Sakido's Burial

Slightly Damned is celebrating its third birthday and throwing a competition. The challenge set was to reproduce any part of SD's actual story in some form, be it a video, a comic, a musical composition or just a plain old picture. Not having any skill at video or composition, I stuck to acrylics, with Gimp for speech bubbles.

I picked the scene of Sakido's burial because it seemed like a very graphic moment, something that could be put into a single view. Most of the Slightly Damned story works over a series of frames, so much that I couldn't find a series of 3-4 frames that made a reasonable whole. So I jettisoned the idea of painting several frames, and went for the One Big Picture. There were a few opportunities that worked, but the burial seemed atmospheric and had three characters appearing simultaneously, but not interacting.

I spent some time wrestling with the line art, especially for Buwaro and Rhea's arms. The down-from-above perspective is new for me and caused some erasing. Overall, Sakido went quickest, then Buwaro, after I got him down right once, then Rhea, because I had to rescale her. Originally, she seemed actually bigger than Buwaro.

Painting was more pleasant than I had expected. I smeared some blue and white around for the snowy background, then went to the characters. I actually used thick black outlines, which is a little unusual for me. It's a pain to do with a soft brush, too, but it adds to the comic feel. Then solid color areas with some shading for contour. Fur markings and for Rhea some grey wash to give the impression of being in a pit. Voilà!

Characters, text and scene © Raizy the Chu