Episode 5 Commentary – Art Style Experiments

Episode 5 looks different from the rest of the episodes – a lot different.

When I first started working on Petra’s Call, I fell into a trap that a lot of creators fall into – I kept rewriting and redrawing Episode 1.

I would finish it, throw everything out and do it again because I had spotted a tiny flaw that apparently required a complete re-write. After spending two months working on Petra’s Call, I had 5 versions of Episode 1 at different levels of completion, but I hadn’t even thought about starting Episode 2. And for a comic that was supposed to put out one episode a week, that was a problem.

My art, writing, Flash Skillz and understanding of the medium were always improving, so I always knew I could do better, so I kept going back and starting from scratch – because I knew I could do better. My wheels were spinning – I was doing a ton of work – on one episode.

I had to start moving forward.

I came up with a plan: I would complete 8 episodes, and then, with these episodes done, I would go back and redo the first 4 episodes and then move onto Episode 9. (the initial plan was 6 episodes complete and redo first 2, but pacing, staging and story demands broke up the first two bigger episodes into more episodes.)

Another part of the plan was to do each episode in a completely different style until I found something I was comfortable with.

Before Petra’s Call, I had barely used Photoshop at all. I had never digitally painted, colored and even sketched in Photoshop before. I knew I would learn a lot by doing the first round of episodes and playing around in each one.

Episode 5 was an experiment in a combination of a loose painted/sketched style with some cleaner animated style panels. In some places it really works and in others, it’s really weird. When it came time to decide whether I was going to redo the episode, I decided to leave it as-is and push forward.

It’s a fun experiment and I hope you enjoy it.