Episode 37 Production report, part 2.

Screenshot: Krita, a sneak peek into the upcoming Pepper&Carrot episode.

Since my last report about episode 37 published back in April here: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article906/ep37-production-report-style , my opinion changed. What happened?

So, everything started fine when applied the conclusion of my style research, but during the final step I felt stuck. The workflow wasn't flexible when I wanted to fix the line-art and control line thickness.

Unfortunately, it was a bit late for a change: at that point I already did all line-art and the colored flat under them with Colorize Mask. Switching mid-way to another workflow meant a lot of hours done for nothing.

That was a hard pill to swallow, but I changed strategy: I put my clean line-art down to low opacity (40%, Grain Merge) and I started to just paint freely under this new setup, focusing on the general ambiance of the panels.

Then I merged all and started to paint over that colored sketch. It's a longer process, but I had room and freedom now to fix the drawings, adding details and continue to improve the panel while coloring.

When I had to redo the already shaded page 1, I could play with the thickness of my line-art, making it thinner and removing it when necessary. This picture compares the two rendering, left (before), right (after).

I also changed hardware midway: I started with the XPPen Artist Pro 24, but then I preferred to comeback to my comfort zone: my non-display tablet Wacom Intuos 4 XL.

All in all, this episode had a very chaotic process so far, as you can see on this three versions of the same panel, but I feel on better track and closer to the rendering I have in mind now. I hope you like the result!

Finally, the call for translations before release was published last week on https://framagit.org/peppercarrot/webcomics/-/issues/213#note_1853362 , many thanks to all translator who already uploaded their work on it.