🥀Rose Fall🥀

It's especially frustrating in scenes where you have to relay a lot of important information, make it interesting and summarized while still keeping it sounding like something an actual person would say. I feel it gets easier when you get to know your characters. These days my characters pretty much talk by themselves and I just trim around the edges. Not always, of course, but a lot of the time.

Take in account their temperament, how logical, how rushed, how much of a front they put up. Nero wouldn't say "you hurt me", he'd say "I'll fuck you up". Runi wouldn't say "I'll fuck you up", she'd say "you're not very nice, are you."

This is not something I've done, but maybe exercises of having your cast relay the same message in their own words would work?

Scenario: Gang eats food that isn't up to their standards.

"I will not eat this." "Eugh... Does somebody else want this?" "It's... not the best." "This is insanely disgusting." "Not for me!"

I don't know! I feel like that would help some people.

Sure!

First I put their regular flat colors down (I do bgs first so that I'm making the Characters Fit Into The Scene instead of Fitting The Scene Into The Characters)

2. Then I slap a layer with the layermode "color" on top. Sometimes I colorpick a color from the bg to use here, but sometimes I just go with what looks the nicest to me. This is a really desaturated scene so I picked a very desaturated green/blue

3. But just with the color layer the characters still really stand out! Sometimes that's the vibe I want, but this is a moodier scene. So to darken up the colors I put a multiply layer with a very light color over top of them. This scene is blue, so I chose blue.

4. Scene specific, but on top of that I put the ""shading"" scribble texture to imply their wet fur

5. and then on top of all of that I put the multiply gradient that I use for shading in this comic.

I don't use all of these steps all of the time, it just depends on the scene.

Sometime I will add a "lighten" Layer if warbler or another very dark furred cat is in a scene to help the blacks blend in more OR if it's a night scene, have them stand out against an already dark bg.

I also like to add some lower opacity normal layers to have characters "blend" into the bg if they are not the focus of the panel. It helps keep the readers eye on what I want them to look at as well as creates depth.

hmmm it depends on the depth/separation of the elements I'm coloring the lines of. typically I like to keep elements more visually separate for readability and emphasis, and I enjoy a bold/dark outline for main subjects and also to use for foreshortening

it's a bit hard to explain without visuals so I threw this together for some examples of when I may decide to color lineart