alternate universe airport fluff of Blackbird and Veloce from Carciphona

[UPDATED]

Amongst Us is my new slice of life comic about Veloce and Blackbird (: It’s an AU (ha ha) setting of my Carciphona characters for fun that I am doing on the side, you can read it for free on 

♫ the official website 
♫ TAPAS
♫ WEBTOONS. 

Thanks a lot for looking!

read  ♫ Amongst Us ★

Episode list:
[ 1 ][ next ]

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The origin of this is rather lengthy LOL i drew a random sketch of bb and vel  (http://okolnir.net/post/109268739602) back in 2015, then these two godly cosplayers Yume and Kitsurie (@yuriecos) made AN ENTIRE PHOTOSET of them (http://yuriecos.tumblr.com/post/122051133427/). I was like holy shit these looked SO GOOD and i was so inspired… but fluff is not my forte and neither is coloured comics so even though I drew this like the beginning of last year I somehow got so stuck and also had so little free time that I completely forgot about it LMAO. I only just remembered a month or so ago and finally sat my ass down and finished it. I don’t know how people write this kind of stuff.. I can only write serious shit but at the same time I have such a soft spot for fluff sometimes I just can’t with myself

this is inspired by and dedicated to yume and kitsurie, thank you guys so much for your beautiful cosplays of my babies ;_; please check them out!! 

tumblr: @yuriecos
yume ✮ https://www.instagram.com/yumecos/
kitsurie ✮  https://www.instagram.com/kitsurie

✮ PSD/full process video/steps for this piece for my May patrons at http://patreon.com/shilin ✮

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Facebook: http://facebook.com/ashenray
My manga: http://carciphona.com
My print/book shop: http://shop.shilin.net

On the technical aspect of this strip, I never really knew what to do with coloured comics because the way I paint is super intricate and I am not happy with just flats, but painting every panel is foolish because I will never finish anything if I have to put in any time polishing the colouring. The other problem is the way I draw manga panels is not like screenshots, I don’t draw complete backgrounds and scenes, and at the same time I’m garbage at coming up with an abstract background colour that fits the scene. This makes everything a huge struggle and although I was pretty happy with book 6’s coloured pages that I painted in November, it’s nonetheless still too time consuming for anything beyond rare special occasions.

On this comic I wanted to try using the kind of sharp edges and solid blocks of colours for colouring that I’ve tried in some previous patreon sketches. The most time consuming thing about rendering is just blending and cleaning, and I can get rid of that step by removing shading that needs to be blended and sticking with these blocks of colours. I can still use many many colours this way instead of being stuck with just 1 bland layer of shadows, and the hard edges along with layer masks creates an illusion of polish that my usual roughly coloured pieces lack. I’ve always liked this aspect of the rough works of suqling , algenpfleger and comics of nesskain  and how the hard edges can give texture and polish without being polished; I’d say these people influenced me the most in my attempts to paint in a way that makes sense to me in the past years. I can’t say how much I think it worked out on this comic but my bottom line of it not taking way too long, and not looking rough and unfinished was met, and I didn’t feel constricted about what I can do. Maybe in the future I can figure out the background and lighting thing in the panels if I have time to draw more stuff like this!