PASTEL
DEFENDER HELIOTROPE
How
The Comic Is Made, Page 5
In the first image, I have created some new layers for making my Gunship command deck crew on, after adding some seats on poles. I realized that while a Gunship spends all of its actual flight time in Zero-P, when docked at the Protector port in Senryoku, the craft would likely have at least part of its bulk over the edge of the continental Proxihesion layer, which means that the command deck, at the front of the ship, would experience the Pastellian equivalent of gravity. Doing initial pre-flight checks would be very uncomfortable without a place to sit, thus simple leather seats.
After the seats (and their shadows) are painted in, I use the layer control to fade out the background to a whisper of its former intensity, so that I can concentrate on drawing people without being confused by all the dark and light shapes. I do not fade the background out completely, of course, because I need to see how to place the flight crew into the scene, and where structures like hand rails might cover parts of them.
The first step in doing my crew is to select a layer just down from the top of the 'people' set of layers and use this to do rough 'guide sketches' of the positions of the characters. This is a new thing for me to do, and I have been doing it more and more. Usually I just dive in and draw a character without any preparation. I can get away with this if the art style is very loose or cartoony, such as was the case with Unicorn Jelly. It is also something I can get away with if I am doing lots of 'talking heads' or upper body shots, because I just seem to find such things easier. But I do have problems drawing full body anatomy, and Pastel seems to demand much more work to match the painterly backgrounds, thus my finally giving in and doing 'pre-ink pencil sketches' (so to speak, or rather the equivalent on the computer) so as to try to do a better job with arms and legs and such.
In the second image, the 'inking' is almost done, and I have to be doubly careful about rails and such intersecting the characters; it is far to easy to forget what is in front of what. When the dark line work is done, then I can click on the layer with the sketch lines and erase all the rough sketches with the eraser tool. Now I have the equivalent of a nice clean animation cel I can backpaint, using all of the layers below the top line art layer for color.
By
Jennifer Diane Reitz
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