Added 2 new A* pages:Since we came into this space station I've been using grays over skin to get some additional shading and--most importantly--highlights, which I hadn't really been able to do before when I was leaving skin mostly white. But back on page 44 I started realizing that the gray skin starts to look flat in close-ups, so for the next one, on page 46, I rolled in some areas of slightly lightening (layers of white set to 20% opacity) to make the cheeks stand up a bit and so forth. That worked pretty well!
Then I kind of forgot about it, but on Friday I was struggling with another close-up, and thinking boy, why isn't it popping like good ol' page 46 did, and I realized part of the problem was the lack of those lightened skin areas. So I added them and changed the weight of the shadows around a bit; if you saw the page in the first hour or so after I uploaded it, you saw the pre-lightened version on the left; on the right is the final version, with additional lightening layers:
That seemed to help give the hand a sense of receding around her head, and got rid of the flat pancake face effect the single gray was creating; although, I think I still have some practice to do with these to get to the point where they're enhancing the effect of depth without reducing the sensation of contrast in the image. But you'll probably see me using this technique fairly regularly now.
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Remember how I said episode 12 was a shorty? Well, we're at hm maybe ten or a dozen pages left to go in it--see? short!--which means that soon I'll have to storyboard and script episode 13, which means that I need to build myself up a buffer of pages to give you guys while I'm doing all that writing and storyboard doodling; so the short of it is, starting tomorrow, I'll only be able to give you one page a day. :P Holding back pages always irritates the heck out of me, but I haven't found a better way to handle the extra work I have to do between episodes. Hopefully (fingers crossed) it will take me less than the five full days of buffer I'm building up with that schedule, and I'll be able to get back to some multi-page days near the end of episode 12--but I think 13's gonna be kind of a long one, so it's fairly likely I'll need all those days to drive myself crazy with drawing hundreds of storyboards. =p
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