Explosion!

Ozoneocean on Feb. 6, 2006

Page description:
Expecting to intimidate a poorly armed tribal attack with their superior technology and firepower, the pilots are completely unprepared for this type of attack. Pinky strafes across the platforms, shooting out the lights and launching two slow rockets out of the dark at the same time. When his light is hit one of them men reflexively fires of a blast with his mighty cannons, even as the glass is still tinkling and glittering all around him. Pinky has a moment to comment on their ineptitude, just before the final blow.
The rockets hit, reducing the machines to fractured steel and molten fragments, Pinky is strafing all the while… Buoyed up by this simple victory, Pinky convinces herself that things might not go all that badly after all, even though her entire plan has just been flushed down the toilet -She knows she can’t risk looking for the reservoir now that she’s sure they’re on guard, vigilant, and know they’re under attack. She could be picked of easily if there are other gun platforms lurking out there…
And so, with the still blazing wrecks framing the way, she prepares to enter the base.

Commentary:
Those two big glowy explosions worked out just as well as I’d hoped here, that doesn’t always happen. I think I accidentally set one of the layers to “dodge” or something and I thought it looked so good that I just worked with it again and again until it achieved exactly the effect I wanted. I remember that it only worked with dark colours with very light ones over the top… Very tricky! What I most like is the fiery heap in the last panel. Now though, I do these yellow fiery glowy effects purely without layer properties, I find it much easier and quick to simply paint it all in normally. It’s fine as long as you know which colours to use.
I find that red colours often compress really badly in Photoshop Jpegs. Anyone else find that?

Writer's challenge!
We’ve started up a weekly writer’s challenge in the forums. Each week writers try writing a short fanfic based on the characters of a DD comic we choose for that week. The first comic is Two Moons. See the details and entries here. It’s a fun way to practise your writing ^_^

A note:
Go to my main site for the latest work (27th January, 2006). I’m uploading one page a day with commentary and explanations here.