Making Of Tilted Sun: Becky's Desk
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Howdy to all Space Cowboys and welcome back to another Making of Post! In these posts I lay out EVERYTHING that goes into making this comic.
Here’s what I’m up to and what I’m doing and what I’m thinking about.
Ever have something that you know to be true, but then forget it, and relearn it only after hanging out with friends?
To loosen up before working on Tilted Sun I recently took some advice from my friends and have been doing informal warmup drawings of DnD characters:
It’s been fun to work on one-off characters to loosen up and get ideas for new clothing designs.
Silliness in art is one of the things I loved most about visiting Tokyo!
Culture is better when art allows itself to be a bit silly instead of when art convinces us that it is Too Serious To Be Touched. It’s nice that people want to dress up and eat cheese and wine in order to see art, but what if we could just see the best art in jeans? Tokyo feels a lot like that. The most excellent art you’ve ever seen is absolutely everywhere.
Anyways, silliness in Anime is one of my favorite things - Full Metal Alchemist and Cowboy Bebop are overall pretty serious shows, but there are extremely funny episodes. Laughter adds to reality in many ways, so I am thinking about how to add more of this to Tilted Sun.
In Japan I picked up the Persona 5 Animations Keyframe Book and also this guide to Octopath Traveler. It’s been fun to leaf through both books and look at character treatments, expressions, and clothing ideas. Not a detail is spared and both series are not overwrought either. You know how some anime can be kind of over the top? I sense a lot of brilliance and also order in these.
I haven’t been able to finish Persona 5 for years, it’s something that happens to me where I just can’t bring myself to finish something that I really like. I did the same thing with Witcher 3. Never finished the game. I just loved it too much and didn’t want it to end.
While visiting Houston I found this old Prince Valiant book from, oh god, 1947, and the illustrations have been nothing short of a front row seat to mastery. The inkwork is so dramatic .
While in Houston I also went to this Van Gogh show, it was amazing. I picked up a copy of The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh and am about halfway through.
He wrote something like 830 letters in his life, all of which were saved by his brother Theo’s wife. It is only thanks to these letters that we know anything about Van Gogh. Overall the letters are almost eerily like what it’s like to be an artist today - a testament to their reality. Like the writings of Marcus Aurelius, van Gogh never intended his letters to be public. They just sing with unperformative reality. The letters also help dispel the myth of the Master of None - Painters can write. Developers can paint. Never listen to anyone who says you can’t do several things well.
Speaking of tech, I’ve been using a new tool called Paperlike after a suggestion from Deadlypeach. It’s been great! Paperlike basically turns your glossy-surface iPad into a surface with more drag and tooth, making it more like paper. Paperlike. Haha. Paperlike Website here and at the bottom of this post.
Clip Studio Paint on the iPad is as dope as it ever was and I’m still playing with the new artificial intelligence coloring feature and working it into the production art for Tilted Sun.
More info about the Clip Studio Paint Artificial intelligence coloring feature here! It’s one of the most popular posts on the Becky Jewell blog.
Here are some screenshots of Tilted Sun pages-in-the-making in Clip Studio Paint:
There’s so much more to Tilted Sun on the way, some of the art would spoil the comic. Like some kind of shy fairy, I throw a bunch of little glimpses into the comic onto Instagram, where the art appears for a few moments then disappears, unless you are very dedicated and rewatch the same story over and over again.
My other favorite thing to do on Instagram is to make fun of how I can’t really draw guns. I just am very bad at it! Here is a practice run of some hands and some pretty bad guns
I’m also ramping up my comics skills on another comic, Crow Magnum, which will have some preview art debuting at the 2019 Denver Pop Culture Con! Hope to see you there, I’ll be at Booth A20 with Laurel McHargue.
That’s all for now my friends - this is my braindump of everything on my mind right now. Thank you for reading and I will catch you very soon!