Red Rum Rising

The exterior backgrounds on this one took me a good few hours to do -- both the imposing-looking office building in the final panel and the docks that you can't quite see behind Rodion and Halifax in the first three. I'm happy with them and should get at least some re-use out of them, so it's not all bad. The apartment backgrounds are from a huge file I made last time I did a Russian flashback, which covers pretty much one whole wall of the apartment, so I'm set for most of the things in that room.

(This is an aside, but it occurred to me the other day that no-one has tried building sets for their webcomics yet, actually building model houses or villages or streets or apartment interiors. It might be interesting to build a set, then shoot pictures of it and drop the hand-drawn characters onto it in PotatoShop. And yes, Irregular Webcomic does something similar, but the backgrounds tend to be Lego, which doesn't... exactly count. Full marks for doing something interesting, though.)

The Russian flashback parts tend to be slightly easier on the pencilling, since I can cover a lot of rough areas up with oppressive inking and angular red shading (a style I'm nicking off old propaganda posters, if you're wondering) although doing the red shading is only marginally easier that the usual colouring. I like working with a restricted palette, though. I think the backgrounds look really good considering I'm sticking with black, white, shades of grey and shades of red. It was my intention to try different styles this year, though I think I've only really done three -- the black-and-white flashbacks/forwards, the conventional candy-coloured ones, and the Russian arcs. The pub ones were going to be done in a much rougher style, sort of smudgy and smoky. To be honest, the only reason I haven't done more experimenting, art-wise, is that it's taking me almost the full two days to do each strip. I'm running somewhere around twelve hours per strip -- which is a long time, considering that last year each one would take four or five at most. Art-wise, it's totally worth it, though.

(I just realised, I lied -- there was another style, the video game one. I forgot about that.)

Best bits: the backgrounds (woo! they made it on the top list for once!); the propaganda-style art.
Worst bits: I'm not overly thrilled with the pacing on this one, or the panel layout. Looks nice, though.