It’s another Monday morning, which means if I haven’t been slacking over the past week, a new page of Variables gets posted. Here’s page nine and we’re back to Isabel and Candice while they investigate the next break-in and deal with another snotty white Atlanta suburbanite.

One of the things I liked least about the first several pages of Variables was the lack of interesting facial expressions. I never wanted this book to become too cartoony but many of the expressions on previous pages just fell flat. They were boring. In this page, I tried to loosen that up a bit to find a happy medium between traditional American comic style and some of the more exaggerated expressions you see in popular online comics. I think it worked but there’s still some room for improvement.

I’ve also dedicated myself to drawing more backgrounds in some of the smaller panels. It’s all too easy to skip out on a panel background due to time restrictions but after the previous few pages, I saw how much I was leaving out and decided to do something about it. So in this page, I added more background elements to a few of the smaller panels and I think the results make the page look more interesting. I enjoy both the time savings and feel of some of the abstract background work but more of the panels need to be grounded in reality with a fully rendered background, in my opinion. Another thing I plan to continue to work on as we enter the second half of the first issue.

Speaking of which, the first issue of Variables is right around the halfway mark! Including the cover (but not the inside cover), there are 21 pages of material in the first issue. You’re looking at the completion of page 10 of that work right now.

That’s about it for this morning. Click through the image below to see the rest of the first issue!

Page 9

Share this page: