Hello again!
This time I chose to share a pic you already know, UPDATED.
Some people like to plan out an adventure in detail, then share it with the world.
That seems like a wasted opportunity to me. You are then, as an artist, living vicariously thru your audience, like a father merely pretending to be Santa Claus for his children. I want to make Santa real, for you and I. I want to HAVE an adventure myself. To that end, as I craft my pages, I much prefer to leave some details undefined until the very last moment, to trust my future self to come up with something that might elevate the whole thing beyond my initial ambitions. The last little thing one adds to a picture, that laaast little tidbit that makes it suddenly "CLICK" orgasmically is DELICIOUS. Maybe I live in order to find those wonderful, cherry-flavored capstones. Let me give you an example via this scene for chapter III of "IN HELL" (I have yet to find a title for said chapter) our group of heroes is seen venturing forth together into the bowels of Hell.
(Here is the image as it was previously seen on the campaign page)
It is perhaps a bit original that I often like to draw an empty dialog or thought balloon as I come up with the page. They feel like "cheating" as they allow you to put a focal point pretty much anywhere on the page. I decide someone will speak, and then I wait and develop other aspects of that image or other images, hoping the time and distance will help me find the appropriate dialog.
Here is the (just now) finished piece:
Sitting down to find one lone detail is a good strategy I feel, as the mind is unburdened with anything but the goal of making that last detail as great as possible. I found an elegant way (if I do say so myself) to express one of the simplest yet most profound ideas I have found. What it means to be a man, and what it means to be a wo-man. The idea goes like this: A man is... "something counted as nothing" and a wo-man is "nothing counted as something" basically, we have a positive counted as a negative and a negative counted as a positive. A man´s worth you see, is not intrinsic. It is only what he does and owns that matters, while a woman´s worth is defined by what she IS not what she does. Of course men can prove they ARE many things by doing and women can DO endless things, but the core of the idea of "man" and "woman" is this distinction between active and passive worth. Stories like "Sleeping Beauty" emphasize this by having a very active hero (fighting dragons, having adventures) and a completely passive heroine (dreaming perhaps the hero´s adventure). I´m very pleased to have found a very minimalist code to convey all this and more... A code which is not literal, but rather meant to convey the essence of what she is thinking and he is saying. She has expectations of him, hopes... He, on the other hand, is actively defining her, giving her a name. It could be his name, or it could be an adjective... "beautiful" for example. Any feature is a limit. He also names her HIS limit. By pouring his love on her, she is deemed ENOUGH for him, specifically "sufficient" (in the technical sense of the word, without implying her to be "barely" sufficient). The code conveys the DESIRE and the HAPPINESS men and women find in each other, what we ask and (when fortunate) GET from each other.
A life and... a death.
See you next week!