Sorry for the delay, but here it is, the new title page for Chapter 1:

As you can see, it’s more dynamic than the old one was. If I’d known how long it was between starting the project and launching the site, I wouldn’t have hurried to get the original title page done so quickly and early and it may have turned out better. Or not. Either way, I like this one better.

As previously announced, the new title page will be included in the Chapter 1 Download Pack (originally reffered to as “Chapter 1: Complete”). Below is a tentative list of things that are getting lined up for the download pack. The release date for the download pack has been pushed back to at least the end of this month since this is taking longer than I expected and I’m just lazy.

These will be included in the download pack, but will also be availible online:

– New title page
– An all new page (to bring the grand total of pages in the chapter up to an odd number)
– At least one or two of the earlier pages will be redone in order to make them look better

These will be exclusive to the download pack:

– High-resolution color version of the title page image
– High-resolution jpegs of all 23 pages
– A seperate .pdf document with all 23 pages
– Commentary for Chapter 1

Keep in mind that this is not final; we may add more to the pack, or we may end up dropping something. I’m also open to suggestions if you want to e-mail us or add a comment to this blog entry. We’re still deciding on pricing–that won’t be finalized until we know for sure what we’re going to include.

And, for those of you hoping for news on Chapter 4, it will kick off tommorow as planned, but you’ll only be getting 2 pages (including the title page). I hate to only do 2 pages, especially when starting off a chapter, but I’m falling seriously behind and, with a planned vacation coming up in a few weeks, I don’t want to have a week with only 1 page. I don’t know–maybe I’ll have to do something special instead for the week I’m gone. 😉

Due to issues with our internet provider, we will likely be somewhat slow to update for the next two weeks. Don’t worry, however, we don’t plan to skip any SMOdyssey updates (although they may be late).

It’s storming pretty bad down this way so if Swordmaster Odyssey isn’t updated until later than usual then it’s probably because our internet connection and/or power has gone out. Just a head’s up.

While poking around the site getting things ready for tommorow, I noticed that the description tag for the site is off: It says that Jessie is looking for her “borther”. Hmm… I better fix that ASAP…

Vision Riders Entertaiment, Inc. is proud to announce “Swordmaster Odyssey Chapter 1: Complete”, the first of several coming releases related to the Vision Riders webcomic. The downloadable title, which will be availible through the Vision Riders Online Store, will include every page from Chapter 1 of Swordmaster Odyssey in high resolution. The content pack will include additional extras along with an updated version of the Chapter 1 Title Page, bringing it more in line with the style of later chapters in the series.

The download pack is expected to be released later this month, followed by Chapter 2: Complete in August and Chapter 3: Complete in September. More details, including price and a list of extra content, will be released in the coming weeks.

And now, for the second draft image that I showed everyone:

The final version is actually quite close to the original draft. The only major difference here is that the close-up of the stuck-up provincial guard captian was changed to an over-the-shoulder shot of Silver looking down at him. This was done for two reasons: first, it reinforces the idea that Silver was up in a tree. I wanted to make sure that the reader knew where he was in relation to the other characters, and understood why they didn’t realize that he had been watching the whole time. Second, it’s just a more interesting shot.

The second panel didn’t turn out nearly as good as I had hoped; speed lines have never been my strong point. Just thought I should mention that.

Hopefully we’ll be able to do this again when we get to chapter 4 early next month!

Hmm… I seem to have forgotten to insert the “pamf” sound effect when Silver lands on the ground. I’ll have to fix that later…

Doing Swordmaster Odyssey purely in solid tones of grays means that finishing up a page is a realitively simple task. There’s generally not a whole lot of work that goes into plopping the gray in there.

However, the system has its drawbacks. It doesn’t look quite as polished as it would had I done an ink wash style, giving it a painted effect sans the color. But the most annoying thing of all is the exact tone of gray. Getting just the right shade of gray is simple enough–But when you look at it on another moniter, it’s a completely different shade! Not only are shades lighter or darker, they’re even closer together or farther apart from each other than I may have initially intended! And it looks different yet again when printed, which may turn out to be a small challenge when Book 1 is finally completed and ready for press later this year.

This issue is something I was aware of before I began and, really, it’s not generally that big a deal (color and tone is much greater issue in television, for the record). However, the art style I chose to do the comic in had an unintended side-effect. You see, getting to tone just right for the lips is one of the hardest parts of cleaning and finishing the line work. If the comic were in color, or even just painted grays instead of solids, the differences between formats and screens would be less noticable.

Heh. Always the little things. 🙂

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the original draft for page 4 that we showed off a couple weeks ago and the final page.

Quite a few differences, aren’t there? Even though I know where I want the story to go, it’s not always clear how it should get there. While I have a rough idea of what works best when I put together the draft, I spend a good deal of time thinking about the exact way things should appear on the page before I ever put a pencil to the bristol board.

In “part 2” we’ll look at what’s changed in the second page we previewed… But we have to get to that page first. 🙂

One of the more interesting aspects of drawing the same character over and over again is that you begin to fail to notice certain… Inaccuracies. Take Jessie’s hair, for instance. In the original sketches of the character she has a moderately-sized pony tail. In the first few pages of the webcomic, however, I noticed that I had drawn it much larger than I originally intended. “Oh well,” said I, “I’ll just draw it that way from now on. Of course, by the end of the chapter I had noticed that I had continued to draw it larger and larger. Blarg.

In any case, I’m slowly whittling it down in size. The same thing happened to her eyes. I drew them the wrong way for the first ten or twenty pages, then switched back to the way I had originally meant. A sloppy way of progressing, no doubt, but it works, I guess.