non sequitur: Dead Piro Halifax Day #3

Okay, now the five-part Russian arc is over, I thought I'd take a breather today and just post some filler art.

This is the full version of that tiny Manchester panel from the last strip, tweaked slightly since then. I've played about with some features on it like the gradient overlay (though that didn't turn out quite so well when it came to saving the file and I found that JPEG and GIF formats couldn't handle the amount of grey properly without screwing up, which is why it's a bit crappy on this .gif) and the blue gradient behind the cloud layer has been tweaked to make it a slightly less horrible day. I also added the text, which is not direct text but rather a darker part of the cloud layer. This meant that the darker the clouds became, the more apparent 'Manchester' became, which seemed very right, somehow.

I don't think I'll go back and tweak it any further, though if I did I'd probably sort the people out -- give them some shading and highlights, then give them shadows. I quite like the paperdoll cut-out feel, though. It contrasts well with the more gritty and realistic cityscape behind them, making the people seem ephemeral and unreal against the unshifting reality of the city. Plus it looks a bit like a 'Gorillaz' video, which is never a bad thing.

An interesting sidenote about the people is that several of them are taken from pictures in my sketchbooks that I drew in the city centre. It's strange to think I went to all the trouble of committing these people to paper so I could take them away from the city with me, only to later put them back into Manchester again. I don't tend to do facial sketches so much, which is why it looks like Manchester has been overrun by Autons. One of whom appears to be Charles Kennedy.