#this pose was quite difficult due to the angle but i'm happy with how it turned out :)

[mistrall-art]

Haven't drawn Alua since last year november/december ...(*￣０￣)ノso used this pose practise to also figure out what else she would wear instead of sporty clothes haha

[genericpuff]

Absolutely love the rendition to the panel of Hades holding Persephone. Lovely to see it rendered as a more mutual act with Perse holding onto Hades instead of just letting Hades hold her, and ofc seeing Persephone actually look like an adult woman. (Not to even mention the colors and rendering because whoaa those were lovely)

And I have a question about this new rendition if I’m allowed to make it! The original had very dramatic and sharp composition with the angles and being off centered which conveyed much of the emotions and style that made early LO very striking. In adapting it, was it a conscious choice to change the composition or what were the deciding factors that made you and banshriek decide centering Perse and Hades worked better in this situation? :0

Ahhh thank you ;w; It took a few rounds of sketching to get the pose just right, the flats thankfully weren't as difficult as I was worried they'd be, but the challenge was definitely in trying to get the pose right while maintaining the height difference that's there.

As for your question, a lot of the posing and sketch composition is something I do, and then Banshriek typically goes wild with the backgrounds while making adjustments to those compositions if necessary, often times I leave the backgrounds up to their discretion as they're 10x more skilled at that sort of thing than I am and they often bring new perspectives to the table. This means that it often ends up being a game of give and take between what we contribute, sometimes I'll have sketches that they feel need to be adjusted, other times I'll have to add little tweaks to their backgrounds if it's missing something. We're both working off a base rough sketch, but we both get to contribute to the final scene in our own ways; splitting it between background and character flats has been a happy middle that's worked well for us :)

Depending on the scene, sketches can range from minimal to more detailed. Here's the original base sketch for that scene:

So originally there was a larger tree working over the side but I didn't really know how detailed we wanted to be in the actual full background, much of it depended on how complex Banshriek wanted to get. You can also tell that Persephone's face was originally buried into Hades' chest in the original panel, which I originally flatted in, but then wound up changing because I wanted her eyes to be visible to reflect both of their expressions of relief at the same time.

That said, with the pose changing from what it was in the original (from Persephone almost laying on Hades vs. him holding her and lifting her up) the composition had to change with it so I decided to just make them a bit more centered, that way the focus would be fully on them and the balance of the scene wouldn't feel "off" due to the pose change. I tend to follow the Rule of 3 here !

So yeah! That's pretty much why centering it felt a little better in this case. Though part me of does wish I was able to keep the original pose, when breaking that scene down into its bones I found it had to take a lot of liberties with its anatomy and proportions, as many LO scenes do. You can't really tell just on a surface level but Persephone's head is huge and the rest of her body is tiny (her hips literally come up to Hades' sternum and her feet meet at his knees). With the character design changes made in Rekindled to make Persephone a little less tiny and more consistent in her body type (while still maintaining the size difference between them) and to reflect their character arcs at this point (as I'm not rushing them into intimacy quite like the original comic did) certain things have to change to balance it out and accommodate. If you're a math person, think of it like solving algebra equations - what you do to one side of the equation needs to be reflected and adjusted on the other side.

And of course Banshriek did a lot more to really exemplify the mood shift in the almost labrynth-like forest Persephone grew within Tower 4. There are still trees and plant life everywhere, but instead of feeling like an endless maze with its tones of deep red that we saw Hades navigate, it now feels like a soft and gentle meeting point for the two. Like the original scene, the color change is used to change the mood of the scene and reflect the calmness of Hades and Persephone as they've found one another.

At the end of the day we did what we ultimately thought would work best for the way Rekindled is drawn, giving both Banshriek and I the freedom to fully utilize our respective skillsets. That way we were able to pay tribute to that original scene while also creating something new out of it <3

That said, I'm sure @banshriek can also chime in with their own design notes on this episode, if they have a minute to spare! I'm sure they'll have lots to say about the fun they had working with those new brushesヽ(・∀・)ﾉ

[warsofasoiaf]

Its been awhile since you've done any character analysis on Fallout New Vegas, but would you be willing to go into one for some of the minor characters? I'm actually curios of your opinion on Silus the captured centurion and his motivations.

I’m more than happy to, although this won’t be about Silus so much as it will be about the quest Silus Treatment. It’s one of my favorite quests in the game, since it does a great deal just with dialogue and some creative use with the engine to create an engaging quest that showcases some of the failures of the NCR and the Legion. Given that the central theme is about picking a faction, warts and all, having a quest that puts the two main faction of New Vegas on full display is an absolutely good idea. The game is too old for spoilers, but it’s a long analysis so I’ll put a cut in.

