Above, a minute-long video showing a few of the good ol' tools in action.
For most of the line art, my Zebra brush pens are proving pleasant. They're more rigid than the Sakura Pigma brush pens, though, and I'm not sure I am getting used to that. The Pigma might be a better...
2021-04-08 17:00:49 +0000 UTC View Post
… asks DD’s mom, in the top-right panel. She will find out in due course.
This week was weird! I did a bunch of page prep (“pencilling”) on Monday, then a bunch of “non-work work” during midweek, including a podcast recording, a presentation to university illustration students, ...
2021-04-02 21:10:26 +0000 UTC View Post
I really like how this sequence turned out. Sitting at my desk, hunched over the paper, I whisper to myself, "maybe this comic will be all right."
If you click through the images, you should see captions/descriptions beneath them. If not, then uh-oh, this plan didn't work as I anticipat...
2021-03-26 23:05:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Some lessons carve a groove in your brain. For whatever reason, this is one of those for me. In animation school, one of our teachers taught us that you might use a ruler to draw straight lines in your roughs, but never use one for your final, clean lines. That is what I have done ever s...
2021-03-25 19:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Want to see some rigging get drawn?
This is an hour's work, sped up to 10 minutes (that's as much as my video editor will let me do). More than anything, I just wanted to test out the process of making timelapse videos.
Featured within:
…in case you were wondering how the pages from this post turned out.
For the pirate page, I drew the bottom panels on another sheet (which you can see in a post from last week). For the dancing image, I wanted ...
2021-03-24 16:15:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Quickly: Dip Pen Nibs
I was experimenting with dip pen nibs earlier this week and having mixed results, so I asked Twitter for some pro tips. 2021-03-20 23:04:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Exciting! The pages are turning out better than I expected. I’m using a combo of Pentel brush pen, Microns, a Pigma fine brush pen, black watercolours, and my trusty ol’ Prismacolor Ebony Black pencils. It has been fun and rewarding, so far. I tried using pen nibs, and they put down nice line...
2021-03-19 22:54:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Not an easy page to begin with, but I wanted to try that watercolour effect. It’s not as masterful as I’d like, but I just need more practice. The colour will hide a lot of the gracelessness. :)
There are a few spots I would re-draw, and I’m making a note to add kelp dangling from the...
2021-03-17 02:27:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Above: favourite panels from this week’s batch of work.
Still roughing in Chapter One of DD4, which has come out to 45 pages. Only six pages left to do, which I’m hoping to accomplish next Monday. After that? Well, probably a little bit of experimentation, then it’s time to s...
2021-03-12 21:30:25 +0000 UTC View Post
A quick test, wondering if I should try a mixed media approach for the “line art.” My lightweight, bright white drawing paper takes watercolour better than I expected. It warps, but probably not so much that it would interfere with the scan. 🙂👍
2021-03-09 18:38:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Above, a select few roughed-in pages for DD4 (as before, apologies that they’re so hard to see). This is my favourite part of the process, I think. At this point, each page has so much potential. Nothing is set in stone. Every sketchy line could turn out a hundred different ways. And yet, at th...
2021-03-05 21:20:54 +0000 UTC View PostYears ago, I heard this great recording on CBC Radio 2, where the host reviewed a Mozart work passage-by-passage, pointing out the repeated themes and talking about how mathematics informed (or could be rationalized onto) the music. I took away a strong feeling that the principles that are used t...
2021-02-26 22:03:57 +0000 UTC View Post
I’m just extremely pleased with this pose. That is all.
2021-02-24 22:49:57 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm in the process of roughing out and/or blocking in the first chapter, getting a few pages down every day. Unfortunately, it's a part of the process that doesn't give me much of anything to post, both because the drawings are so fuzzy and because that blue line doesn't photograph well (by desig...
2021-02-23 21:18:31 +0000 UTC View Post
They may not look very glamorous*… yet… but I have roughed/"pencilled" out the first three pages of DD4. Going straight from the thumbnail, I have "broken ground" on the clean line art.
This is only really post-worthy because it is emotionally significant. I was talking to a fr...
2021-02-20 00:30:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I was having a hard time progressing on the first few DD4 pages, I think because I didn't know my boat situation well enough. So I took some time out to do some boat research and make some choices in those regards. To paraphrase Stephen King from ON WRITING, often writer's block is simply a manif...
2021-02-18 17:54:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Over the past week or so, I thumbnailed out the first "chapter" of DD4, doing a lot of writing as I went. It was pretty successful!
I'm going to take the entire first chapter to final art before continuing with the rest of the book, as an experiment. I'm scared about this approach, because ...
2021-02-16 01:01:42 +0000 UTC View PostLike it says on the tin: how often would you like to see posts on this Patreon campaign?
Seems like Patreon sends out an email every time I post something, so assuming you are in full control of when/if you receive those emails, and it's not a nuisance, do...
2021-02-11 01:16:38 +0000 UTC View Post
A while back, I wrote a series of posts talking about how much I would like to change my method of working. Now, I’m sitting down to make progress on this comic and I find myself proc...
2021-02-11 01:01:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Thinking about Mom a little. Born and raised on an Ionian island, she eventually met a visiting Englishman, fell in love, and accompanied him back to his family Estate. She feels affinity for both her homeland and her adopted home, and has invested herself in thorough adaptation. She wants the sa...
2021-02-08 19:47:39 +0000 UTC View Post
This was frustrating for a few days: I knew I'd need a few different costumes, and I had a bunch of reference at my disposal, but I didn't know exactly where to aim my efforts.
After a bunch of semi-productive but aimless sketching, I thought to set my story beats in order and consider what...
2021-02-04 23:22:21 +0000 UTC View Post
The design for the Pirate Captain is challenging my design discipline. At various points in my education, I was told to "never go with your first idea." Get your first idea out of the way, then keep working until you find something more interesting or innovative. Amass a panorama of options, then...
2021-01-30 22:02:15 +0000 UTC View Post
The purpose of the "Character Design" process is to create drawings of characters to which I can refer as I am working on pages. Primarily, this is so I can keep everyone looking consistent as I go, and if everyone looks consistent, the book is easier to read. Ideally, readers are not distracted ...
2021-01-27 00:15:01 +0000 UTC View PostTwo things:
First: a big, big Welcome to everyone who has joined as a patron over the last month or so. You've all given me so many reasons to be optimistic about this endeavour and about this work, and I can only hope to repay you for that gift.
Second: 2021-01-24 17:58:57 +0000 UTC View Post
THIS WEEK I have been putting my story notes through a writing process originally referred to as the “SCENE / SEQUEL” approach. If you are a writer and are curious about new ways to approach story-ma...
2021-01-22 20:05:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Been trying a few different landscape and environment studies!
To shake out the cobwebs, I've been doing a few studies from research images. The first, above, is from Edward Dodwell's Views and descriptions of Cyclopian or Pelasgic remains in Greece and I...
2021-01-15 03:43:09 +0000 UTC View Post
I said I was going to try new things, so I'm trying new things.
The current First Step in Making A Book is to accumulate a denuded forest's worth of assorted notes (a small number of which are pictured below). They are often written in no particular order, often conflicting, and generally a...
2021-01-12 22:02:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Back when I first put The Turkish Lieutenant online, I'd get the occasional question like, "how long were you in Turkey?" which I—admittedly with a little shame—took to be a compliment. Any feeling of Turkish authenticity was the product of a half-decent research discipline and some ...
2021-01-09 02:52:09 +0000 UTC View Post