The Making of Afterhour Adjustments
Hello!! Despite being a pretty short comic, Afterhour Adjustments is the biggest project I've taken on - probably ever, to be honest! So I figured I'd talk some about the process of creating it, as there's a lot that was changed, cut, or added over the few months I spent working on it. For the sake of making this easier to read, I'll use proper capitalization for once.
Special Thanks
Firstly, I'd like to extend special thanks to all those who supported me throughout the process of making this comic:
My close friends & my owner, for keeping me company while I worked on this thing and being there to support me
Furufoo, for providing very thoughtful feedback and suggestions on composition, pacing, layout, etc., and letting me use their cool comic font. Go check out their art!!
The critters who bought the comic, for helping me pay the bills (thank youuuuu <3 ;w;)
& all of u who shared feedback on the comic, for helping motivate me to make more stuff and making me feel appreciated
Thank you all so much <3
What follows is the original behind the scenes document included with the paid release of this comic, with only minor grammar and accuracy edits.
The Idea
I was talking to a friend about the idea of mouthlessness, and what living without a mouth would be like - which is something I've been fixated on a lot lately. Do you ever get fixated on kinks? It honestly happens to me a lot, and I find there's not much I can do to like, satisfy my fixation. We were talking about it a lot, specifically the different aspects of life it'd affect. The idea of a mouthless character getting an x-ray and seeing just how thoroughly their anatomy had been altered was mentioned, and that idea really stuck with me. It was something I wanted to explore, so I did a simple sketch of my sona, then overlaid it with a sketch of what its skull would look like. I used images of actual capybara skulls for reference to help sell the realism of it. And I was really happy with the result! Though it did look kinda freaky, and I was worried others might really not like it, so I decided against posting it in the end. But you get to see it! :3
I was so happy with the result, in fact, that I wanted to explore this idea more. Over the course of a few days I came up with the idea for a short comic of pebble going to a doctor shortly after being transformed, being faced with the reality of just how permanent its new situation was. Then I figured that if I was going to show what pebble was doing after being transformed, I might as well also show how it got transformed in the first place. And so, the first draft of Afterhour Adjustments started to take shape.
Initial Scope
The idea of making a whole comic was very intimidating. At this point, I had only ever made one multi-page comic, and that was 5 years ago. Inclination: Null was also stylistically very simple, with the whole comic drawn as just rough sketches. But I had recently figured out a way to make myself draw nearly every day, and I was working on drawing ideas more complex than I had been able to in years, so I figured it would be worth a shot. I started by deciding that this project was going to be 5-10 pages, which should hopefully be enough to tell the story I wanted to, and I got to work on a rough draft of the story.
At first, I was only going to focus on the transformation aspect. I saw this comic by FabFreakShow, where a character gets transformed by having someone mold their form like it's made of clay, and it stuck with me and inspired the direction I decided to take with this comic's transformation. I thought about who was going to transform her, and the first thing that came to mind was this demon character design I had been forming in my head for like, years at this point. The fit was too perfect for me to choose anything else, honestly! I wrote out a very rough script for the first 3 pages, not even having a set direction in mind for the rest of the comic, and I got to work. Overthinking is my worst enemy when it comes to creating, so I wanted to avoid it as much as I could.
Style Evolution
I was still skeptical about whether I'd be able to finish an entire comic, even if I did my best to keep the scale down, so I wanted to ease my workload as much as I could to keep myself motivated. I worried that if the pages were to take me a long time to make, I wouldn't be able to stay motivated long enough to continue working on the project. Which is why I initially decided on a simple style. I would keep it monochrome and use thick lines, making plentiful use of the line tool for the backgrounds.
I quickly realized that I didn't like how this came out. I thought that not having to deal with colors would make this easier, but turns out drawing in monochrome is like, a whole skill of its own that I'm not very good at. Oops! For my second attempt, I decided to add some complexity. Still keeping it monochrome, I added individual shades to the character and I added shadows.
This definitely looked better! But I still wasn't happy with it. I liked the added contrast, but it now looked like a 30s noir detective drama. Which is, like, not at all what I was going for.. Instead of reworking everything, I decided to mess with different color filters. Given the night theme, I decided to try a darker shade of blue, and I honestly think it worked pretty well!
At this point, I thought it looked good, and I totally could have done the whole comic in this style. But.. I thought I could do better. I wasn't liking the thick uniform lines. I thought the contrast was still pretty bad. I just really wasn't feeling this style for this comic, so I decided to try a different approach.
I pretty much drew the whole page again. I used thinner lines, giving everything definition in the process. I also decided that I would use colors after all - but to keep it simpler, I would use a set color scheme for the backgrounds. The colors of the character didn't change from page to page, so I didn't have to worry about that too much. I would also use soft shading instead of cel shading, as I found I had an easier time with it and I could get away with being less precise without it looking bad. Interesting, right? I'd have thought soft shading would be more effort, but I find it much simpler, if I'm trying to make it look decent, anyway. Lastly, I added a subtle color overlay over the non-shaded parts of the character as like, an easy way to make the lighting "pop out" more. I was really happy with this! This was the direction I wanted to go.
