Tales from the Interface | Book 5 | Pages 7-12
A strange building
Hello Interface user,
A lot as happened since the last page post. I participated in the Québec city comic festival (FQBD), If you’d like to know more about it, I go into details after the comic.
From May 23rd to 25th, I will attend the Montreal Comic Arts Festival, hope to see you there!
I’ve also added a process section at the bottom of this post. This section is available to all paid subscribers.
For now though here are pages 7-12. Happy in how they turned out. I especially like the sunset gradually taking place in the pages. Hope you enjoy, and as usual, I’d love your feedback.
FQBD (Festival BD de Québec)
After winning the Jacques-Hurtubise prize last year, which is awarded during this festival, I wanted to attend it at least this year. I attended many years ago. Big thanks to Rémi Paradis, who manages the independent publisher kiosk. It gives a space for people to sell their books without renting a full table for 5 days.
I’d love to go there for the full 5 days but it’s too much of a challenge with work and family. While being part of the independent publisher kiosk is nice, I only had a few hours to sign books. It was a challenge making enough sales to justify being there. I’m looking into solutions, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to go next year.
I was also featured in a little exposition organized by the festival. Big thanks to them, it was pretty cool to see it in person.
Process
When I work on scenes heavy on action, I often will work on the characters first and then the background. I do try to keep it in mind though. A quick grid will help with that. Here I used the perspective grid with fisheye tool in CSP and layed out a general frame.
One of the main benefit of working in steps, rather than finishing one page at a time is that you can have a new eye on previous iterations. In this case, the character looking up, didn’t make a ton of sense, I switched the pause to make him more connected with the battle. It’s time consuming to revise so late though, so I do try to get it right the first time, to avoid wasting time on the next stages. But my point is that if I didn’t come back to a page multiple time, I would miss this sort of details.
Another thing I was struggling trying to find a background for the last pages 11-12 until it dawned on me to go with black and white. It made a lot of sense since it adds a stronger link to the story that inspired that part of the book. I kept the characters in colors, makes them popup quite nicely.
Here’s a scene from that story that I used a base from one of the panels.
