very perfectly. In my latest picture, I completely removed the use of outlines. All this while, I had been using outlines - something which was a necessity for me while using Paint. And now that I've moved to Photoshop, I think outlines may be gone from my pictures over time since the scenes tend to look better without them.

There's one more TC that doesn't particular look like one of the above since it was drawn for a different purpose, but it does resemble a cliff edge shot.

This is TC34.4, also drawn in MSPaint years ago. I really like the part at the bottom right. It still makes me feel something till today. I remember how tedious it was to manually create gradients in Paint pixels by pixels - but it was what made the moon at the center look one of the nicest among the TC I had drawn back then.

Here's today's progress on Countryside comic scenes:

It's looking satisfactory so far! I can't wait to finish up the first of the Countryside scenes!!!

At least one person will be looking at how shiny that apple is.