Long John

It’s been awhile since a post titled “Chapter 6 Update” has dropped, though we had an unofficial (though obvious) update when it was made public that all the pages had been drawn and inked.

Since then, another major milestone has been hit: color flatting is complete.

Again, flatting is probably the most mind-numbing stage of the entire process because it’s not very interesting, creative, or exciting. It’s just where you go through the pages and drop flat colors (hence “flatting”) to separate the elements of a panel to make the eventual shading and highlighting a bit easier and go faster.

While it is rather boring work, I found the flatting on this final chapter a bit reflective, too. I found I was focusing specific pieces of the pages rather than on the pages as a whole, which allowed me to appreciate (as silly as this sounds) myself as an artist. There were times when I saw a hand drawn particularly well and thought, “wow, that looks great!” nearly disassociating enough to wonder what choices past me made to make it look so good (which you’d think would be something I could be able to remember).

What’s also nice is that walking through each page slowly allowed another pass on story and scripting, finding more poignant themes or points to hit during the scenes to make the progress of the story even stronger.

So, I stepped into the flatting process with trepidation and a fair bit of whining, but took much more out of it than I had expected.