Original Art Sundays No. 297: Curt, p. 35

 Once more into the breach, dear friends.

When we left our heroine (me), the half-assed suicide attempt was truncated by a neighbor's phone ringing. Before I could clean up, Curt came home. How will he react to the woman he claims to love attempting such a thing?

Well, there you have it. As was noted by one of my Beta readers, knives are intended for cutting meat, so his asinine wrath was also factually inaccurate. This is what happened, but I condensed events slightly for narrative flow. But even with the danger implicit in living in this situation, it starts to seem absurd at some point. Abusers often pride themselves on reason, but are often irrational in their micromanagement and rage. The challenge is to navigate their anger and feed into their egos.

Again, no overt trans content on this page, other than it being a trans woman's story.

Technical notes: The layout is pretty direct and flows well. I particularly like the tight shots of Curt's eyes framing his gaze down the cut arm to the bloody knife. At one point, I had divided that long panel in thirds, but it seemed more of a distraction than a dramatic effect. I hand-rendered the text, but reworked it in Photoshop. Lower energy, but it reads better. A sense of place is crucial to this page. Perspective is key on the first panel. I seldom do such detailed work on environments, but this is a time where it's necessary to ground the space. Looking at it now, the page still needs a couple minor corrections, but it's 95% there.

The gray values on the ceiling in Panel 1 are a simple gradient.

Instead of scanning, I tried a photo with my iPhone 12. I'm not 100% happy with this method. Too much work in post to get the levels right. If my other option, using the document capture in Notes, yields similar results, I'll just go back to scanning. 

I used my favorite scumbling brush with masking tape on panel 3 (the arm). Don't you love simple production tricks? I got this fascinating sort of dry brush smear by accident on my drawing board, and it's inspired me for a page down the line. A pen nib and a brush marker died creating this page. We will now observe a moment of silence.

Tools:

• Canson Bristol Board
• Pencils: Ticonderoga 2B, Paster Classics 6B, 4B graphite stick
• Erasers: Staedtler Mars Plastic, kneadable eraser, erasing guide
  
• Brushes: Blick #2 synthetic Masterstroke, Blick #6 Synthetic round
• Pen nib and holder
• Microns: .005, .02, .05, .08, 1.0 and brush
• Photoshop

Next: survival strategies.