Episode 730 - Lighting by The Doodler
Mar 10, 2025
Today we have on a super special guest, The Doodler! This is another on our technical series about art making and this time we're talking about lighting. Tantz suggested we interview The Doodler for this because she's Tantz's go-to person for lighting issues in scenes. It was great to chat with The Doodler about her lighting techniques and the different challenges presented by different scenes. The Doodler was much better at explaining the concepts than I could have been so it was a pleasure to have her on the cast!
Topics and Show Notes
You might know the Doodler for her long running comic The Second Crimean war, about an alternate history of the Russian takeover of the Crimean region after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 90s- this comic was created in 2010, before the modern takeover of Crimea in 2014. It's a popular and well drawn comic with top level artwork. It's mostly black and white with some limited use of colour. It's over 800 pages so it's a sizable chunk of comic to get into and I highly recommend it!
Lighting is the most fundamental thing there is to visual art because it allows all things to be seen: a radiating body sheds light rays in straight lines around itself and these are absorbed or reflected off the objects they hit, in turn we see those objects because of the photons that are reflected into our eyes… It's MUCH more complex than that though. As comic artists we usually do things backwards: we draw line art, which would mean the default is that EVERYTHING is fully lit and visible, then we work out where the light comes from and what's in shadow.
The simplest way to handle lighting in a comic is just to draw stuff as if there ware spotlights illuminating it all from the viewer perspective, like a stage play or TV sitcom- no shadows, full lighting. A more advanced, realistic approach suggested by The Doodler is to treat the image like a 3D space and work out where the light comes from (the sun, a flashlight, an overhead light etc), then ray trace from that point to work out what's in shadow and what's lit up. Listen to the interview to get a much better discussion on it than what I can write here!
Gunwallace wasn't able to give us a theme this week so we're replaying his theme to The Second Crimean war - Heavy, grey winter skies, pregnant with snow and sadness. Cold snaps the brittle air, crystal daggers hang in the forest, a whistling breeze sings of desolation and loneliness. A thaw will be long in coming to this blighted world of war and suffering… Synth violins and cellos set the scene beautifully, touches of quiet bass and piano round out the landscape of the Second Crimean war. (Originally part of Quackcast 494)
Topics and shownotes
Links
Our guest The Doodler! - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/The%20doodler/
Featured comic:
Black Tiger - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/mar/04/featured-comic-black-tiger/
Featured music:
The Second Crimean war - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_Second_Crimean_War/ - by The doodler, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
VIDEO exclusive!
Become a subscriber on the $5 level and up to see our weekly Patreon video and get our advertising perks!
- https://www.patreon.com/DrunkDuck
Even at $1 you get your name with a link on the front page and a mention in the weekend newsposts!
Join us on Discord - https://discordapp.com/invite/7NpJ8GS
Episode 729 - The Feather report
Mar 3, 2025
The 3rd in our technical art-making series, we're talking hair, feathers, and fur today. How do you draw those highly complicated, textured things? Well the complicated, difficult way is to draw every single strand of hair, every follicle of fur, and every filament of feather… But that has a lot of disadvantages! So how else do you approach it?
Episode 728 - Skinship
Feb 24, 2025
Today we're going into another aspect of creating artwork for webcomics! This time it's painting skin, a topic that Tantz suggested. How do you render skin? It's a super common thing in comics and there are many, many ways to do it! We're not experts on all the methods so we just cover what WE do. We all have different approaches and you'll have to listen to the cast to see what Tantz and Banes say.
Episode 723 - Changing tech and design
Jan 20, 2025
We're talking about how technology and design changes so much over the years and how that can change things with plot in story and it can also help pinpoint the date of something sometimes better than other things like fashion. The biggest one we talked about were phones, which have changed so much over the last few decades. Universally connected smartphones mean huge story changes- characters can all look up whatever they need at any time, communicate with people instantly, entertain themselves, take photos and videos etc. That can massively affect plots!
Episode 721 - A plot B plot
Jan 4, 2025
A standard thing in stories is to have multiple plot lines. In short stories or when you're just starting out as a writer you tend to have a single line, the A plot, but as soon as you get a bit more experience and write longer stories you'll find the plots tend to branch and multiply, even if you don't always fully intend it. The usual is to have the A and B plots: the A is the main one that drives the story and the B is where you put other interesting junk like character development, villain stuff, comic relief, love interests etc. But it can get a LOT more advanced than that and you can have far more than simply A and B.
Episode 720 - Happy New Year!
Dec 30, 2024
It's not the new year yet but this is the final Quackcast of 2024 and it's coming out on New Year's Eve! In this Quackcast we do a bit of a year in review. A bit happened this year… DD reached its 22nd year online being one of the oldest sites on the internet and definitely one of the very oldest free comic hosts next to Keenspace which doesn't really exist now. We released another DD anthology comic collection, A Flock of Dreams (linked bellow), in which your Quackcast hosts collaborated on a comic together! We were really proud of that, Key of Dreams, our story was a real work of love, and you can read that in the anthology.
Episode 713 - Gunwallace, Master Composer
Nov 11, 2024
Today we have onboard with us our resident theme maker, our classic composer and musical genius! He does all the DD comic inspired themes that regularly appear on the Quackcast and has done so for the last 10 years! In that time he's done almost 600 musical themes. At the moment Gunwallace is the games-master of a Star Trek roleplay thing that Tantz, Banes, and I all do after the cast. He's based an illustrated story on it called “On the Edge” with art by Banes and Genejoke, and some by Tantz and me, Ozoneocean.
Episode 712 - Guncast
Nov 4, 2024
This week we're talking the development of weapons, tactics and armour over the millennia. This is a fun little overview of everything from ancient stone weapons, to bronze, to iron, steel, guns, tanks, and jet-fighters and all the interesting stuff in between. Comic stories often involve literal conflict whether set in the past, the present, future, or fantasy and Scifi, so overviews are always good.
