#very nice to see this comic getting colored up and lettered tho. makes my brain happy

[jesncin]

more clois comic wips! This comic is taking so long because of all the public transport scenes,,,

[mcrmadness]

Madness draws: Behind the Scenes of the “Alleine in der Nacht” die ärzte fan comic.

A few weeks ago I posted this comic:

This post is yet again just another drawing behind-the-scenes post but You can go and reblog the original post here.

And as always, all my ramblings are under the cut!

This one was relatively easy to do because I just woke up one morning and internally died from laughter because this idea just happened like a random pop up window in my brain. I wrote it down to my phone notes and later on also into my sketchbook:

I was laughing out loud when I was drawing those images, Bela’s face still is cracking me up :D And because I’m yet again trilingual with my comics, there’s only one word in my mother tongue and it’s: Bela laulaa = Bela sings.

And other fans might recognize the lyrics of the song, I needed to write them down in order to decide which ones would fit the comic the best.

This one is then again me trying to see how it will fit on a A4 paper. Originally I saw it in my head more like a short, regular comic strip with 3 panels but somehow I couldn’t get it to fit into 3 panels. And 4 panels was too many in a row so I decided to go for a full page then. That caused bits of trouble to me because I normally don’t draw the comic book faces THAT big and it’s surprisingly hard to draw them in bigger scale. (With pencil drawings it’s the opposite, the bigger the better. It’s much easier to draw an eye the size of a finger instead of a size of a tip of a needle.)

Here’s the first sketch! Just the shapes to see how and what I need to draw. Sorry for the awful photo quality again, my phone’s camera has really gotten really bad after these 3 years of use...

Anyhow, the third panel caused me some troubles because I knew how I wanted Bela’s arms and hands to be but I didn’t see them that good in my head so what I did next was to try different postures into my sketchbook:

I also tried this foreshortening technique I saw in a video of after a Tumblr post, even tho I don’t find that too hard to do myself anymore but it was still interesting and can really help making the eye and brain to see the image in 3D. So here I finally figured that I wanted Bela to have is arms like he was singing something very theatrically. I think it turned out pretty good.

Next I struggled with the bedsheets and I figured that I am a bit too good at blocking out information when I draw because I tried to draw unmade beds from reference photos and I’m able to follow a line but also able to completely not see any other lines around the line I’m following. Like I’d often follow a line to somewhere and suddenly notice that wtf there’s SO MUCH MORE lines all over the place in the photo but I just did not see them.

^Here’s two pages in my other sketchbook that I got for the comic stuff especially because the paper is actually white. The bigger sketchbook has light yellow tint to the paper so it can mess up with the colors when I need to try out and look for perfect colors from the colored pencils. (This sketchbook is also smaller aka A5 because Derwent sketchbooks are expensive but this was the only A5 one with a bit grainy paper in white. The A4 one is cheaper and from Mont Marte.)

After a while I was done with the besheet and the rest of the second sketch. I don’t have a photo of the comic with just the lineart, only a photo where the first panel is already colored and now I actually need to talk about the coloring.

That caused me lots of trouble because I really love playing with lights and shadows in everything (drawing, photographing... everything) and I do know how to do the night effect in black and white, but I have only once before done that with colors and it’s never that easy. Plus that one was my first comic when I started drawing again in 2018 and it was not that good to begin with.

I run some tests with the pencils, as well as some shading tests:

Käsi = hand, iho = skin. I use Derwent Flesh Pink (I have a 72 set of Derwent Watercolour pencils) for the skin color and was then trying out other colors to see which one would look the best for shading. It was actually really difficult to do and my sister suggested that I’d use only cold colors but like... how do you use cold colors on a skin without making the character look dead? :D

I imagined that there’s a moon shining in from a window that would be behind the “camera”. I almost ruined the first panel because I wasn’t exactly sure what was I even doing and what did I want from the colors:

Here’s the lineart and almost finished first panel in colors. I really liked the lineart and this would have looked so nice in black and white too, maybe even better. But I just saw that blue background so strongly in my mind that I just had to go for it.

The first panel was really difficult to do like I said and I almost ruined it at some point. But it also taught me something because with the rest of the panels I knew to start with the skincolors and end with the black (I started the first panel with black, I think... kids, never do that, always start with the light colors! :D) and I think the last panel is the best what comes to the colors in the final comic. I also added light blue here and there to make it look more like the colors of a moon at night:

I’m actually very happy with all of the other colors in this panel! It also reminds me of a book I had and used to read as a child. It was about this girl that went to an appendix surgery and all the images were drawn with either colored pencils, pastels or crayons and it looked grainy the exact same way as this one too. It also had lots of red and orange and brown colors in it. (I wonder if I still have the book here...)

Then there’s also the title and “Das Ende”. Originally I was going to do the late 80s logo they have e.g. on the 80s live vhs/dvd but then I just saw another post in my dä blog’s queue and I just needed to do this logo instead!

I had just a couple of weeks prior ordered a pack of white Sakura Gelly Roll pens and needed to test what would make the best compination and with which black!

I also had bought a white paint pen but it’s useless. As you see, it just looks grey after it dries and it just... doesn’t look nice. Plus it takes so much time to dry AND it’s extremely messy and I have paint more in my hands and a puddle on the paper but barely none where it should be. So my choice for the logo was to use either Pigma Microns or Promarkers (I think I chose the latter) and the thickest Gelly Roll aka 10. This was the result:

And I’m actually super happy about how it came out! Couldn’t do that good looking spots on the letters because can’t make splashes with a gel pen so I did a few bigger ones here and there and then just poked everywhere with the pen to make it look more random. You can actually see how it’s slightly whiter than the paper if you look closely, but it’s not too strongly whiter so it looks pretty nice like this.

