Goodbye, 2023! Hello terrifying, unknowable emptiness of the future.
Hope you all had fun celebrating the holidays with your family, friends, and/or chosen bottle of poison. Back to the salt mines with you! Please remember to thank your capitalist oligarchs for generously allowing you a break from the factory/office/rig/mine/counter…whatever it is you’re now chained to again.
And if that does not apply to you and you are independently wealthy, might I interest you in becoming a paid subscriber, dear sir or madame…
Page 6 of Skingirl has been sitting on my desk for some time, scabbing over, oozing, ripening… But now that I’ve been thoroughly cleansed by the purifying consumerism of the mas of X, I can safely say she’s ready for showtime….
We’ll start with page four and work our way forward. Stay tuned afterward for some commentary from the intrepid, ink-stained brain of artist Chris Winter.
A word from our artist…
“Page six of SkinGirl was fun for a bunch of reasons, and it was also a point where I was starting to get a feel for what we were creating. Now I had previous pages I did that could reference. This is also a kind of obstacle too, since continuity was being established with the characters and terrain, and little stylistic details I might do for fun or creativity might then conflict with previous pages. One thing that stuck out for me was that it was the first time we got a real up-close mugshot of SG after she had been rolling around in the pit for a while. Her skin is beginning to split and tear, and I did draw some muscle underneath which probably shouldn't be there. But that will quickly rot away as time continues to pass. Her eye caverns still have a faint glimmer in them suggesting some sort of energy or life, but I probably should have made it fainter. In doing this project I am torn between just executing ideas and then realizing there may be some continuity or style errors that I would have done differently had I the ability to think about all the details in unison or going back in time. Also, I work on this in the little free time I have, so while there isn't a deadline exactly, I force myself to pull the trigger on depicting things so I don't experience "analysis paralysis," and so I'm productive in the little time I have. Looking back there are always some things I wish I did differently or spent more time on before turning it in. I think that experience is likely not one endemic to myself or my process, and I also have to learn to let go and move forward. I care a TON about this project, and I am a very harsh critic of myself. That's how one gets better, I suppose. To circle back, I really like the mugshot I did, but there are parts of it I would have changed if I was able to go back and start again at a certain point. There are so many instances of this in my finished pages.
One of the things that makes this project so easy is that Sean graciously and deftly provides a page layout for me, and there is little to none that I would tweak about it. Furthermore, often if there was a tweak I had made, it usually was because I didn't pay close enough attention to the script or layout while I was drawing it! This page really had a feeling of the video games I would play as a child, with the large bird's eye map layout in the center, the gathering of the sword and shield, and then the 2nd person (3rd person? idk.) view of SG running away from the camera in the final panels. I kept thinking about "The Legend of Zelda" on the original Nintendo system, and later as Sean and I discussed, the retro video game aspect of the page was not unintentional at all, so it was another example of our minds operating on very agreeable wavelengths. We are close in age and also have similar tastes in media, so it isn't some huge coincidence, and it makes for a smooth partnership. Looking at it from the viewer's standpoint as playing a video game kinda makes it more interactive, or personal, like you're reading it, but also participating in the adventure, screaming at SG from behind, like "watch out! don't go that way! there are enemies right behind you, jump!" The page layouts shift between this 16-bit game perspective to interconnected panels displaying the passage of time with breaks in borders but not scenery which I think is really clever and fun to draw.
The obvious detail of page 6 that jumps out is the large cracking egg as a centerpiece. In the script, the eggs are described as being asymmetrical and "...like strange, obsidian modern art." Asymmetrical I can do! I do most everything freehand and usually under the influence of coffee, so straight lines and symmetry are nemeses to me by nature. The obsidian part was a great guideline to describe the material, but how does one convey obsidian in black and white effectively? It's obviously a reflective, shiny surface, but one of the key qualities of the volcanic glass is its oily opalescence. There is a very fine rainbow spectrum bordering every glare it reflects and even in the pitch of it. Doing a Google image search confirmed this. So I knew that there would be areas of absolute black, but the glare and reflective portions would not only be very bright but finely multicolored. This was one of those times where I decided that it was out of my hands and I decided a lot of it would just have to be left to our exceptional colorist Kelly. I did go over the solid black areas with a white gel pen to make fine cracks, and tried not to dwell on what I thought I could do to make it perfect, and rather just DID what I could. This is a recurring conclusion that has been a theme of this project. For this page and many times before, I really learned that just doing something is better than thinking about doing something and it typically turns out better than you hoped. (Especially when you have a colorist like Kelly.)
Speaking of overthinking things, a common trope among depictions of Hellscape environments is the vast cover of ominous thunderclouds and jagged bolts of lightning perforating the rocky, creviced terrain. This is how I drew the background in the comic thus far. There will be scenes I'm sure where this is not the case for the sake of context and spontaneity. I also don't know if this is something I talked about with the team or just a knee-jerk instinct to depict the subject matter. I know that I am not completely in love with it, purely because it is a trite depiction to me. But for this page and the following pages, there is a lot of growth and experiments on what I think looks less stereotypical. I don't think I have it quite at this point but later on in the pages I feel better about where I'm headed with it, specifically making the clouds and the lightning coming out of them look believable. For the landscape itself, where we're at in terms of location still seems like the boonies of hell. There is some infrastructure, but it's mostly rural, in the outskirts of the larger city. I get to tap into my personal experience and memories of walking around an ancestral ranch property that my Dad grew up on (in? Did my dad grow up "on" or "in" a Ranch? Shit.), so the dilapidated barn and tractor and the house with the big porch in the bottom panels, along with the random animal bones, car parts, dead trees and rock outcroppings are all very sentimental to me. Writing this at the moment makes me realize I effectively put those things in Hell, and now I don't know how to reconcile that with myself. Yikes. Well, it was stolen land anyway.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to UNSKIND to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.