I think this will probably be the only page for this week; I don’t have any sketches for the next page. I might have a wild fit of productivity tomorrow and take it from “loosely laid out dialogue” to “final art” but I’m not gonna count on it. I did actually spend three solid hours working on this, which is like three times more than I’ve been able to make myself do for most of the past few months, so you never know. I think spring may finally be coming! (Edit: I had a wild fit of productivity tonight while hanging out at SICAGA and got the next page roughed, holy crap. Lots of complex backgrounds in that one though, so who knows how long it’ll take..)
Aaand I also spent some time throwing together a Patreon campaign. I had a few people ask if I had one; now I do. Basically it’s an ongoing Kickstarter that will pay me per-page, for those of you who’d like to support me that way instead of (or in addition to!) buying a copy of the book about once a year. You can find out more here.
(I’m still going back and forth with the printer on contracts, this is just taking crazy long this time. I will be so happy when I get book 2 in print.)
Hehe. I’ve also always thought of pidgeons as sky-rats :)
Normally I try to be less judgmental of ’em – they’ve done a great job of adapting from a life living on cliffs to a life living on, well, the artificial cliffs of buildings – but in this case, it was right for Rita’s mood.
The worlds are really starting to blur together…or…corrupted macroblock together, I guess? :) This should be interesting.
Also…my god, those wings. <3
EVERYTHING IS BROKEN. Can you trust any of this?
I must’ve gone through like five different color schemes on Big Flying Dragon Rita before I finally settled on black/red with wings made of a lace pattern fill I originally created for Skylands Rita’s dress.
Almost hidden little text: “# # Erroneous timestamp detected; # # Recovering…” possibly the most significant piece of information on this page, just sayin’…
I am so glad people are willing to read this thing closely enough to pick up on these sorts of things. *grin*
And then there’s some HUD text showing up in the fantasy world, too. In purple.
Yes, I noticed that, too. I’ve been reflecting on the nature of the purple for at least three panels now.
I am not an artist and I certainly don’t know much about art, really, but I know some artists and my impression is that an annoyingly large fraction of intentional efforts put in to any given artwork — specifically details and choices that correspond to especially effective technical or emotional artistic intelligence — these are often not consciously noticed by most persons who come to experience the art. This is true even if the art is “well-received”. I imagine that this can be frustrating.
The funny thing is, even if these things go unnoticed by most of your patrons, they add real value to the work, value that I suspect is sensed even if not consciously noticed.
I remember in the director’s commentary for Eight Legged Freaks, they mentioned during a scene where a spider climbed through a window that no-one notices the reflection in the window, but they very much do notice if the reflection is missing.
That applies even to undesirable artifacts…we think of atmospheric scattering, film grain, and camera shake as negative things, but if they aren’t there people register a scene as “fake.”
Likewise, because movies were for years shot at 24 frames per second, and TV (in North America) at 60 interlaced fields per second, people often think 60 fps video looks “cheaper” even though it’s smoother.
I noticed that, too. Verrrrry interesting. It’s fun constructing mental theories about what’s *really* going on. :)
Feel free to share any interesting ones! I’ve got several already, and I try to throw in little bits now and then that confirm all of them. There’s a place I want to go in the end that will probably be a lot of heavy evidence for one particular theory, but multiple readings is half the fun of this sort of story.
The simplest possibility I have so far is that the different alternate timelines are Rita’s mind trying to make sense of corrupt or conflicting memory data, much like our brains turn random neural firings into dreams that we then try to make coherent stories out of when we consciously remember them.
But that seems vaguely unsatisfying somehow. I was never a big fan of the “it was all a dream” ending.
Plus it leaves open the question of which is the “real” version of events. Most obvious would be the cyan world, and it’s the one that correlates best with the log messages…but then, one can never fully trust logs on a compromised system. ;)
Incoming hat!
HATFALL IN 5… 4… 3…