And here it is. The belly of the beast.

If I had any sort of idea what exactly it was that my eyes are currently supposed to be offended by, I would probably join Fris and Avie in their mocking of this odd-looking fusion reactor. However, my miserable track record of pre-university physics grades affords me no such liberty.

Oh, well, guess I’ll just have to fall back on my basic human instinct of joining others when they make fun of stuff, even if I have no fucking clue what they’re talking about! I mean, that’s what the internet is about anyway, right?

Yeah!
Fuck physics and fuck school, I’m off to start shit with dark matter researchers on Twitter!

Website-Exclusive Author’s Note:

Hmm, what insights can I even share about this page? I’m not quite sure.

Well, let’s state the obvious thing first: This page COULD have been done within a single week, but I chose to drag out the creation process to the point of it taking more than two weeks to complete. This time, I have excuses, though. Bad thing is, that I’m unwilling to share those excuses just yet. You’ll have to wait for my next livestream to hear about all the cool things that have kept me from committing to my AAiS obligations with the ferocity that I, otherwise, would have deemed necessary.

Those mysterious background schemings aside, though, let’s talk about page 19:

Fris is now officially confronted with the big bad of AAiS chapter 1, that being a shitty experimental fusion reactor from times well and truly passed.

With this page, I’ve tried going for more detail in the environmental design, especially in panel 6, since I’ve found my previous work somewhat lacking in… well… detail, I guess. For some reason, I haven’t noticed this before, but during the course of AAiS I’ve developed somewhat of an impulsive habit of just drawing basic geometric forms when designing my background environments. You know, boxes, spheres, that sort of stuff.

Panel 6 stands as a reaction to me noticing this trend, and the reactor at hand is made up of all sorts of interesting concave and convex shapes. Hopefully this change will provide the readers’ eye with a bit more visual interest.

Other than that, though, there’s not all that much to talk about here. For the most part, this page is a continuation of my previous efforts of improving my color palette and visual style. I kinda forgot about using Dutch angles in this one, but I’m sure those’ll make a return in the future.

For now, though, I’m mostly contempt with the work at hand. It’s not ‘good’, per se, but it’s also no longer bad enough to become a case for the ATF because of its status as an unregistered, fully automatic visual assault weapon. So, that’s something, I guess.

Jokes aside, though, as we’re slowly coming up on the one-year anniversary of AAiS, I’m honestly impressed with how much my visual style has grown and improved just within a single year. We’re still nowhere near where I’d realistically like to be, but God damn am I better off compared to the starting point of pages 1 and 2. Seriously, do yourself a disfavor and turn back to those early pages, just to see the changes in anatomy, visual composition, color composition, line art, and general art style that have taken place since then.

Sure, it’s a long, winding and rocky road ahead, but by this point I’ve successfully navigated across the narrow mountain passage that should have, realistically, seen me fall off and drop to my untimely demise, accompanied by one of those comedic sliding whistle sounds you can find in early cartoons. Now we’re at the boring portion, also known as “The Grind”. The basics are there, now it’s time to improve. Study anatomy, study colors, study visual composition, and get better at the things you already know how to do in their most basic form.

Well, I’m all here for that! It may be boring, it may be arduous, it may be soul crushing, but that’s fine with me. I’ve flipped my coin when I uploaded that first page of AAiS, and I’m not one for Mulligans.

— AP