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?
Topics and Show Notes
The simplest way is to draw the overall shape that the full thing makes up and just do an outline of the rough edges. So for a hair style that would be the full shape with some hairs sticking out at the edges, with fur that's sort of the same thing though it's a lot less smooth than hair, with feathers just draw the whole wing with a few edge feathers and for the feathers themselves draw some parting in the filaments. Then what you do is add some texture within the shape, but only enough to suggest the rest, the viewer's brain will fill in everything else.
If you want to get more advanced and painterly then you use the colours of the thing (feathers, fur, or hair), to create impressions of texture, shape, shadow, and highlights within it. The straighter hair is the more shine it will have, and conversely the curlier it is the less it can have, the same goes for fur, unless the hairs are facing you end on, in which case it has no shine.
How do you approach these things?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Grapeshot - A charmingly, whimsical, sea themed folky tune, promising adventure, action, booty, and freely flowing grog. Dance a little jig to the joyous violin!
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Pos Adventure - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/feb/24/featured-comic-pos-adventure/
Featured music:
Grapeshot - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Grapeshot/ - by Mercuryviruscomic, 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
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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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!
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.
