Page 43-44: Professional Conduct

Greetings! I am incredibly pleased to announce that Chapter 2: Contact is done!

With the alien menace seemingly deterred, our team take a moment to rest. However, it isn’t long until the team’s new allies begin to take a dislike to the Executive…

Chapter 2 was an interesting piece of the story to work on, moving on from Chapter 1’s two settings of “cramped starship” and “wide empty space” to a more urban environment, which required the detail of the starship scenes across a much wider landscape. This lead to an experiment in time-saving that lead to, in my opinion, a rather interesting art direction.

In the outdoor part of the chapter, I experimented with digitally painted backdrops to depict the landscapes of Bastion, intending to evoke the matte backgrounds of old television scifi while cutting down on the number of vector assets needed per panel. I feel that this worked well for the open sky and the far background and would like to make more extensive use of the more painterly style in future.

A notable failure of this endeavor was the Archer Building. Its first appearance on Page 33 was initially to be as part of a painted coastal landscape. However, both the monorail track and power conduits, both elements running from the foreground into the background structure, resulted in a problem.

While the contrast between the foreground vector art and the background painted style proved quite pleasing to my eye, the transition between the two styles needed to make the scene work… didn’t work. And so the painted background was abandoned in favour of a vector rendition of the building.

With that reflection on pragmatic art direction decisions out of the way, I present the conclusion of Chapter 2: Contact. Next time, we revisit the crew back onboard the Lyrae-III for Chapter 3: Heatwave!

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The next upload is slated for Sunday 21st November 2021.