3:30 am. Selkie time.
Thank you for your understanding on Wednesday, everyone. I appreciate the well-wishes. I’m going to try not to let it get that bad any further. “outlines now/colors later” are one thing, but I hate missing strips entirely.
Have a good weekend, folks.
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
“Outlines now, colors later” are my favorite updates. JSYK. I love seeing the art that goes in before it all comes together in the full version.
Also: El Goonish Shive is getting along just fine without any colors at all. If you thought it would help to go to inked-only for a while, just to cut down on the load. I could see a few possibilities if you also still wanted color:
1. Outsource (get a fan to color them, like Freefall does)
2. Submit three inked pics per week, and color them on the weekend.
3. Submit two inked and one colored pic per week.
4. Submit three inked pics per week, and one week per month spend coloring previous strips. Whether you get caught up to the current strip or not, you’d have a much smaller work load for continuing the story, while also giving us nicely colored pics eventually. You could also have special colored uploads when the colors are necessary for understanding the action/characters, but it needn’t be every strip.
5. Inked pics for the website, colors for the printed collections. Allow Patreon supporters access to the digital colored version.
Ideally, periodically add a set of colored picks to a digital colored version for the public, so it’s behind by a few months or whatever (Patreon supporters get to enjoy it earlier — I do appreciate this “early access” model when the public eventually gets access as well, as it feels less elitist than “only people who directly pay me get to enjoy the full thing,” which is like the opposite of my view of the Patreon/Patronage model: a small portion pay and the public gets to enjoy).
Just some possibilities to consider. EGS has some of the most awesome art I know of, and they’re really rocking the B&W, with occasional forays into colors so you know what the characters look like and everything.
(P.S. Have created my first public Sims 3 characters, for anyone who might like the cast of Person of Interest in their Sims worlds. Only four so far (Shaw, Cole, Elias, Marconi), but a vampire variant of Elias should come early in October. Link in my name there.)
EGS still uses shading and backgrounds. Honestly, if you’re going to use 12 different shades of grey, that you have to keep carefully consistent anyway… why not use some colours instead?
It’s a stylistic choice; I’m not sure it actually saves Dan Shive any meaningful time.
Now on the other hand, there’s times where colour is important to the story (like… when you’re writing about different casts of sarnothi who all have skin tones unique to their cast… hint hint. 😉 )
Actually the one ball drop that always sticks in my mind is “Wapsi Square” a B&W comic about central American myths come to life. Early on a character is introduced called Tepoztecal, who is a small Incan statue that came to life (for want of a much longer explanation you can read the comic for). He’s in the story for a year or two, hundreds of pages in… and someone casually mentions that he’s BLUE. Apparently Paul Taylor had intended that he be blue from the start, but never mentioned it to anyone, and then years later, he’d forgotten that he’d never mentioned it. If your comic is all B&W… you don’t get to claim people are odd colours, much less expect them to calmly swallow it; you have to *show* it, or it’s effectively not TRUE, no matter what you say.
Dan’s done a comic about that. The time it saves is he only has to think about a selection of 32 greys instead of all 16 million possible colors.
… so triple the number of greys I guessed.
Honestly, it sounds like there’d be little difference. And “time thinking” us just however long it takes him to make a decision; the number of colours technically possible to display, most of them indistinguishable to the human eye, is irrelevant.
Grayscale Dan: “Maybe this one? No, that looks too dark. Let’s go with that one. Yeah, done. Imma go make a Hot-Pocket.”
Colourized Dan. “Maybe this blue? No that looks nearly purple. Let’s go with something a bit closer to indigo. Yeah, done. Imma go make a Hot-Pocket.”
It’s really not that different.
He’s the artist; I trust him to understand the distinction between “so much work it was overwhelming and I decided to drop it” and “a workload I can use and still have fun with.” He said that the colors were making it take too long and making it not fun anymore, and that’s why he decided to go grayscale again.
You’re right that it’s not as simple as black outlines and a blank background, but there are comics that get by with that much and still are fine. I’m just pointing out that you don’t need colors to have a worthwhile comic, and if that’s one of the things that could be dropped to make it easier to stay on a schedule, then it should at least be considered.
Actually, while I’m at it, check my name URL here for a website (Creative Color Schemes) whose color palettes have helped me with a TON of artistic projects, simply by making it easier to select colors that go together (and then branch off of those for darker and lighter choices). It’s got a selection of freebie palettes, plus even about five more if you explore the site (the rest you would pay for).
Though I’ve had plenty of luck with just Google Image Search. And by “luck” I mean “a rabbit hole that sucks away my time and productivity by immersing me in gorgeous color schemes,” but same diff. I also took the time to import some seasonal color schemes (the makeup/clothing thing — Warm Autumn, Clear Winter and the like) as palettes for GIMP, which include a few dozen colors that mesh and give an overall color scheme to draw from.
(Palettes are awesome, is what I’m saying. Love them to pieces.)
Dave, glad you are on the mend!
Selkie, having met Scar, has no idea of the chaos and genocide that she has been sheltered from. And what terrible things Echos have done. And Te’ Fahn is giving her the compassionate (not the gory true) version of it. I b’lieve Te’ Fahn is the Anti-Mandy, and bound to become Selkie’s BFF in a way that might change Selkie’s life. Truth is a very hard thing. You can poke someone in the shoulder and say, “pay attention,” or you can bludgeon someone to death with it. A friend can give you the gentle truth.
Even when meeting Selkie, Scar could not tell Selkie who he really was. To do so would have placed them both in danger.
*Love* Selkie’s face in the first panel.
Do sarnothi kids lose baby teeth and grow adult ones like humans do? Or is it more like sharks where they’re constantly getting new ones?
Seems like I was right about Te Fahn being worried about the ‘evil’ bit because of Selkie being an Echo. Clearly a misunderstanding due to cultural differences, but I had a hunch that Te Fahn was actually very worried about the Echo thing regardless of what Tony and Georgie said to her.
Take a month off, allow some guest comics and while those are running build up a back stock to use for rainy days.
All of a sudden I am picturing Te Fahn playing Sarah the Gentle Tree to Selkie’s Sue.
“WHEN YOU ACTUALLY HAVE SUPERPOWERS…IT’S NOT FUN TO MAKE JOKES ABOUT BEING A SUPERVILLAIN”
“Wait isz thatz true?”
“YES!”