My houseguest is gone but I think he left a little something – I’ve got a sore throat and a cloggy head; I think I’m getting an early start on the crud. Groovy. I got myself some zinc tablets to hopefully ward it off.

I can’t seem to get in the mood for drawing Rita today but I wanted to draw SOMETHING, so here’s a little color test for The Drowning City.

I think these hues may be too garish, overall – my vision of it is really a very grey comic, with some slight tints. And often a very dark one. Ultimately I still need to figure out how to pull off a painterly look in AI if this is going to look like it does in my head.

edit. Fucked with it some more: played with some sloppy art brushes, and tried a couple more things on the tints. Now we’re getting somewhere; I’ll want to make a bunch of my own art brushes for this but this is starting to look more handmade. Add in a couple fuzzy edge treatments on the filled shapes and I think I’ll have nailed the methods.

I like the one in the lower right – a gradient over the greyscale drawing – the best. It’ll let me control mood in a similar way to what I did in Absinthe, without the contrast problems.