In this week’s comic, me and Liam were having a conversation about the price and sizes of pizza, in which he had told me that the price of a 10″ pizza was the equivalent to half of a 14″. At this moment, I had not read him properly, (this was a conversation over text) and thought that he was saying that a 10″ and 14″ pizza had the same area, so because he was so adamant when I was telling him he was wrong, I did the math and was getting frustrated, until I reread his message where he had said HALF of a 14″ pizza was the equivalent of a 10″.
So, already frustrated with the conversation, especially having to do math for no reason, I wanted the conversation to just end and swap to something new. But Liam had other points to still discuss, as he felt (and I agreed with, but the laws of math were not on our side) that surely a 10″ pizza should be half of a 20″ pizza. Which started him explaining his conspiracies that the pizza companies are against us, a couple of days later, this being the subject of our new comic.
In this piece, I have shown our conversation in the present time, showing Liam’s enthusiasm and my lack of interest to the subject. In the second frame, I have then shown the both of us as elderly characters, the kitten Wednesday is still in my lap 60 years later, but is older. In my mind, he will outlive the both of us and this is not up for debate! And 60 years from now, I still see Liam bringing this subject back up in conversation, and myself still being sick of the subject, but in this time, he is even more adamant that the pizza companies are against us, as he has more elderly man rage (‘get off my lawn’ whilst waving his walking stick at children type of energy).
I was happy to work on this piece, as I feel I have tried to play around with backgrounds and scenery more. In the background of the second frame, I have drawn a fireplace with photos and ornaments scattered across the mantlepiece, for this, I had taken inspiration from my Grandmas home, which was similar to this setup, but I have exaggerated some of the elements. I had also added in rocking chairs, which myself and Liam have already agreed that we are purchasing as soon as we live together, we really are already old at heart, and behind them, I have also added in a zimmer frame for myself, then a walking stick hanging on the arm of Liam’s chair.
Although I was very happy with the background, it did seem to become slightly problematic when it had come to adding in the text. To overcome this problem, I had selected all of the layers for the background, then copied the selection as merged, then pasted them back into place. Now with the one layer, I had dimmed down the opacity, enough so that it was still visible, but still allowed the text to stand out. To help a little more, in a separate layer underneath the text, I used a watercolour brush in photoshop, (as it would give a softer approach, as to a quite harsh highlight of the text) then I started to build up a white base to make more contrast between the background and text.
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Melon.R 