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/
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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 727 - Painting Series: Sky and Sea
Feb 17, 2025
We haven't done anything about actual art-making for a while so we thought we'd start a series on technical stuff. Starting out we tackle painting sea and sky! These are key general background elements, they're the two biggest simple background features you can get, you don't always need them but it's good to understand these big features for outdoor scenes and how they work.
Episode 726 - Ego!?
Feb 10, 2025
Do you have a big ego? Do you know someone who has? This Quackcast is about utilising egos for comic characters for comedic purposes, to humanise character, or to make villains more unlikeable and or funny. Big egos are a sign of poor self esteem, people inflate their egos to cope with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. For examples of that we have a certain prominent politician and also a tech billionaire as perfect representations of every facet of that concept. :)
Episode 725 - Your fave comics as a kid
Feb 3, 2025
We're chatting about the comics you liked as a little kiddo this week! The topic was inspired by a thread in the DD forums. This is always a fun topic and I always have to mention Asterix because it was so amazing. This week Tantz had to bow out but we have Gunwallace to replace her, and Banes is back! Gunwallace is a fellow Antipodean, that means he and I share many of the same cultural touch stones, particularity the comic Footrot Flats. (Tantz is still on the Patreon only video)
Episode 724 - America's Plutocratic classism
Jan 26, 2025
Is there a culture of plutocratic classism in the USA? I'm inspired by Trump's America and how people think that people like Elon Musk and him are above the law because they're rich, while conversely the lowest rank in society are the homeless and the poor. But what do I mean by “Plutocratic classism”? A plutocracy is a society where people's position is determined by their wealth, classism is our tendency to discriminate based on social class, put that together and you have people determining social value by how much money a person seems to have.
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!
