Weekly 2018-02-09

Hi! I remember a time, not long ago, when I was writing Weekly News of what was happening in the backstage of Pepper&Carrot production. I have my little idea about why I lost this habit: probably a mixture of fear to disappoint and lack of time... I'll try to redo-it!

The past month

I can't really talk about what I did this week without introducing what is happening recently. I'll give a quick overview:

Episode 25 scenario

Do you saw the 4min long video "Fail Faster - A Mantra for Creative Thinkers by Extra Credits" ? I wanted to apply this to the creation of Pepper&Carrot episode. Thanks to our new collaborative platform Framagit it's easier to expose story pitches and scenario written in markdown to the volunteer around the project. Bad ideas are removed at root before being transformed into full storyboards or final page where things are harder to fix. It sounds easy, but it's not. On start January, we had final scenario ready thanks the feedback and corrections of Midgard, Craig Maloney, Nicolas Artance, Valvin.  You can read the full thread here. (warning: spoiler alert)

Spring concept-art

On mid January, I worked on adding more concept-art for the open movie Spring produced by the Blender Studio and directed by Andy Goralczyk. You can look at all the artwork for Spring here.

New filters for GMIC

In January I also tested and proposed ideas for the creation of two new filters in GMIC. An Equalizer to help colorizing black and white pictures by range of value and a new deformation filter "Crease" to add angular noise. They were developed by David Tschumperlé, the creator of GMIC.

Krita testing

I started beta testing the next Krita 4.0 ( 4.0.0~git , still not released, development version) more and more in January and decided to switch full time on Krita 4.0.0~git in February for the production of episode 25 to help with the feedback before release. Right now I'm focusing on the core: drawing and painting stability and rendering. In future Krita 4,  you'll be able to create easily new brush presets that looks good out of the box. Here is a video of the thumbnail creator developed by Wolthera . I contributed to this tool by giving my large collection of thumbnails. They will be built-in Krita 4.0!

Episode 25 Storyboard

Here is a sample screenshot showing first three pages of episode 25 storyboarded (for not spoiling). It's a mix of concept-art drawing from my sketchbook, speedpaintings and quick doodles to get a feeling of the final layout and composition. I added a little pass of bright yellow on the storyboard for the first time and it was an idea I'll keep in production: it's really good to underline the main focus of each panel and get a better feedback.  

Episode 25 Production

In the previous episode( episode 24 "the Unity Tree" ) I tested many new things: our new Framagit Gitlab platform, the usage of English to create the episode and the big one: painting the comic in two steps. That's was very creative and risky to change so many things and I learned a lot... 

To describe the production in two steps; I first made a pass of speedpainting without any rules, panels per panels. When I finished the episode fully with speedpaintings; I then shared the result on Framagit as a beta version. After a review, changes in panel, speechbubble and other I started a second pass of cleaning and making the panels consistently rendered. 

But it was hard to correct the speedpaintings. Harder than I thought and I still feel many panels are blury or weak because of that. Also, because I had a lot of faith into the second pass to fix things, I started many panels with weak drawing fundation (anatomy, expression, perspective, etc). Fixing the second pass was painful and some panels were needing a full paint-over for the character. An example:

 So I'm trying to improve on future episode 25. And to get more solid characters and view angle I had to update my sketching skill. It's hard to draw "right" without eternally using post-corrections. That's why you probably saw me on social networks posting many sketches recently:

I'm training for a workflow in the same spirit as I explained in my long video tutorial a comic page from A to Z but with more focus on the base drawing and less production "bottleneck". I also learn to pencil "final". 

This week, the first page of episode 25 received final colors to test how my lines were blending with the coloring:

The rendering will probably not feels so new to you; it's looking a lot like what I made in previous episodes. The change is mostly under the hood, in my approach of the base drawing. 

That's all for today. Next "weekly" will certainly look like a single picture and a paragraph. But I'll try to build back the habit. 

Have all a good week-end!