Well, this is the very first comic of the new art style, and quite a way we've come. Besides minor things (Duke now wears short sleeved shirts, as opposed to Thanatos's full sleeve affairs), there have been major changes in how I drew everyone. I don't think I've done another side view comic after
this one. It's just a bit too hard for my limited skills. When I first did the new style, I decided to set a few constants to make it easier in future for myself. Duke has 4 wads of hair going forward, and one backward. He wears a dark red shirt and blue jeans as default, while Thanatos wears a deep green with blue jeans. This was probably because I don't really wear shorts myself, and drawing them just looks funny considering I wear jeans 99.5% of the time. Seriously, I should be getting sponsored or something....Where was I? Oh right. Constants in this comic. I use the same fleshtone for all the main characters, to make it easier, and make Wang roughly kidney shaped. I try to make them have 5 fingers, but I occasionally slip subconsciously, because I a) have bad math skills, and I forget even the most basic things like counting (seriously), and b) It makes their hands sometimes look too big for the rest of their bodies. Actually, I slipped up here, because up till now, Duke had had the full yellow hair, while Thanatos had had the paler yellow, but I must've gotten confused during the change over. Since then, their hair has been the same, though. Duke, Thanatos and Nat all use the same font in their speech (Mead Bold), Wang uses Snap ITC, and Jesusman cycles through fonts, because he doesn't appear regularly enough for me to remember what I used the last time. I later decided to only show Duke's eyebrows when he was expressing things. This was because I had originally based his look on
Dilbert, and although Scott Adams can pull it off, it just made Duke look weird. Especially when the art started changing at a more rapid pace. I later repealed that self imposed rule, and now Duke has eyebrows like everyone else. I taught myself to draw differently through experimentation, and looking at other art available on the net. Thanatos and Duke's look came from mostly
Sluggy Freelance Fan-Art, and a little
3 finger salute while Nat was a mixture of
Polymer City, random Anime (hence her bug-like eyes, to borrow a phrase from item-chan of 3fs), and old Wonder Woman comics my brother had back in the 70s. Man, that rifle is kinda funny looking. It's curved like a banana. I actually just copied it from a Max Payne website displaying each weapon in the game, and their real life counterparts. On a side-note, nearly every comic after this has used basically the same coloured backgrounds, which I took from various
Penny Arcade comics, in order to give a better 'comicy' feel to them. Doing backgrounds is just way too much effort.
Ah, new style. You're getting slightly warmer in the search!