Little Flames: chapter 2 FULL PACKAGE

Wooo! First of all I want to thank all of you for supporting on this journey. It's been 3 months since I started working on this chapter and I'm glad to be able to finally share it with you! As always, down in the attachments you can find the archive with all the pages and bonus materials in it, please do check it out if you're interested.

Now... The wall of text about three months of work.

This comic keeps pushing me hard, it's an experience that I don't think I'll ever forget. It's not just a test of skills, but also emotions. I can't possibly tell you how terrified I was to actually start working on this chapter. I found out that it's very easy to start a new idea and work on the beginning parts, but then- oh my god you have to move it now, you have to show the journey, you have to actually fill up that space you've created. The thought of that had me shock stuck for like two weeks before I actually started making decisions.

This is my first comic with a story line that's not just revolving around one plot. It's mainly about Sonic and Shadow, yes, but there's also Metal Sonic, and Knuckles, and the rest of the guys to think about. Many scenes in mind, how to sort them? What should go first? What should even be there for this chapter? All these questions got me to a point where I realised I can't sort all of this in my head without losing my mind and that was a thing that pushed me towards getting a magnetic board, note papers and magnets so I could sort my story pieces. What really helped me is that I knew the scenes I wanted to have, so with this I only had to figure out the order for them, and eventually my board ended up looking like this:

And oh boy was this insanely helpful. It does not allow to see how much space in the comic each moment would take, but at least I can have a broad view of everything at once and work from there. It also helped me to not lose the scenes I decided to push aside. I will be using this board for the upcoming chapters too, I feel like this is a very valuable thing.

The writing seems to be getting easier now. Probably helps that the majority of this chapter was made up in my head for a long time now. But also, I think I'm getting better at writing banter even though it 's mostly thanks to re-watching Yu-Gi-Oh for inspiration. Writing in general is what keeps me the calmest because I know that I can come back and rewrite dialogues before release. This is the biggest reason why I only release my comics in full tbh. If I were to do it page by page it would have been a lot more... random I guess. And I'd not be able to deliver on some things that I did when the entire chapter was practically done.

In the scene with Sonic and Shadow catching their breath after Shadow pulls Sonic out of the river initially I was pondering on what they should say to each other. You'll see it in the script and in this panel I shared back when I got to clean it up, that at first these two had lines in this shot. It went "Thanks" and "Don't mention it".

At the nearly last moment I realised that they don't really need to say anything here, just a nod would be enough. I felt like the scene would get so much more powerful if I let their body language speak for themselves. This scene in general was the one that had a lot of complexity to it due to how it came to be in the first place. In the script you'll see me writing a whole paragraph about all the things I kept in my head to make sure this scene comes out right. Right now I feel like adding dialogue there was a sign of insecurity, like the plague of Netflix writing when you have to be explicit about everything without leaving your audience a single chance to process the scene on their own and feel it naturally. I hope my final decision on the panel was the better one. I like it infinitely more than before, and if you have thoughts on the matter I'd like to know them. I'm genuinely curious if what I did felt right or confusing.

A big push to getting rid of dialogue here was provided from a book I got literally last week. It's "The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression" by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, I've mentioned it in the server. I feel like it's a great help for the "show don't tell" style of storytelling.

I think this time, what went through the most growth was my art skill. And it happened on a go too, I think you can see it with how my approach to drawing backgrounds is developing throughout the whole chapter. I think it makes it clear this chapter took longer than it should have and it was the cause of it in the first place. Coming in, I knew I needed to get better at drawing scenery shots, I was not happy with a lot of my backgrounds in my previous works. So, shortly after finishing my previous chapter, I got me a book called "Pen and Ink techniques" by Frank Lohan. It contains a lot of useful information and exercises. Studying it taught to me treat the shapes and shades differently. Instead of making the shapes I just started laying them out with specific strokes. It sounds and looks like a simple and obvious solution, but to me it was eye opening and it completely changed the way I went about natural scenery. I like the results I got, though I've still got a lot of things to learn, as you can tell it's not nearly consistent enough. I feel if I go on it's gonna form into something I can be absolutely sure of, and I can't wait to see what that's gonna be like. I also hope to get better at city shots, that I straight up hate to look at, and at the moment I have very little idea of how to do them :D This will be on my list of things to study next, gonna be looking for more books for sure.

Now... Another reason why this took longer than I thought, is also art related. When coming back around to clean up my sketches and finalise them I kept running into panels and whole pages sections that I was not happy about. You'll see in the folder with sketches some pages have doubles. I saved them for documentation of sort.

When sketching I'm not always sure how to go about my scenes visually, but I do know what I want out of them functionally. I always do things the best way I can, and what happened was - during the cleanup my best became better than it was during the sketching. And in the end it gave life to my favourite action panel I've made so far.

The initial sketch for this punch was very flat, 2D. You can tell that functionally it's the same in content, but when I came around to it I hated how weak it looked. I realised it does not deliver any energy and looks a lot like a schematic. So I came in and remade it. This took me two days, it was one of the first setbacks I'd have in the whole comic. But I actually love how it came out. I'm still super emotional just looking at it. Man and this comic isn't even about Knuckles :D

And the same story repeated here though I will say I like this one less. These are not the only cases, but the biggest ones. I'm still not entirely sure what led me seeing how to make these panels work beyond being functional, but I can point out two things. First - there was a break between me doing the sketches and coming back to them which allowed me to look at them with fresh eyes on the second round. Secondly - I realised that it's good to have a functional sketch for a dynamic shot like that in general, for planning purposes, so I could make a new sketch looking at the old one. I want to see if I can someday bypass the need to take a break when drawing shots like these. I'd like to get faster and more consistent, so I'll definitely be experimenting.

Now, as much as I want to say that I'm excited to get started on the next chapter - I'm not :D Well, I am, but not for jumping right to it. I'm tired. I want to take a little break with some commissions now and do a horny comic for a change. And this will give me time to do a little prep for the next chapter. I know what I want to happen in it, but there's many details I need to define first. As much as it's a silly shipping comic, I take it seriously. This really is the reason why I make these production diaries in the first place - it's a way to document my progress and share it with you at the same time. I'm glad I've arrived to a point where I decided I was good enough to start Little Flames and now I want to get better. And I'm glad you're here with me for the journey. You have no idea how much it means to me to have the support to be able to make something like this. And I hope you enjoy this journey with me.

Thank you! I'd like to make more stuff, better stuff and share it with you in the future!

The wall of text: done.