The changing face of Faren Gosman

I thought I'd look back over the 3-year history of Policy Police and see how the style has changed and (we hope) my skill has improved.

Here's Faren from the first episodes. Rendered using Paint. Paint is pretty low-resolution and unforgiving of mistakes, but there was something in its crudeness that gave me the space to move on with the story. I felt I needed to get the episodes out monthly to maintain momentum both for myself drawing it and to keep the readers interested in reading it.

The second picture dates from around the 9-month mark.  I had decided to revisit the main characters and tidy them up a bit. I had gotten much more used to Paint by this stage, and the differences between the older and more recent characters was showing a bit. I then went back and "remastered" the whole 8-episode story, "Reaching the LEARNER" to give it an overall consistency.

As the second anniversary of Policy Police approached, I decided to ditch Paint and move over to Manga Studio Debut. It was a bit of a quick changeover, so what I did here was redraw the Paint version within MSD. As ou can see, the main difference is sharpness.

So now it's almost a year later and I've got much more into the flow of using Manga Studio. So, like I did with Paint, I'm looking back at earlier drawings and de-doing them to get greater consistency. This last pic is a sneak preview of a new-look Faren that'll debut in the new year. I decided to go back to my original sketches and source material and start again from scratch. I may well do some more tweaking and stuff between now and then, but he seems to be shaping up.