August News Post

The latest update to the Little Piggies comic features Zoey being introduced to the life of strict bondage that awaits her as Nelson's piggy and learning his one rule. It was pretty fun coming up with new extreme bondage contraptions that I haven't used before for this comic.  

In other news, unfortunately Gumroad has changed their TOS to no longer allow fetish content to be sold through their store, so I had to take down the AOH Shop after it was flagged.  I will be adding Blackwater Booty, Paycheck Punishment Program, and Dirty Priest to the SubscribeStar archive soon so that they will still be available here for subscribers.  

For KSB5, all 60 pages of art have been completed, and only 1-2 weeks of polish remains before I send it off to Dofantasy to publish. For those interested, my polish process usually goes as follows:

1. Composition/Pose Pass: I look through every panel and make a list of anything that needs to be re-rendered, such as a bad pose, a weird facial expression, a big visual issue that can't be painted out, or a composition that isn't working.  Then I go in and make those fixes and re-render the panel. 

2. Detail Visual Pass: Usually when I'm working on a page in photoshop, I'm zoomed out so that the page fits on the screen.  For this pass I zoom in to 100% and look at every inch for any small issues like skin poking through clothing that you might not notice unless you're zoomed in.  If it's something that can be painted out in photoshop like a small hole in clothing, I do that, but something like a finger poking through skin I need to go back and re-render that panel again.

3. Final Brightness Pass: The way my visual style is set up, in Photoshop I can paint any part of the panel about 20% lighter or darker than the base render.  I go through and touch up every panel so that it is roughly the same brightness and important things like faces and body parts are highlighted in the composition.  If any lighting is way too dark or light, I need to go back and re-render, but I've gotten consistent enough that that tends to be rare these days.  

4. AI detail replacement: For character faces and some details like wrinkled shirts, I'll cut out just the face and run it through stable diffusion to make things look a little more realistic.  Then I paste it back into the comic and mask in the areas where it is an improvement, and leave out the areas where it is the same or worse than the existing art.  For faces, the main benefit is more lifelike eyes that I can't get with CG. I do the main face pass while making the initial comic pages, so this pass is mostly touch-ups.

5. Dialogue Pass: When making the initial pages, I do a rough dialogue pass so I know where speech bubbles will be in the panel and what the characters are saying.  For the final dialogue pass, I basically read through the comic again and again and rewrite the dialogue until nothing sticks out as being weird or repetitive.  Sometimes I'll come up with new themes or subtext to carry across multiple pages, but repetitive or unnatural dialogue is the primary reason for rewrites.  I'll realize the Kayla is starting off her speech bubble by saying "oh god" in 6 of the previous 10 panels and need to come up with different things to say instead. Unfortunately, the main way to spot this stuff is just to read the entire comic through from the beginning over and over again until nothing stick out, which is usually like 5-8 times and can get pretty boring.  
  
6. Final Export: Finally, when the dialogue seems solid and I've read it through completely without finding anything I want to change, I'll run an automated spell check across all the pages, and then an automated process to flatten and export out the final pages.  

As a reminder, KSB5 will be published exclusively on Dofantasy.com and typically publishes a few weeks after I deliver it to them, so I expect it will probably be available later this month.