Volume 7 Page 18
Posted April 20, 2020 at 12:01 am

Panel 1: Expect to see this “NOW” caption quite a few times throughout Empowered vol. 7, as only the Ayakami warehouse scene is taking place in “real time”; everything else in the book is, in effect, a flashback taking place before this looming battle.

Panel 3: Using a bunch of pallets and boxes I found in the online archive for the 3D program SketchUp, my buddy Ryan Kinnaird worked up a model for the entire warehouse, which I then used to construct this setting’s backgrounds. I had zeeeeeero interest in working out the perspective for such a detailed environment by hand over the course of dozen upon dozens of pages and panels, needless to say. 

So, for each panel with this setting, I’d open the SketchUp model, laboriously and carefully move and tweak the camera view until I had an appropriate image, then print out a jpeg I could trace the background in a comic panel. This process was actually rather slow and time-consuming, but not stressful at all—whereas constructing such complex and detailed perspective by hand would have been very, very stressful indeed, especially when carried out many times over the course of the story.

Along those lines, I recall quite clearly that panel 3 of this page took me a full day and a half to complete, as the SketchUp warehouse-background jpeg for it was fiendishly detailed. Honestly, I probably should’ve made this panel into a full-page shot, as it’s the primary establishing shot for the Ayakami fight that rolls on throughout this volume’s 224 pages.

Today’s Patreon Update: As this is a Monday, time for our weekly double dose of life drawings new-ish (2018) and old (2017), along with the high-res Photoshop raw scans for both of ‘em, available to all Patreon tiers.

-Adam Warren

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