So, this was less work than the “Widumihei” one but it was also an interesting piece to draw. And I think I have now this comic drawing more freshly in mind so that drawing the next ones (there’s three waiting for sketching already) will be much easier as well :)

[unproduciblesmackdown]

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3. what is your gender presentation like?

i basically go with the flow.....honestly my Fashion Sense is real simple, really just jeans and tees (usually graphique) and yeah i also like throwing in a layer actually but also, unfortunately, I’m Sweddy all the time.....sometimes i like to wear something different, usually for Particular Occasions or just in the mood.......i rarely mess around with makeup and if i do it’s just like, idk, Maybe eyeliner lip gloss eye shadow....it’s more about having fun with it though like, really i’d go wilder when i felt like it and have it be like studio killers style colors down the face, i would cover myself in body glitter for fun b/c glitter is great and everyone is cowards..........i don’t really wear a binder that often nowadays but sometimes i totally do. it’s always been a bit confusing b/c i’ve never quite been able to fully Curate my own wardrobe cuz like, originally living with parents who really cared about my Gender Presentation, and after that not quite having the time / access / funds to go all out and do a lot of clothes shopping....but yeah honestly i think the jeans/shorts/tees is pretty much My Look. also that reminds me, yeah for the past ten years i’ve been in the process of cutting my hair shorter and shorter and i like it that way. rn it’s a great undercut that i continuously maintain myself via bathroom mirror lol......i Really don’t like that much length on the back or sides. i actually Have considered shaving my head but never committed and also a) that’s even more of a pain to grow out than an undercut and you gotta maintain it all the time. so yeah what i’m down to wear really kinda involves a mix of what’s considered Men’s Fashion and Women’s Fashion, but it leans very much towards those jeans/shorts/graphic tees/ no makeup / short hair. oh and sometimes i accessorize w like, bracelets / necklaces. but only sometimes and when i’m goin out and stuff. i’m not too fancy

6. top five favorite parts of your body (n why you love them)?

hmmm.....well i’d like to thank my legs for being long, b/c i am basically a solid 5′11″ or 6ft tall. i guess my vocal cords are a part of my body and i’m a tenor and we all know that altos and tenors are the best. body hair sure has “body” in it and is def technically part of it and i’m fairly hairy, my armpits are pretty solid and i’ve got hair on my stomach / thighs / chest and, excitingly, my eyebrows are connected and i get hair on my neck too (which is a little annoying so i kinda trim it down but i don’t like to shave it off completely b/c people think it’s weird and i’m testing them) my head hair is alright but boring tho, just brown and determinedly straight. uhh legs voice hair......i get freckles, and that’s great, my favorite physical trait probably. and uhhh.......well my brain’s doing a great job, i need that to be a conscious being, and can’t actually think of a fifth thing

8. how did you pick your name?

milo sky kilopascal burrows.......well for a long time “milo” was just like, my favorite Name....i don’t have many standouts there so it was hardly a competition, i probably took conscious notice of it via milo bloom, shoutout to my puzzling through 80s comics when things like the far side’s humor is very difficult to grasp at like, age 7. my informal-but-no-seriously Middle Names so far: for a long time it was like well “milo” is the only name i Specifically Want and there’s certainly nothing Significant out there....in true nonbinary fashion (and just trans fashion in general) going for those Names Of Objects, Baby!!!!!! i kinda leaned towards wanting something science-y related, science has Great names and terms and stuff.....and ever since taking chem i always liked the phonetics of Kilopascal and that it abbreviates as kpa lol........so i was like, fuck it, let’s go with that! and Sky is not only an object name that sounds nice but is also something i like. “burrows” occurred to me last summer when i was rereading lotr, which is a fun book obv, and also i read a fair amount of the appendices, those hobbit family trees, there’s a “milo burrows” who’s a cousin or something of frodo’s on the baggins side, i was like, oh i’m already a milo, i’ll take another character reference, love for it to be from lotr, “burrows” sounds fun and there’s nothing Else of ~great significance~ that i’d pick for a last name and god knows i’m never gonna think up a better one on my own, so, there we go. oh shit and i’m remembering that milo burrows is in the main text!! in the very beginning he’s left one of those Ironic Gifts: a pen and inkwell b/c he never answers letters. me neither. what an icon

9. what does your name mean?

aha! well! see above!! but let’s go ahead and get into etymology for fun huh. “milo” is a bit uncertain, if it’s a derivation of “miles” then that seems to be linked with the latin “miles” for Soldier, but it also is possibly from “mild,” meaning, Mild, or Peaceful, which comes from the root for milling something aka making it softer / finer, “milan,” which can mean.........To Make Tender.......could also come from “milu,” meaning Merciful. “sky” i mean in the literal definition but let’s look it up. says that in old norse that mean “cloud.” well i love clouds. kilopascal natch being the prefix Kilo meaning a thousand, and pascal is the unit of pressure named for a french scientist, i believe also the same mathematician of pascal’s triangle fame? yes it is, blaise pascal. love that shit too, man these french mathematicians......i am going to look up the etymology of the french name “pascal.” aha it is in fact like an alternative of “paschal,” coming from “pascha,” aka relating to easter, which comes from the hebrew “pesach” which of course meaning passover. burrows i’m presuming is the literal verb/noun b/c like, hobbits, but let’s etymology that too..... hey it says it’s a variant of “borough” which is great b/c i’ve been like oh “burrowburough” is a great Pun......apparently possible further roots could mean “stronghold,” “fortification,” “city,” “elevation,” “to dig,” “to protect/defend/save.” all fantastic, great

23. claim something as trans culture.

honestly being valid and wise............being young and relating to characters who are girls who don’t ~perform their gender~ properly. universal kinship there, really. and bmc