19th Mar 2021, 7:57 AM
I've had this story in my head for so long that I always wonder if these little twists are surprising to the reader, or if you are guessing what's coming. As I've said before, my writing process is somewhat elastic, and the timing of when and how to reveal this story point changed a few times as I worked on the pages leading up to it. I tried having them bump into each other at the bottom of the previous page, but there simply wasn’t space for it. I feel it would have weakened both the mislead and the surprise reveal I was attempting - I needed the reader to believe, as the characters did, that they were not going to see each other again. This way, this new page reveals both their entwined destinies and the new location at the same time, and hopefully the impact of all that is heightened by a full double-page image.
As you can probably tell, this image was a lot of work! That was okay though, because it gave me time to come up with a punny name for the candy factory. I was initially thinking “Mostest”, as a play on the classic 1970s Hostess Fruit Pie comic book ads (I LOVE those!). Unfortunately this had been done a few times in the past (I guess a lot of other comic writers loved those ads too!)
I had “Chewers’ Choice”, “Luxury Sweets” (which I repurposed as slogans on the sign), and I was leaning towards some variation on “Yesyou Candy”, before I settled on “Mostun Candy”. It sort of sounds like “Hostess”, but works on its own, too. I briefly toyed with making it look like someone had graffitied an “N” over the “D” in “Candy”, to make the pun really clear (Most Uncanny/ Mostun Candy), but decided against it. Hopefully you got the joke without that.
I posted a few work-in-progress pictures of the very early stages of this drawing on the Steamroller Man Facebook page, if you’re interested. It occurred to me, far too late, that a timelapse video of the entire process of painting this image would have been fun. Oh well... I’ll have to do it for my next double-pager.
For those wondering, this image was created in Clip Studio Paint EX. The perspective ruler tools were invaluable! The telephone poles that frame the building were low-res CG models that I imported and painted to integrate them into the rest of the image. The brickwork texture, the candies on the factory sign, and the text fonts were downloaded too. I drew everything else by hand. I don’t consider myself an experienced digital painter by any means, so I’m quite proud of how this turned out!