Silus Treatment starts off simple enough, going to Camp McCarran, in the old McCarran International Airport, now the regional command post of Colonel Hsu. McCarran is not in a great spot when you first get there; there are periodic Fiend attacks, tensions in Freeside are causing havoc for NCR civilians, the overstretched NCR supply lines are making it difficult even for their central point of operations, and there’s a strong possibility that they’ve been infiltrated. It’s all Colonel Hsu can do to keep order and function in the base. Perfect protagonist fodder, in other words, for a nice quest hub.

It’s a tough needle to thread in any RPG to build a quest hub where there’s stuff for a character to do. If everyone is incapable of solving even the most basic of problems, it gives a great deal of quests for the player to do but it makes the quest-givers look incompetent, especially if the quest-givers are supposed to be capable figures in their own right. Conversely, if the NPC’s are competent, then the quests would be solved and that would close out on content for the player. There’s plenty of ways to settle this, and the devs do an adequate job here. The war effort means prioritization, and Hsu is dealing with being torn from both angles. He can’t just hunt down the Fiends, because he needs to organize patrols and deal with NCR settlers in the area. He can’t just pacify Freeside because it will engender hostility with House and so he’s delaying the order from his butcher superiors like Moore to go in with fire and sword. He doesn’t have a solution to the Kings but he’s trying to find one, which as far as writing goes is a good solution. Hsu is a decent man but overworked. He’s hoping that he can develop a solution in time before Cassandra Moore decides to pull rank and go on the warpath against all who oppose the NCR, which leaves a convenient spot for the player.

It’s this person that gives us our introduction to the Silus Treatment questline. Hsu has a valuable prize: Silus, a captured Legion centurion! Typically centurions always commit suicide rather than be captured to deny any useful intelligence to the enemy, so to capture a centurion alive should be quite a find. But it’s not going so well. Lt Carrie Boyd, in charge of base security, can’t get Silus to talk. Again, perfect quest writing to get the PC involved in the plot. Normally such a sensitive operation would never be given to an unknown civilian contractor, even for a bureaucratic mess like the NCR. Frontier desperation, hitting a wall via official channels, and the fact that the character is the protagonist in a sprawling open world help it pass ludonarrative muster.

Boyd is a real piece of work, she’s openly sadistic hiding beneath of veneer of civility. She considers the humane treatment of POW’s as an impediment, and so looks for ways around it. Notably, while she wants information from Silus to deliver to her superiors, she’ll settle for just having Silus beaten so bloody that he can’t speak anymore, calling it “entertainment.” This is a person who simply should not be in charge of interrogating a prisoner, she is neither humane nor effective at her job, but here she is by virtue simply of being the chief MP on base.

Not that Silus, the prisoner and the other side of this duo, is better. He openly revels in the barbaric practices of the Legion’s slavery system, even trying to ensure that the slaves can never achieve some level of comfort by tightening the collars and making it difficult for them to feel at ease while eating or drinking. Even if Silus is mostly saying those things simply to get a rise out of Lieutenant Boyd, he knows what the Legion is up to and enjoys it. Silus is arrogant to an extreme degree, he is filled with confidence that he can outlast any interrogation by the feeble NCR without giving up any intelligence, that he could easily escape NCR confinement and that he is so valuable to the Legion that following Caesar’s order would be a waste. Good fodder then, for the protagonist to bring him down to size.

Silus Treatment as a quest is relatively simple. Boyd signs off on the Courier beating the ever-living tar out of Silus and then steps out for a smoke, letting the player do whatever he or she wants to the prisoner. Silus, sneering, dismisses the Courier as just another piece of NCR trash, and it’s up to the player with how to succeed. Violence is always an option, you can beat Silus, and eventually gets something useful, that the base itself will be the target of Legion destruction. Silus admits that his fantasy of escape was always a fantasy, he was dead to Caesar just as surely as he as if he had committed suicide before capture. 

