(Though I really should stop calling them screentones before someone gets angry at me for misuse of the term.)
First off, I’m travelling for a while, and since I don’t carry a scanner, light table or graphics tablet with me there will be a longer-than-usual break before the next update of the comic. The following pages will probably be finished and uploaded here by next week’s Sunday (29th of May).
I can, however, write even if I don’t have a scanner at hand, so this time I’ll compose a blog post instead. (Not that I’d think this makes up for the postponed update of the comic.)
The background of page 5 of the first chapter. Of all the pages I’ve drawn so far, this might be the easiest one to write about. The workflow for it was as follows: (1) designing the layout of the page (already a few years ago); (2) taking lots of photographs of flowering branches and sky (over the years); (3) selecting and cropping a few of the photos (this was somewhat tedious); (4) drawing the page; and (5) adjusting the size, angle and tones of the branches. It took a lot of time to finish the page, but I think it was worth it, as I’m quite content with the final look of the page. (Though it might look a bit odd when placed next to page 6.) Besides, experimenting with different kinds of screentones gray textures is never boring.
This particular file – the background alone – was huge when I was working on it. By huge I mean something close to 100 megabytes. With high resolution, multiple layers and RGB mode, large file size might not be all that surprising, but it did startle me a bit. (I’m quite sure my computer wasn’t too happy about having to deal with an image that large…)
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I’m still trying to figure out what to write about in these blog posts. The webcomic is the main content of this site, but in addition to that I’d like to blog something too, every now and then. Technical aspects seem like a relevant subject here, if not interesting, so for now I have settled on them. But variety would be nice too, and I’m open to suggestions: If there is some topic related to this webcomic you would like me to write about (for example some particular part of the working process), let me know. Questions and comments are more than welcome too.