And so we’re finally inside the Deeps proper, a place we’ll spend some time in. While there is an overlaying purpose for going there, atleast half of the pages will be spent just expressing that they are in there and what they find, much like the travel pages on the outside. The old Misadventures incarnation basically just went from point of interest to point of interest and never covered the ground in between, which I found resulted in much flatter characters and a far less interesting read. I still do skip in time between pages, I just try to reduce the ammount of time skipped so things feel like a natural progression.

Naturally, this also means that the actual plot takes that much more time to get to or work through, but I guess as they say: “it’s about the journey, not the destination”. And, if anything else, it means we won’t run out of plot anytime soon.

One of the more difficult things when assembling a page for Beyond the Tree is to make the renders and the backgrounds to fit together – as they’re both made seperately, making scale and angle match the world enough that the characters look to fit in can be quite difficult. Doubly so when the static backgrounds have to try to adjust against the movable characters as the characters are telling the story and the background is not. In this particular case I went all out on trying to think of various water effects to denote what parts are above and below surface, to the point where I had to add an additional graphic layer to the image in Paint Shop Pro to make it work.