Ink warm-ups/sketchdump/worldbuilding

Pretty disparate post today - sketches and ink-practise and a bit of Fathom-worldbuilding (because worldbuilding is the most fun you can have with your pants on, honestly).


Costume-ideas (i.e: visual identity) for the Whalerider-people. The one on the far left is Khazri, the one next to him is a tentative design for a standard soldier's uniform; the next is a random woman's outfit, and the one on the far right is probably a cloth-merchant. As a nomadic people, the Whaleriders tend towards becoming itinerant traders.

They also make a big deal out of concealing their faces (both genders); they think of faces as an important expression of identity - the shape of their soul, if you will - and it is therefore considered intensely private.

Ink-warmups;




A variation on the theme of my most recent digital painting; this one focused more on feelings of protectiveness.

Gesture-practise! (Photo-referenced)

Ink warm-ups, take 2.

More ink-warmups. They're a good habit, since they keep me drawing almost every day (and to be honest, the days when I'm not working on Fathoms, I'm drawing other things).






... Perhaps I ought to clean some of these up and colour them. For practise, or something.

Ink warm-ups

I'm currently working on Fathoms pt. 2 - the sketches are all finished, so I'm inking them now - but since I haven't inked anything seriously for months, I've decided to do these ink warm-ups before I start every day, just to get into the flow of things.

Some of them have turned out pretty nice, others unremarkable. But still - it's good practise.

Daily sketchbook dump July 2-10

My first sketchbook actually ran out on the 7th, so I've got a new one now - hardcover, which means it's a bit trickier to scan, but on the other hand I get enough performance anxiety that I absolutely refuse to waste paper on halfhearted sketches. In the long run, I guess that's a good thing.

Hesitant progress is being made

I'm plugging along on A Thousand Miles of Wind, and it's going quite well. I am behind on my planned schedule, because of family trouble and a persistent and quite incapacitating neck-ache that strikes me at odd intervals - and since I much prefer a whole neck to a whole finished project, I've been forced to slow down.

But I'm not defeated yet!

Here's the first inked page of the comic - it's been scanned in two pieces, because it's drawn in A3-size and I only have an A4 scanner, so there's a strange break right in the middle of the image, right across the stairs, but ignore that part; when I scan this for real, it'll be on my school's A3-scanner.



This took me.... about five-six hours to ink properly, I guess? The leaves didn't take as much time as I feared they would, but it was still slow going, considering the architecture in general, and the stairs in particular.

A Thousand Miles of Wind - bits and bobs

Interesting fact of the day: storyboarding eats my brain.

It is the most important part of comic-creation, and while it might not be as time-consuming as actually drawing the pages, it is hard work - it tends to leave me feeling as if I've turned my brain inside out.

So why don't I show you a bit of what A Thousand Miles of Wind looks like right now? Here's the storyboard for pages three and four:


Usually, I write a plot-summary first, and then I write a proper script, then I do the storyboard, and then finally I revise the script to fit the storyboard - with A Thousand Miles of Wind, I did my plot-summary the usual way, but I've storyboarded and written the script at the same time, piecing everything together as I go along.

... It's all very scribbly on the page, but it's enough for me to know what's going to go in each panel and what it's going to look like.

Speaking of what goes in the panels, here are some background characters - only the old lady has any lines in the script - four of them, I think.



I just wrapped up the entire storyboard for the comic - it ended up being thirty-two pages, two pages over my planned maximum limit, but I am pretty happy with it, all things considered.

Now comes the most work-intensive part - actually drawing the thing.

Tengu

First art post - yay!

So, A Thousand Miles of Wind is going to be the story of a young shinto priest named Toshiyuki, who accidentally gets into trouble with the local supernatural critters - the most important one being the tengu who lives on the same mountain.



I'm still kind of fiddling with the details of the tengu's design - adding things and subtracting things all the time - but I'm pretty happy with how he looks right now. He's a bit difficult to draw from the back, considering all of those feathery things on his head, but I'll get around to that.