Page 144 - July 1, 2012

And I'm back, right at the beginning of July, as promised, and the follow-up of that promise was also a permanent crazy increase in the update pace. I think I said four pages per week, up from "only" two, but I've decided to go with six pages per week from now on. If I have a mental breakdown from all the work, or in case I'm just experiencing some kind of manic phase right now (bipolar disorder does run in the family, after all) I guess I'll tone it back to four pages, but that's not likely. So hip hurray, almost daily updates! How does a new page per day monday through saturday, and therefore a break each sunday, sound to you guys?

See what I did there? I asked a direct question, yet without any kind of commenting system to allow anyone to actually express their opinion on the matter. Hah! Dictatorship! 

The voting incentive for today on Topwebcomics is the colored pencil sketch for that painting that's featured in the main site layout, the full version of which is now available in the gallery. As you can see, the colors haven't really changed a bit since this very early, rough sketch-like phase. All that's happened since during the dozens of hours of work that followed has been the systematic adding of a ton of detail and tigtening of the shapes, until I finally said "goddarnit, this thing is done and I'm going to have some ice cream right now! x<". But I'm pretty happy with the result, especially the doggy-moose-fur.

Holy boobs, Ville looks completely wrong in that third panel! Why are his horns so tiny? And why does he look so stupid! Sure, I mostly used footage of adolescent moose as reference for the first few pages of this chapter instead of completely mature ones, but that's just ridiculous. He looks like a...fish crossed with a badger or something! It's pretty obvious that I was struggling quite a bit with understanding the physical apperance of moose at this stage. o_o

Last thing before I call it quits for today (and finally dare to go check my email and face the chaos of spam and probably painfully important stuff that I've missed during my absense): my plan was to draw the linearts for at least 30 pages of aRTD, and I drew 37 of 'em! Quest completed, ka-zing! And most of them are pretty good, too. There's a couple of kind of meh-level ones in the mix, but nothing really bad like some of the pages for chapter 3. I could have done like a dozen more pages with the time I had at my disposal, but unfortunately I needed a couple of mid-chapter pages to use as references for the very end of the chapter, and whoops; I forgot those at home. So I've still got about ten pages left to draw before this chapter is wrapped up, and literally a whole pile of uncolored ones to finish. Well, I sure know what I'll be doing for the next two weeks!