Forest Tails Page 158 in HD

Well, she's gone and done it now ...

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So for all those who still care, I am once again dissatisfied with the look of the page due to the values being all over the place, but that's me learning and improving as I go along.

S'not all bad though. I am very happy with how the structure of the tree trunk turned out. Came together fairly easy too, so I think I may be getting the hang of doing things in a "fast" way that still allows for satisfactory levels of detail. One thing that does still bother me is that it still takes me very long to finish pages, despite using plenty of prefabs for the backgrouns ... starting to wonder how long these would take me if I was still drawing every single thing by hand .~.

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So there's no music selection for this page, but not because I don't remember what I listened to. Instead I've gotten back into the habbit of watching movies while I work.

I used to do this a lot more often when I didn't have such dialogue/story heavy content to produce, because movies and their dialogue tend to disrupt the creative thought process while trying to tell a story of your own.

As it is, the current pages I've already sketched out and dialogued beforehand, so what I do now is all just blocking, arranging and greyscaling work and I can do that while having a narrative running in the background without jeopardizing the end result.

I don't remember all the movies I watched while working on this particular page, but among those in the selection were The Untouchables, Air Force One and The Sentinel, all of which I can recommend for various reasons.

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On more production notes; I mentioned above I'm not satisfied with how the page turned out with the values. I realize this is largely due to the fact that animals and their coats are 'supposed' to blend with their environment for stealth purposes and as most mammals don't have color vision (or at least not the high end version we have), foxes and squirrels still blend into a forest environment, despite orange and green almost being complementary colors X3

I'm trying to find ways around that, but it's getting difficult with characters having so wildly different shades of fur, where Myra has a relatively bright coat, while Marvin has a darker shade and then a really, really dark shade on his socks - balancing values to accomodate both in one frame, or even on the same page, is turning out to be a real challenge (without having a very garish switch between the values of their backgrounds) - not that I'm coplaining about a challenge, mind you, but I was hoping to be further along in my ability to control this.

It's also weighing heavily on production time. It used to be I would have a page done in anywhere between 10 - 14 hours. Current production times are closer to 18 - 20 hours per page, which despite my most recent boosts in available time is proving to be rather costly on a financial level. I haven't done the math yet, but I'm fairly sure I will likely have to put more time into regular commission work again sooner, rather than later.

Not that I'd be abandoning Forest Tails for it, no. Updates might become a little less frequent again though, which is something I'd rather have avoided. To clarify: don't believe the lie of my patreon's front page. I only earn $93 for the first page I produce a month. The second, third and fourth page net me significantly less, but it's still all income I am in need of and I'm thankful for every single coin sent my way. I know times are rough on everyone <3