Beyond the Western Deep

Rachel and I both want to extend our sincerest thanks for your patience — getting this page together proved to be a lot trickier than either of us had anticipated, so I figure since one of the big points of this post is to share some of the work that went into the page, this would be a good thing to talk about.

When I write fight scenes in the script, I usually do so now on the assumption that the beats I concoct in my head will need to change and shift to accommodate the shift from written medium to visual. A series of moves I think look really cool might only seem that way in my head, especially once Rachel hashes out a rough. The overall actions, however, were similar: Quin grabs the Ermehn’s cloak, tries to get the better of him, and a struggle ensues.

The original rough featured a series of actions that Rachel would later say “didn’t animate right” — I would have to agree. See, even though we’re dealing with the static images of the comic medium here, we still want to provide an illusion of cohesive movement from panel to panel and page to page. We want that real cause and effect to play out in your head as you’re reading it, and the original flow didn’t have that.

After realizing that this rough just wasn’t working out, Rachel and I tossed around a few alternate ideas, then she started the entire page over from scratch. It doesn’t happen often (actually I can think of maybe one other time that happened since we started releasing online, but the exact page eludes me), but when it does happen, it’s because something just flat-out wasn’t working.

For the new rough, Rachel approached it in a way she rarely does these days — by quickly hashing out the movement and action flow before even drawing in the panels. This more organic approach helped Rachel nail down the flow of movement around the page, and helped get the process of page creation back up and running.

For the delay post, we had a really cool sketch of a Tamian warrior that artist and BWD reader Daryl Gray did for us. In the interim, he actually went back and cleaned it up, then added some color to it! Seeing as how his sketch was going to get bumped over to this “real” page anyway, I figured it made sense to just post up the revised and colored version here!

Cool as it was in black and while, I love the coloring work you put into this new version, Daryl! As I mentioned last week, the style of the clothing, the shield, and the sword evoke memories of the Redwall series for me, which is never a bad thing :) Thank you so much for the revised version, and I’m glad we got to post it up with an actual page!