The Last Day of Rain Update: 22nd of March 2024
Building the map of Shiba Town, an underground city in the heart of London.
A version of this post was originally published on the 22nd of March 2024, in a private newsletter to my Kickstarter backers. I’m now making all the updates available to the public, so you can see how I create my comic books.
Hi there, and happy Friday! What have you been up to this week?
I’ve been inking more pages, so I don’t have a lot to show that doesn’t look very similar to what you have seen before. So instead, I’ll show you how I’m using a 3D map to help draw the scenes that happen in Shiba Town.
In case you missed this in the description of the Kickstarter page, Shiba Town is an underground neighbourhood excavated in South London, where Surrey Quays and Canada Water used to be. Most Londoners moved there when the rain stopped falling, except for those who couldn’t afford it. It’s the new city centre!
In order to visualise how the underground neighbourhood would look like, I created a 2D map and a 3D model of the city. The map looks very rough around the edges, because I’m using it only as a guide, but I promised you behind-the-scenes content, so here it is!
The yellow bit is above ground, and it’s where Carol, Art and Pepper live with their pets.
I then placed the map in Blender and began creating the city.
And finally added the three areas and some buildings. The buildings outside Shiba Town are imported from Google Maps, so I didn’t need to model them myself!
And it’s an underground city, so it features a roof made of solar panels on top:
I didn’t add details to all the buildings, as the model is mostly there to help me place the characters as the story unfolds.
Here’s an example of how I used it to speed up the sketching process, and so the city looks more consistent throughout:
I used a similar process in the cover. Here’s the final image:
And the 3D render underneath, which is a zoomed in view of the map you saw above:
It’s the first book where I’m using 3D extensively and I’m hoping that it will make things look better in the end. But I’ll be waiting for you to tell me if that’s the case, when you receive the comics! 😁
And this is it for today! I hope you have an excellent weekend and looking forward to catching up again next Friday. ✨
Claudia
Thank you for reading! The four chapters of The Last Day of Rain are available in my online store at shop.claudiamatosa.com.
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