I’m not pleased with how this page turned out, because it’s mostly backgrounds, and I’m disappointed with my results. Backgrounds take so much longer to draw than I ever allocate. The Alari ship is barely just past the draft stage. I needed to put another ten hours into making it look like a hive of activity and showing how it’s expanding. Actually, right now it looks like a Level 1 structure in a RTS game, and someone just hit the button to upgrade it to Level 2.

And the Galytn city… well, it’s pretty basic looking. I didn’t want to make it look like Wakanda, Galytn isn’t that far along, but I wanted to make it look like a city that’s had a ton of new infrastructure put into it. Honestly I wouldn’t have minded something closer to Gaia City from Appleseed, but really that’s far too advanced as well. Still, a few buildings with curved metal roofs that collect or reflect the sun or buildings with rooftop gardens would have been nice. I just sat down to draw the city and started putting in some basic looking buildings, and that took so long I had to start moving on to other stuff.

Clip Studio Paint (and a lot of other drawing programs these days) has perspective rulers you can set up to keep your background from looking like it’s been hit with an acid trip warp effect, but the limitation of those guides is that they don’t have anyway to handle things like arches or 45 degree architecture, like rooftops or rafters or flying buttresses. What that means is you have to turn the rulers on and off about 2,000 times while drawing the average background.

There are ways to do perspective correct curves and angles, but it honestly requires a fuckton of intermediate measurements and is not a terribly fast process. It makes me appreciate artists that do amazing backgrounds. Not landscapes. Those are easy. Relatively speaking. There’s still a ton of skill involved, just less fiddly measurements.

Update: My wife pointed out that chasing nyquil with a tumbler full of Goldschlager* might not be the best idea, so I ditched the booze plan but somehow wound up getting a pretty decent night’s sleep. I think all the previous insomnia caught up with me. Anyway, I woke up this morning feeling pretty good. I’m not 100%, but I think I’m over the hump. Took about 5 days to get there. Hopefully I’m on the mend and this isn’t just a temporary boost because I’m well rested, but we’ll see.

*Yeah, Goldschlager. I’m not a whiskey guy or scotch or whatever else, I like drinks that taste good. Actually, my favorite drink currently is Dr. McGillicuddy’s Apple Pie Liqueur, but Goldschlager has twice the booze which makes it better for getting knocked out.

So, I’ve got Covid (probably Omicron). Not because I’m some dumbass anti-vaxxer, but just because we have a high-schooler in the house who managed to go a whole year without bringing anything back with him, but there’s like 2,000 kids in the school, so it was basically inevitable. I got my shots, but never got around to the booster, and so far it’s like a pretty mild case of the flu, although one point on my side is starting to get awfully sore from all the coughing. Except, I seem to be having some fairly weapons grade insomnia, and my energy and attention is suffering for it so. Sometime it takes me 5 days to draw 2 comic pages, this week it took seven. Haven’t even started on the nudie pinup yet this month. Well, actually each time I sit down to do one, I spend half a day drawing and discarding ideas, so I probably have some half-finished pencils I can dredge up and polish. But I’ll probably start a new one, hopefully keep it to a single character this time.

I’m so tired.

Melatonin fucks up my blood pressure and also I basically can’t wake up until about noon the next day, so I’m going to try the time-proven method of drinking a bunch of booze. Wish me luck! Skål!

BTW, if you are a dumbass anti-vaxxer, DO NOT POST ABOUT IT HERE. I will ban you from commenting forever. On the plus side, you will have more time to go and Darwin yourself out of our gene pool, thereby reducing your drag factor on the rest of humanity. 

Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update: Getting Proofed!

Two chapters left to proof. I’m going to work on it after I post this page, but I’m so tired. We’ll see how far I make it.

January’s vote incentive is titled “The Origin of The Might Halo.” Hopefully the reason is evident.

Nude versions available over at Patreon. Along with a bonus comic page.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.