Wilfrith and Grwn - Roughs: Pages 2-3

I’ll excerpt my script here to set the scene for these atmospheric pages:

“It’s clear from how fully Wilfrith has embedded himself that he’s been waiting for a while and has become completely bored. He’s in a lean season, with his beard extra unkempt.Various objects are splayed out around him, implying lots of other adventures (he’s very prominently wearing Kapel’s ring). One of the more conspicuous objects is a black, leatherbound octavo-sized tome. The cave is dry, but the sky is dim with rainclouds, but his bat clings to the rock above him like a tiny magical lamp, casting soft light downwards onto Wilfrith.”

(Pages 2-3, digital roughs from Wilfrith and Grwn)

My intention here with this process was to spend less time roughing and more time making pages fast, but that’s always my intention for every project until I get distracted by some fun drawing flow and end up just solving lots of drawing on the page. I feel like a broken record about this particular process and my desire to be looser, but alas.

I had to invent a lot of visual details about Wilfrith and his world very quickly while working on Wilfrith and the Golem Stonemason due to the form and pace of production. Which was very good to get it done and out into the world, but then left me cutting a few design corners that I’m going to return to and iterate upon here and in future stories.

One of my favorite elements of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle stories is how she’s happy to contradict or modify “canon” as she’s previously written it--Knowing that it’s not essential for all of the edges of things to line up. That sort of mentality is a great fit for fantasy worlds, I feel. It tends to give the world a more mythic or fairytale experience to the read.