Progressions X hit 300,000 pageviews today! And this week I've lettered pages 1-17 of "The Appearance of Respectability" and drawn five Progressions X pinups to start posting on Monday.
Since the final Progressions X story finished last week, and Chastity Towers won't begin for another month, what I've decided to do is to draw a series of pinups focusing on a different fetish each week. The first week covers facials, and I've drawn closeup portraits of Pam Sage, Mad Morello, Ariane Usher, Jane Cutler and a combined pic of Ariane and Isabel.
Instead of Prog-X's regular update schedule of several pages on Monday, these portraits are going to post each day from Monday through Friday. Next week will cover a different topic, and so on, until Chastity Towers begins. Who knows, I may continue doing something similar even after Chastity Towers starts. It's fun and they're full color! So it's been a great exercise in doing more color.
(WARNING: Not safe for work (NSFW) discussion follows.)
Speaking of color, I learned quite a bit about doing fetish artwork from doing this series of pinups. Obviously when the subject matter that's fetishized is a woman's face covered in semen, the way the cum is rendered makes a big difference to whether it's an appealing image or not. And if that sort of thing isn't a particular fetish of yours, it's going to look ridiculous anyway!
In this case I tried about half a dozen different ways of rendering the cum until finally settling on what ended up being the simplest way to do it AND the most effective. The drawings are done in a stylized cartoon method with thick black lines and fairly flat colors, but I started out working on nearly photo-realistic renderings of the shapes, color and texture of the semen. That just looked freaky, so I tried mixing the realistic coloring with black outlines and that still didn't work.
What I was trying to do was based on the way it looks in real life--our brain wants cum to be WHITE, but in most cases it's translucent and reflective, so it's got a lot of variety in color, especially depending on the skin color underneath it. So I was trying to stay faithful to that reality, and finding that it was just not working against the cartoon style of the portraits.
I then decided to reduce it to three colors--a base color, a white highlight, and a darker shadow. I really wanted it to be shiny and get that highlight, but I found that in every case, if I made the base color dark enough to make the highlight apparent, it didn't look like what it was supposed to be. It just looked like a grey or tan fluid, and that was not right at all.
So finally I stripped out the highlight and colored it with a single near-white base color and a simple shadow along the edges. This gave it exactly the kind of volume it needed, it was consistent with the cartooning style of the portraits and communicated exactly what was necessary to the brain.
In the end it was the absolute simplest way possible to do it, but I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't gone through all those steps first.
Labels: comics, progressions, progressions-x