Yet if the Courier has points in Speech or Intelligence, he can completely upend Boyd’s methods and actually deliver a worthwhile interrogation. The first technique, with speech, uses an interrogation technique known as Pride-and-ego-down, where the interrogator routinely belittles and demeans the prisoner, usually their technical competence or soldierly qualities, in an attempt to get the prisoner to “redeem” themselves by explaining a piece of useful intelligence that would explain the deficiency as opposed to it just being a terrible personal quality. The Courier mocks Silus as a coward (bravery being a key soldierly virtue) and he defends himself by stating his bravery and that suicide is a poor death for a soldier of his intelligence and caliber, then saying how good a soldier he is for a “self-appointed megalomaniacal dictator.” Silus then spills that Caesar held his unit for three days because of “headaches,” in actuality, it’s Caesar’s brain tumor. The technique works to an exceptionally high degree, not only does Silus divulge that McCarran has been infiltrated as in the violence ending, but also that the Legion is suffering a crisis of command due to Caesar’s illness. The Courier gets a lot of useful intelligence out of Silus and doesn’t compromise the humane treatment of prisoners in the process. If it actually caused some self-reflection in Boyd, that’d be a complete win, but I suppose we can’t have everything.

My favorite option is the intelligence option, because the Courier goes full-on PSYOPS, posing as a Legion assassin sent to kill Silus for his failure to commit suicide on Caesar’s order. Silus denies it at first, but as the Courier continues to sell the performance, Silus begins to express real terror at the thought that the Courier is actually a frumentarius sent to kill Silus before he divulges anything to the NCR. The Courier fully sells the deal using Latin phrases as the language of Caesar’s elites. The Courier can quote Cicero, “legum servi sumus” - we are all slaves to the law, in what is perhaps a perfect example of Caesar’s philosophy of totalitarian obedience. The full quote "Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus” - we are slaves to the law so that we might be free, means little in Caesar’s totalitarian state where all are subject to his whims and contingency plans for Caesar’s incapacity aren’t even considered. Of course, the Roman Republic was hardly a free state, but Caesar really takes the cake with his dictatorship. If Caesar’s dictum holds true: “Corruptio optimi pessima” - the corruption of the greatest is the worst outcome. how much worse is it when Caesar himself is corrupted? But totalitarians rarely raise the possibility that they themselves are corrupt, because the good of the dictator is the good of the state. After all, L'etat c'est moi is the dictum of any dictator, not just a Sun King.

Of course, fitting New Vegas, you can side with Silus, and facilitate his escape. There, you feign beating him to unconsciousness and slip him a silenced pistol, then Silus makes good his escape, killing the guard sent to bring him back to his cell and sneaking out. Of all the endings, this one isn’t as satisfying. Some of it, of course, is that you never interact or see Silus again, so there’s never any reward to the quest except for the knowledge that the base is infiltrated, which in the pro-Legion side of the quest I Put a Spell on You allows you to complete Curtis’s sabotage operation (and a far better Legion quest, in my opinion, with the NCR quest side being even better given the multiple outcomes), but also it’s not referenced again with Caesar. What would Caesar’s reaction be to the Courier springing Silus? He is quite fond of reciting a litany of the Courier’s accomplishments in Act 2 at Fortification Hill.

If I could improve Silus Treatment, I think I would have made it so the violent path wouldn’t have produced enough valuable intel, and the player needs to do some more detective work to actually get to I Put a Spell on You, or even being mislead by Curtis and becoming the unwitting patsy of the Legion. But overall, I think it was an incredible quest and a testament to the writing in the game.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[subparatbestcomics]

