Sketchdump, round Nth

My warm-ups from the last couple of days; some sketchy, some more finished. Some in colour, some not.

First round; some Fathoms-stuff:

Superheroes: Firestarter. I need to practise drawing fire, because this looks like crap. Blackbird in uniform, being ninja.... ... and out of uniform, being her plain clothes-self.

 Samurai: Whoah... Perspective and backgrounds and stuff. Far out. Masahiro being picked on by the mean kids.

 Assorted misc.:
A Nopon merchant from Xenoblade Chronicles - which is a neat game, despite the three million sidequests and silly support-meeting-esque battle dialogue. Vesto, being the badass-space-fleet-lieutenant-turned-exo-biologist-nerd that she is. The 1920ies might, not so secretly, be one of my favourite historical periods - mostly for reasons of awesome fashion and art movements. And tommy-guns. And Prohibitions and gangsters.

Comics, etc.

Flatland is getting on a bit in pages - all the way up to 10 now, so we're almost halfway! - so I thought I'd post the sketch for the latest page:


As I got further and further into drawing Flatland, my sketches started getting rougher and rougher; this is honestly what I inked on top of - no further sketched details added. I think that the simplicity of the backgrounds and the familiarity of the White Walker made it easier.

Otherwise, I need a pretty solid sketch to ink over, especially when I'm inking non-digitally - as I do with my ongoing fanzine-project, Fathoms of the Sky. In digital media, there's than handy "undo"-button, that my brushpens just don't have. :P

And by solid, I mean this is my storyboard for Fathoms III:


Compared to the ready-to-ink Flatland sketch above, the Fathoms-storyboard is at least twice as detailed - but it kind of needs to be, because it handles more visually complex stuff; more detailed backgrounds, characters with more complicated clothing, etc., etc.

I ink Fathoms mainly with a Pilot Pocket Brush Pen (Soft), with Staedtler pigment liners of varying width for panel-borders and tiny details. The first two parts will be available at the Stockholm International Comic Festival 2012, 28-29th of April, at at UppCon 2012.

Warm-ups, again

More stuff:


Another character from the same universe as that frowny samurai I posted a couple of entries back. This guy, I mean:

Sketchdump+cool trailer

Bilingual entry, because some neat stuff I found is in Swedish:

Okej - Trailer för Morwhayle 2 av Peter Bergting, som ser ASCOOL ut. Ungefär som om Mike Mignola har sprungit med huvudet först in i Drakar och Demoner. En fristående berättelse finns att läsa i senaste Utopi Magasin, och det är min professionella åsikt att det var JÄTTEBÄST, så hör sen.




Alright, back to regularly scheduled programming:


Loose tengu-concept for a bigger painting I'm working on. I visited the Natural History Museum's bird-taxidermy exhibit the other day, and let's just say I got an itch to draw birds.

Here's the sketch for the WIP-painting:

Mmmm. Cranes and crows and sparrows and Japanese Waxwings...

Sketchdump

New roundup of warm-ups and stuff. Some Fathoms, some mobsters, some superheroes and a bit of frowny samurai.







And an environment study/practise/thing to round it all off:

Sketchdump

Sketch-roundup again:


Munya from Golem-verse in a new outfit; it seems to be migrating into some sort of strange North African/Middle-Eastern steampunk territory. Hmm.


Practising Khazri, who will be turning up in the next chapter of Fathoms



Kuro and Banri, because mobsters.


Kuro and Banri as teenagers, because it's fun to explore what your characters might have been like at different ages.

Fathomsverse

I love worldbuilding.

I love it in all its forms - I love brainstorming the first ideas (should it be a desert world? What colour is the sky? Is there magic?), I love researching all the relevant information (no, seriously, I enjoy reading about the process of making table-salt, really), I love tinkering with every single imaginable thing about an imaginary world.

I think worldbuilding might be the greatest joy and strength of speculative fiction.

... Which is probably why I do so much of it. I tend to dig pretty deep, and get stuck in the most unlikely of places.


The Moonface tribe began as a brainless doodle while I was having a slow day - I just put pencil to paper and let it run away with me. What came out was a squint-eyed axolotl-looking creature. They'd show up in the background in future chapters of my fanzine, Fathoms of the Sky, I decided. And then I resolved not to think about them any more.

But my brain does not work that way. I kept coming back to those little albino lizards, and kept tugging at the little details - and now I've got the beginnings of not only a people, but a culture and a religion.

The marks on their foreheads are echoes of the phases of the moon - and those phases are important to their culture. Their religion is based around them, and the advocates of said religion are known as Speakers for the Moon - astronomer-priests. The full moon and the black, empty moon are two sides of the same coin, and its Speakers constantly in conflict. The Speakers for the White Moon are not morally good, nor are the Speakers for the Black Moon morally evil - I didn't want it to be that simple. Instead, they represent two ways of looking at the world, both with their benefits and their drawbacks, and the Moonface Tribe is split more or less down the middle in two camps, each following one side of the religion.

And voilá, I had not just some lizard-people populating the backgrounds of my comic panels, but a whole race of people with the potential for dozens of comics all by themselves. They even come with their own built-in conflict!

Thankfully, they aren't demanding that much space in Fathoms, or I'd never get it done.