POYEKHALI!

I'm pretty sure I'll post the next page (depending on how quickly I can work on it) on here, but I'm debating saving the pages after so the ending isn't spoiled. Between baby and me being slow it might be a while to finish.

Bunch of sketches, what a mess! I swear this all means something to me.

Page 19 is done!

Refining a bunch of stuff and adding in images of the earth being lit up by the explosion. A lot of the high-altitude nuclear tests mention that they lit up the ground beneath them like the sun, so that's a neat image I wanted to include.

I spent a lot of time looking at high altitude nuclear detonations for this image. Technically it's not a nuclear explosion, but the Asher is releasing stupid amounts of energy as it gets shredded so it's the closest reference I can think of.

Some tricky perspective work here so we're already at three layers (including a perspective warped cross section of a Hellflower I'll be using as my base.

Page 18 complete! A rabbit binkies while hyperkinetic kill vehicles take out a kaiju.

Bye for now!

So this is something like a bunch of 60,000+ m/s lead projectiles impacting something made of almost-diamond. And while I got a rough estimate of the speed of sound in diamond (18,000 - 15,000 m/s) it's a big range so maybe the angles of the shocks aren't quite right, and I'm not sure if things would shatter, or melt, or turn to fine dust, or what. But I went with shattering because it looked kind of cool. Anyways, I tried, there you go.

Of course, then you end up with 50+ layers and you'd better hope you labeled them well.

The order I use for sketch layer colors goes: blue, red, red-purple, indigo, then green. Most of the time at least. Some people have asked if I make 3D digital models and I don't. Haven't learned blender yet and my professional experience is with programs that would be terrible for art. Sometimes I make clay models, sometimes I drop in a pre-made CSP asset (usually like, a bust, or a simple shape) to get things roughly correct. Everything else is just lots of layers and a pretty good knowledge of perspective (it's just math really).

Pleased with this one. I always worry about how hard it is to include various subtle effects. One being that the lightning halo is diminishing as they gain altitude. But like, it's not super plot relevant, so it's fine if it doesn't come through.

When it work's it's great. It's all about breaking down the underlying structure, but that's sometimes easier said than done. Seems to be working here though.

Doing more watercolors. I should start making some weirder stuff but I want to build up a backlog of normie flowers and birds to give away when I inevitably forget to get a gift for someone.

There's a lot of weird stuff I researched for this page, but I kind of don't want to point it out because it's not important for plot and is really just part of my "draw something with recognizable influences and then try to peel it back so it's no longer obvious" shtick. But that is a thing I love doing. Maybe people will see, maybe they won't! That's part of the fun I guess.

Page seventeen begins! Another sketch that barely makes sense to me and probably doesn't make any sense to you. The ugly baby stage of the comic. Necessary, but annoying because I prefer rendering to sketching.

That being said, weird Venetian blind/gridded airfoils survive today, in the form of axial compressors/turbines, and in grid fins. Both deal with shocks by using shaping techniques (though usually they don't do well near Mach 1), in these cases compactness and uniform flow are worth any other issues.