IV 6

Reminder: click to vote for Malaak and see the new incentive.



I won't lie, I was happy to get the crowd scenes and fancy lighting over with. In the third panel, getting some colors to peek through the bluish darkness was not a straightforward operation; I added a layer the color of the margin color over the color layer, but it took some playing around with the different blending modes to get it right. In the end, it was setting it to Multiply and 70% that did the trick. The lighting layer is a light blue set to Linear Dodge and placed on top of the former, but under the line art layer, otherwise it would affect it.

I actually made a mistake the first time I sketched this panel, getting the characters perspective wrong. They looked like they were seen from the level of someone standing among them instead of from above as I wanted it. The advantage of adjusting sketches digitally was that instead of redrawing the whole thing I just drew faceless bodies int he correct perspective, and re-placed the faces over them (the faces being upturned towards the viewer weren't affected by the angle).

The final panel on this page tells a long story in two details (or at least I like to think so): the sign that reads "shelter", that can still be spotted on some buildings, with a poster announcing a gig in that now-subverted shelter – a very Lebanese thing to do...


There is a scene I had wanted to include on this page, but after drafting and re-drafting pages 6-7 several times, had to resign myself to the fact I couldn't fit it, and forcing it in would take away more than it would add. So here's an outtake!