What Now

Lightning Bug as drawn by me now

It's been two years since I drew pages 87 and 88 of the Page a Day Comic. In those pages, Zach and Lightning Bug are pursued by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Much like a dinosaur, this comic is huge and old. A lot has happened since I penned, scanned, colored, shaded and wrote every page.

For instance, I've adopted yet another shading technique. I now print out my scan of the penciled pages,  and draw the shading with a marker, fitting it to the pencils in the computer afterwords. This allows me much more control over the shading, and makes it a lot easier. I also tend to put outlines around my characters now, as you can see from the above image.

Lightning Bug is still my favorite character. I think he's probably the easiest to write, other then Zach.

I've been thinking a bit about this comic recently. I think it might be fun to do a few spin off short comic pieces on some of the more obscure characters, like the robbers, or White Skull, who never got a chance to explain their backstories.

When I read it now, the first part makes me cringe. It gets a little better with the second part. But I know that if I tried to do the exact same thing now I'd probably have a few lousy days too, so there you go.

Anyway, I was going to write a post where I showed off the characters drawn in a "realistic" way, but I lost the drawings I did for the post. Oh well, maybe I'll find them some day.

As for my comic about thieves, I didn't have much motivation after this behemoth and so dropped the project. But I am still making comics!

I started up this comics company here: http://obliteratedcomics.blogspot.com/

It's going pretty well.

Well, that's basically all I wanted to say for a recap post.

You can check for further updates if you want, but chances are I probably won't be getting around to the spinoffs any time soon. You never know though!

-- Tsitra563.

Found Some Old Concept Art

I did these when I was creating the character of Nightmare. :)

Hope you like it!

-- Tsitra563.

Day 365 - Page 365 | FINAL DAY!

Well, well, well. Here we are at last. The final page.

You see, I was going to color it, but none of the shapes were working so i just decided to leave it black and white. Looks great, though, doesn't it?

I put a slight gradient over it to give it that "cool look." I've been doing that a lot lately.

You'll notice that every character I've ever made is there, (uh, sort of).

But uh, anyway let's get on to...

Ooops! Heh heh! I forgot to shade. Oh whatever, it still looks awesome tho! ;P

I was going for a cool kind of "sketch-y" look with this final page.

I think I achieved it pretty well.

Ahh, isn't it great? All-in-all, a great ending to Page a Day. :)

-- Tsitra563.

Did I fool you?

No?

Ah well. Here's the REAL final page.

This is a bittersweet ending to Page a Day.

On one hand, I'm sad to let all these characters go with that lame last line.

On the other hand, I'm glad to finally not have to draw those guys over and over, it gets really tedious.

However, I do have good news! Rock Paper Scissors was sold to Marvel and will be appearing his own monthly comic. This time, he'll be drawn by the amazingly talented-- I'm kidding.

However, I do have plans for that character. :)

Ahem, to honor this Outstanding Achievement, I've prepared a little video.

(Actually, I prepared it only a hundred or so pages in, but what the heck).

Oh yes, and those cards I made? I'm thinking about updating them. Please vote in the poll to your left whether or not you want me to make all of them. :)

One last thing before we get to the various sections, I created a three dimensional Lightning Bug a while ago, and now's the perfect time to show him off!

Yay! Anyway, on to The Age Old Debate...

Remember these guys?

I'm still hoping to do a comic with them in it, but I'll be pretty exhausted from drawing and writing 365 pages, so I'll probably spend at least half the year doing nothing but this other comic I'm going to be doing with my friend-- which is a small, 25+ page thing that'll be pretty easy, (hopefully).

Anyway, I'm not sure these guys will be able to fit into to my busy schedule so I'm putting these drawings in a drawer and saving them till later.

However, I'm pretty excited about a new prospect, which is about a ghosthunter. :)

So, summing it up, not sure if these guys will be in my new schedule, but SOMETHING will.

Also, about publishing the comic, there are quite a few consistency errors, mistakes, and other things that I'm dying to get my hands on, and I won't allow myself to publish this comic as an e-book or anything until I've fixed all the mistakes and plot holes.

I will announce the publication of this comic, (if it ever happens), on this blog. :)

The shading on this page had to be above average. After all, it's the last page!

So I pushed myself to shade every little thing, and believe me, it was worth it.

However, I'm kind of disappointed. For some reason, this page didn't stand out to me. Maybe that's a good thing. After all, who wants a glossy, over-the-top, light show with fireworks and confetti?

Maybe it's fine the way it is.

I applied a light gradient over the whole page, (like I mentioned in my little joke up above), to give it some visual flair. I used the surface shader in Corel Painter X.

And a look at the very first page...

Well, here we are at the end.

There's nothing more to say.

See you around next year!

- Tsitra563.

Day 364 - Page 364

The penultimate page!

When I first drew this page, I drew Zach's left eye wrong in the first panel, so I copied the right one, switched it horizontally, and deleted the left one, and then cleaned up the seams.

The shading in this is my new technique, but I mixed it with my old technique to make it go a bit faster.

-- Tsitra563.

Day 363 - Page 363

Well, here we are at the third page of the Final Five!

-- Tsitra563.

Day 362 - Page 362

The second page of the Final Five, with special guests Nitrobeam and Bob and Joe!

The new shading technique I use involves creating a new layer especially for shading, making my pen tool the color black, and lowering the transparency of the layer. That way, I can draw over any surface and it will be a darker version of the color beneath it. I then draw out shapes of where I want the shading, being sure to stay close to the lines of the characters. My old way of shading was drawing directly on the canvas, which was more efficient, but looked slightly worse.

Here is nothing but the blocks of shading for this page, which looks very pretty indeed.

In the original version of this page, I drew Zach's face horribly wrong in Panel 4, but there wasn't any space to draw a new Zach in the same panel. Luckily for me, in order to faithfully draw Nitrobeam, (I wasn't about to draw Nitrobeam wrong on Page 362!), I had printed out the page he first appeared in. I drew Zach on it, and scanned both in, then swapped my messed up Zach for the other one. Whew!

Zach looks a little TOO happy in Panel 4 if you ask me, but that seems to be the only thing slightly wrong with this page-- that and the fact that when you're in a window, your face doesn't turn blue, it remains the same color it was, with a blue tint. It's a shame I didn't remember that sooner, since now it's impossible to fix.

-- Tsitra563.

Day 361 - Page 361

OMG, it's the first of what I'm calling the Final Five, (as in, final five pages).

I shaded this page using my new time consuming shading process.

It took an annoying 40 MINUTES TO SHADE.

But, seeing as it's the first of the Final Five, it's probably worth it.

Lightning Bug's Lame Reference

Yes, you guessed it. Lightning Bug isn't just randomly blabbing. That's a reference to Powerpuff Girls Season 3, Episode 32, "Jewel of the Aisle."

In the end, Lightning Bug annoying pop culture references and nerdy brain win out over saying something quotable and cool. Ah well.

-- Tsitra563.