Artist’s Commentary

Rather than a new page this week, I will instead be reviewing and providing commentary for the previous 10 pages published. For the most part I will be going over my own mistakes, as well as explaining some of the choices made, and whether or not they worked. Before we start however, I would like to note these pages are not complete, but more of a rough draft. There are several reasons for this. One major reason, is that it has been several years since I have drawn with any regularity. Producing a page each week will, I hope, shake off the rust. Additionally, neither my or my brother's hardware is up to the task of rendering RFO. One day, RFO may see an updated version that better fits our mutual vision of this project. And so, the commentary begins. RFO 1 -Jude Anderson lives in a poor neighborhood; identical row houses with unkempt lawns and no decoration outside. -My first mistake was leaving the sky blank. Its meant to be near midnight, but the bright sky and lack of shading imply otherwise. -Jude's front door and the paneling on it will change in scale just about every panel. Partly, this is because there was no consistent model. -Jude's house -interior and exterior- were modeled in Lego Digital Designer. -Jude's house number is 616, a less popular interpretation of the number of the beast. -My original attempt at this was painted in photoshop. The foreshortened fences were an absolute nightmare. I'm still not too happy about them as drawn now, but its still better than it was. -I forgot to shade the first floor window shutters. Oops. RFO 2 -Jude is whistling the ever popular 'Happy Birthday'. I’m not totally certain about the notation here, because I haven't had to read music since middle school. (side note: This song recently entered the public domain) -Jude's outfit was inspired by Back to the Future's Marty McFly. -I forgot to put a candle in the birthday apple pie. -You may notice Jude has no visible fridge in his kitchen. Jude cant afford a full fridge, or fit it in his kitchen. Instead, anything he needs cold is kept in a basement mini-fridge. -Jude’s facial features and hair take inspiration from Norville 'Shaggy' Rogers of Scooby Doo. -You may notice the quality of characters hands changing. Hands are still difficult for me, but I'm hoping to improve. -My brother pointed out that the carpet in Jude's living room looks like grass. I'm not really certain how one draws carpet. -The leftmost painting depicts two figures with an arm around the others shoulder. A third figure appears later, but there is no story significance, I just forgot what it was supposed to be. RFO 3 -The overly enthusiastic individual at Jude's door is meant to be androgynous. I feel I made them a little too masculine -The design on the handbag clearly denotes a christian denomination, although not any specific one. I wanted it to be generic, but evocative of several things. (a cross, a sword, an angel, a shooting star, etc) -While it was done primarily to help them stand out, the white outline around the stranger nicely implies a holy glow. -I'm most proud of this page, and how uncomfortable and annoyed Jude is by this stranger interrupting his birthday and asking about religion at midnight. -Several of these pages were first sketched in faint colored pencil. Its not meant to show up when scanned, but clearly that didn't work quite as advertised. -You may notice proportions are inconsistent, especially regarding head size. Like most of my mistakes, I did not notice until it was already too late to fix without starting the whole page over. -The handbag is unshaded in the last panel. RFO 4 -I'm not sure how I feel about these sound effects in retrospect. I'm still toying with how they work. -One habit I need to break is placing speech bubbles too close to the papers edge. The scanner sometimes cuts them! -As Jude gets more confused and frustrated by strangers popping up at or in his house, his hair gets wilder. -Jude's house layout is similar to several I personally have been in. RFO 5 -I'm not happy at all with the posing of the officer; they're so stiff and lifeless. While I could try to pass it off as part of the stranger's idea of how a police officer asks, the truth is that even when my skills weren't rusty; posing was never my strong suit. -Some panels have blank backgrounds partly due to laziness on my part, and partly so the paper could be held without smearing -The officer's nametag reads 'GATES'.This, along with his unusual badge and emblems, indicate that this is still the same person who was at Jude's door only a minute before. RFO 6 -I don't have much to say about this page, except that the officers uniform is visibly becoming simpler by the panel. This is because drawing those details was hurting my wrist. In the future I will try to be more economical with character design. RFO 7 -If the past ten weeks have taught me anything, its that I should plan out what I'm going to do more thoroughly. Jude's speech balloon was drawn first, and ended up over the other man's crotch. Now it looks stupid. -The officer (stranger) tends to be to Jude left, while the other man tends to the right. -The middle left panel is another I'm proud of, not for any major thing, but because tilting the head is difficult for me to do on purpose; especially when the part of the head where the jaw meets the neck is visible, but I think I did okay here. -The hard angles and edges of the final speech balloon show the officer is stern and serious. It is also shaped like a stop sign. RFO 8 -While the officer is still left of Jude (to the viewer), he is now right of the other man. Left positioning in RFO signifies benevolence, right signifies malice. It could have been the opposite just as easily, but sometimes you have to make an arbitrary choice for theming purposes. -The other man's hair forms horns on the sides and a tail in the back whereas the officer's (stranger's) hair is more flowing and wing-like. -Jude only owns one other jacket, as seen in his barren closet. -The officer's proportions in the bottom left are so off, I'm not sure why I thought it looked okay. -The other man's outfit and personality are meant to evoke a stereotypical used car salesman. Also Rodney Dangerfield! RFO 9 -Not much to say here. I will continue to simplify the style until an equilibrium is met between making things look good versus not destroying my wrist. -Also, the other man's sleeve in the first panel is missing its vertical stripes. RFO 10 -Jude's face in the last panel seems off to me. I don't quite know why, and I'm the one who drew it. -When I originally planned this page out, there was too much vertical space. It would have left me either having to draw their legs (which would been difficult with the furniture in the scene at leg height) or leaving a terrible amount of dead air above their heads. Instead, I tried to do something more visually interesting with that negative space, by making the last two panels more diagonal than horizontal.                                                                                                                                       Jacob Birmingham