September Update: I have been working on my story comic script (coming February) and on my “Making of” comic (title still to be determined). I’m glad I took the time to work on my “Making of” comic. It is a good review of what I’ve learned and thought about in comics for the past few years. I also feel rusty at making comic pages, so designing the pages for this is helping me remember how to make all the creative decisions that go into a comic page.

The image attached to this post is a 15 minute study of an isopod (aka rolie polie, aka pill bug, aka woodlouse). I do a 15 minute warmup drawing every day to keep my drawing skills sharp. I alternate between sketching humans and sketching subjects that are relevant to my comics, but the drawings are mostly throw away sketches that are for practice only. I picked this study to share, though, because I liked how it turned out. : )

 

Hi All! 2023 has been a busy year. Our landlord decided to sell the house we were renting, so my husband and I spent our Spring searching for a new place, and then our Summer buying, moving, and settling into the new place. But my new studio space is mostly set up (hooray!), and I am back to working on comics with my nose to the grindstone. I’m going to start making monthly updates here.

The release date for the new comic is February 7, 2024. I’ll be posting the comic cover on February 2, then the first comic page the following Wednesday. (I posted my first ever comic page on February 2 in 2016, and I posted the first page of The Pelkern Cycle in February 2018, so I decided to follow the February trend).

I am also working on a brief “Making of” comic about the things I learned while working on the The Pelkern Cycle and during my hiatus. In 2017 I drew a “Making of the Wolves of the Wynd” comic about creating my first comic, and I am glad I have a record of how I felt and thought at the time. So I’m going to do it again! I’ll post the new “Making of” comic sometime this autumn.

The painting above is an armor study I did in Adobe Fresco using vector brushes.

Short Explantation:

New comic coming in 2023! This one will be an adventure that starts in the subterranean world of Pelkern, and it will be a short story (with 70 comic pages or less, taking 1-2 years to complete). The work in progress placeholder name is “The Sea Serpent.”

The digital painting here is a study of an eel I made in research for this comic. I painted it in Adobe Fresco using vector brushes. (The reference is from an istock photo I purchased with a standard license).

Long Explanation:

I first started working on the idea for my previous comic “The Pelkern Cycle” when I was in high school. After graduating from my university, I created the practice short comic “The Wolves of the Wynd” for two years, and then started posting The Pelkern Comic pages in 2018.

Then in 2020 I experienced the onset of my autoimmune disorder and resulting bone marrow failure. As I tried to pick up the pieces of my comic in 2021, I started to realize I had outgrown the story of “The Pelkern Cycle.” The themes that were close to my heart during my university years aren’t as relevant to me anymore. I also started to realize–both from my experience and from reading about other graphic novelists’ experiences–that this is a common issue with long form comics. Comics take so long to make that by the time you’ve completed a long form comic you’re a completely different person, coming from a completely different place.

So I started to pivot in my thinking on comics. I am shifting to making short story comics–comics that can be completed in one year or two–that all occur in the same world. Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, wrote 41 books in the same world, but each book is a complete, stand-alone story. I have always loved how you can pick up any book of his in whatever order, yet the stories were steeped in a world that is rich, complex, and multi-layered because of the 41 books’ worth of worldbuilding.

So I’m planning on continuing to build the fictional world of Pelkern that I first concieved in high school, but letting the accrued worldbuilding feed into a variety of short stories instead of one novel-length story. With shorter stories I can switch up art styles, story tone, and timelines when needed, as well.

Ace, Carolyn, Sol, and Myles will return in this new comic. I am currently working on completing the comic script, and I will start doing thumbnails and then comic pages once I have a 2nd or 3rd draft done on the comic script. I have been working slower since being so sick, so I don’t know the exact start date yet, but the comic will be ready to start posting sometime in 2023.

Friday marks one year from when I went to the Emergency Room with bone marrow failure in 2020. I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder soon afterwards. My immune system attacks and destroys my bone marrow, and bone marrow is the part of your body that makes blood, so losing a lot of bone marrow is dangerous. The disorder had kicked in a year or two prior, but it wasn’t obvious because the issues were on the inside.

Last year was a rough year, especially in the midst of a global pandemic. But after many months of treatment–blood transfusions, immune suppression treatment, and medications–I survived, and we managed to get my bone marrow to grow back. Now we’re keeping my disorder in check with medication.

So I am working on comics again! It’s been a tricky transition to come back, so I don’t yet have a firm date for when I will start posting pages again, but I am chipping away at it. (The image above is a concept painting of Pelkern–a subterranean world–that I did while I was getting treated).

In the meantime, if you want to read my comics, “The Pelkern Cycle” (my current comic) starts Here, and “The Wolves of the Wynd” (my first comic) starts Here.

For this week’s concept art, I painted a photo I took of an armor set from Meersburg Castle.

(I painted a different armor set from the same castle about a year ago, found here: Armor Study 1).

It took me 7.5 hours to paint, but I compressed it to 50 seconds in this speedpaint video: