#process stuff

thegotlandskorvreblogblog:

Design notes + process for the lowpoly robot character I posted earlier!

My initial mental moodboard for this character was the clockwork bosses from Lock’s Quest and the song Astral Coal Town from the Night in the Woods soundtrack. For now I’ve named the robot Hunger, because I liked how it gives the character sort of a desperate tragic twist? Like it’s not that the robot is actively trying to make an already dying world worse, it’s just trying very hard not to die itself. And that struggle just happens to work against the struggle of the tree-person-protagonist.

Also I swear I planned the missing arm as a character quirk from the start, it was not a cheap way to save in on the tris count haha. Although in retrospect I’m definitely not complaining since I really wouldn’t have afforded another arm without some serious simplifications (the limit was 1000 tris, my final count was 978). Something I did have to cut due to the tris count though was the log you can see in some of the early concepts, I thought that would’ve been a cool and character-defining prop, but alas.

Now that I’ve finally wrapped up RECOLLECT, I get to move on to my favorite part which is blathering about the process to wind down from it:

I’d say compared to EXHALE, I only ‘saw’ about 60% of RECOLLECT, and maybe only kept about 40-50% of the original rough compositions as I had envisioned. Some of it had to do with the natural evolution of a composition: for example, on p8, i originally intended to have the trailer exterior instead of the interior, which I changed for scene transition reasons. I also originally had p10 set on a less defined space, but I got bothered by potential continuity issues after I thought about the trailer and how confined a space it is. I think the page is much more interesting for it!

some of it had to do with minding other stuff - p10 and 11 (the middle pages) would have originally had ~flashbacks~ to a sex scene (with p9 originally having them more visibly headed for the horizontal tango, with Trowa asking ‘Who are you trying to forget?’), but then I remembered that this is set within series’ timeline and they would have canonically been minors, which is not something I really need to draw.

while this was only 17 pages compared to EXHALE’s ~25, they took about equal amounts of time to complete. The gains I made with tools and skills and process stuff was offset by being more ambitious with the level of detail I was putting into inking and the hair (I did not plan it that way at first, but recognized that full-page portraits just wouldn’t be very compelling to look at if I didn’t).

This was also the least ‘planned’ comic I’ve done to date despite having more time to work on it, with some pages and lines (like the final one where Wufei goes up to Altron) not figured out until like last week. This was one of those projects where every little effort mattered. There were a few early pages that I completed, up to the tones and all, except for a hand or two. I’m a big proponent of keeping up momentum, so if I stalled in some way, there was plenty of other things to do until I absolutely couldn’t avoid those spots anymore. It’s not a flawless strategy - putting off the trailer thing led to adding a few hrs’ work on p10′s background. However, it’s way more productive than struggling against the piece. I highly recommend it for people who feel like they get ‘stuck’ or can’t progress to the other pages because they’re still stuck on page 1.