After getting started on page 2, I made a few further adjustments to the style. Mostly I just adjusted the colors slightly, but I also added rim lighting to the character to help her stand out more against the backgrounds. Additionally, I decided to put a little more effort into some of the simple backgrounds, like the cityscape here. I also later decided I'd go for narration instead of thought bubbles on the first page, to better tie it in with the final pages.
The Story
Before I started working on the comic, I decided that I wouldn't try to plan the whole thing out from the start and leave it more open ended for myself. I wasn't really sure how draining working on the comic would be for me and how many pages I'd want to draw, so it was important to not constrain myself at this point.
The Bad Ending
Over time I started trying to figure out where I wanted to go with the comic. The initial idea was to just focus on pebble losing her mouth, and the aftermath of that. Instead of being relatively calm once she gets teleported home towards the end, she was going to panic, running to the bathroom, struggling to deal with her new reality. There was going to be a lot of focus on the panicking part, internal dialogue, her feeling up her snout, that kind of thing. I wanted to just end the comic there, with pebble all panicked. I think TF stories where the TFee struggles with it at first can be really fun!
There was also a plan to do a follow-up comic if I felt like it, exploring pebble's life after the transformation. The scene where she gets an x-ray showing absolutely nothing being left of her mouth was honestly the thing that got me to want to do the comic, so it's not much of a surprise that this was one of the things I wanted to focus on in the follow-up. Other scenes I wanted to include were her figuring out that her snout is sensitive for the first time, struggling with the conflict of not wanting to give in to the changes, but also wanting so bad to make herself feel good in that way. Then her meeting up with friends for the first time post-transformation, and what that would be like.
The Good Ending
Later on, I decided to sort of merge the follow-up comic with the main story and include the scenes after what was initially meant to be the ending. I also decided to go for a more euphoria-focused vibe, since I felt it fit better with how I feel about the theme of mouthlessness. I also just liked it more, honestly - I feel like you don't see TFs with happy endings that often. Instead of the ideas I wanted to explore getting their own scenes, they each got one or two panels. I feel like the one and a half pages of pebble's life after the transformation add so much to the comic, and bring it all together really nicely. I'm sure some of you would have preferred the peril-type ending, but personally, I think there are more than enough tf comics like that out there :3
After deciding on the new ending, I also decided that pebble would get nulled and hoofed as well. Initially, she was going to already be null by the time the events of the comic take place, having gotten a bottom surgery and all, but I figured her getting nulled would be very fun to include, so I dedicated a few panels to that :3 I've also had the idea of having hooves for hands but still having her/my regular footpaws stuck in my head for a while. Something about the footpaws being more dextrous than the forelimbs is really appealing to me! So I decided to include this as well. Personally I think the combination works really well, and I'm really glad I decided to go with it.
Designing Rascal
I've had this idea for a trickster demon character in mind for a while now. A wish fulfillment demon who gets satisfaction from changing others' bodies in a way that they don't yet know they want - but they always end up loving it.
In terms of visual design, I wanted it to clearly look out of place. Not bound by the laws of our world, its body a single color, except for white lines defining its shapes where needed. Its body lanky, stretchy. Here are the characters who inspired its design and behavior, in no specific order:
Can you guess what behaviors are inspired by which character? :3
I decided to give it shackles with chains permanently attached to its collar and limbs, to kinda show that others tried to contain it, but failed - that it cannot be stopped. It plays by its own rules, and if it chooses you as its "victim", there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it from permanently altering your body in whatever way it wants :3
I find the whole idea of this character incredibly hot ok
Also, since I've been asked about this a lot throughout the process of sharing this comic publicly:
Rascal is a wish fulfillment demon, of a sort. The idea is what whatever it does to you, you eventually end up enjoying it, and feeling like it was exactly what you needed in life.
Closing Thoughts
Thank you so much for being interested in my little comic!! Whether you supported it financially, or just enjoyed it once I shared it publicly, your support means a lot to me! It was honestly such a joy to get to work on this, and to see it to completion. I've never attempted, much less finished, a project of this scale. There's definitely things I could've done better, things I would've done differently if I could have, but I'm really proud of myself for not expanding the scope of the project more than I could handle, and it was a great learning experience for me too.
A part of why I wanted to do this was to see whether making comics was genuinely outside of my reach, whether it was something I could do but didn't really enjoy, or whether it was something I could see myself doing for a while. Thankfully, I believe it's the last option! With this knowledge, and all the experience I gained working on this project, I think I might finally be able to get started on another project I've had in mind for a while. We'll see ;3
Thanks for reading!!
PS: If you're interested in more like this, this story I write a bit ago takes place in the same world and also features Rascal. Admittedly I don't have much experience with writing stories and it kinda shows in this one >w>'
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