How to Color the World

How to Color the World

Digital screenshot preview of eight sequential pages from my upcoming short graphic novel, Amphiox. It's meant to be too small to read clearly. It features a lot of blues and reds.

From Inks to Colors
I completed the inks to Amphiox sometime in November. From there, I needed to figure out how to color a comic. I’ve done short comics in full color before. The thing with a one- or two-page micro-story is that each individual story can have its own color scheme. It’s a wholly different concept to color 48 individual pages in a book. The pages all need to look like they’re part of the same book, but also evoke different moods, times of day, and settings. I’d never colored more than a sequence of one or two pages before. This was going to get interesting, and fast.

Digital spread of black-and-white comic pages. It has several panels with striking black backgrounds. It is otherwise uncolored with black lineart on white background.For lack of knowing what else to do, I filled in spot blacks across all the pages in the comics, like I did in this page. 

It was hard to know where to go after I filled in spot black inks. They weren’t intended to be a final version of the comic, but they did make it look finalized. A fallback. The point of Amphiox, though, is to approach the challenge of making a complete comic, colors and all, so that I feel less afraid and lost while making other comics. Since I had the entire book drawn and inked, I had one advantage, and one advantage alone:

I know what the most complicated spread in the whole book is.

(…Or at least, I thought I did.)

Digital comics spread depicting a chaotic village of people who live inside of airships. All sorts of air vehicles are strewn about, near a garden and tables full of food. A lot of stuff appears to have been repurposed for village life, such as dumpsters used as storage and old solar panels used as roofing. There are hot air balloons, RVs, motorcycles, old military equipment, and helicopters perched near a section of highway that has clearly seen better days. There is a black fill on the ground and the rest of the subjects are white. Manta rays fly through the air overhead, which is not something they do in real life.Here it is. The most complicated spread. If I can’t get colors to work here, they’re not going to work for the rest of the book.

I chose this spread of the airship village because it is the most detailed and overwhelming piece in the entire story. How I ended up coloring this would influence the rest of the book. It would be hard to retrofit a color scheme from a simpler page onto this spread, because what if I didn’t use enough colors elsewhere? What if the colors I was using in smaller panels were cacophonous here, when I needed all of them at once?

Same digital spread as above, only now it sports chaotic colors, most notably: Bright green.My first attempt at flatting this spread. I used literal colors, except for the manta rays. They were made red in an attempt to make them stick out from the background more.

My thought process was, a nice bright green to welcome readers into the world, and make them see that, through all the wrack and ruin, something beautiful and fun had come together in the form of a traveling village. However, I discovered that coloring everything with a literal hue (as in, a 1:1 representation as seen in real life, which has no art direction) still led to a cacophonous color scheme. There weren’t many good ways to direct reader attention if everything is a very bright color. The biggest problem here was my inability to separate the extreme foreground (flying manta rays) from the extreme background (airship village and villages). I did genuinely like the green and what it represented. I just couldn’t get it all to agree with itself in one spread. That meant that this strategy also wasn’t going to work across the rest of the pages.

The good thing was that the way I had set up my flatting, it was easy to change colors with one click via Fill tool with ‘contiguous’ unchecked. I could blaze through as many color schemes as I wanted without too much fuss.

Spread of the airship village, only now in nightmarish red, yellow, and blue hues.My second attempt at flatting the airship village was inspired by the works of James Fenner.

I really wanted this to work. Really, really wanted it. It just wasn’t going to cooperate. I didn’t quite have a bead on what made Fenner’s color schemes work. The tone was ‘complete nightmare’ when I was going for ‘cool dream’. I had possibly overcorrected from literal hues to more symbolic ones. I also fretted that I was stealing a bit too fiercely from Fenner, whose entire portfolio uses basically this color scheme or other similarly unhinged schemes. It was still a great exercise and one that made me think more carefully about stylizing hues.

Digital spread of the airship village, now rendered in teal with...pink and purple manta rays? What?My third attempt at coloring this spread, before I gave up temporarily.

I came to one conclusion: The ‘village’ portion of the illustration was likely going to be all one color. At this point, I had mostly learned about what my comic wasn’t going to look like. It was time to step back and think about the other extreme within my comic:

What was the simplest page going to look like, when it came to color?

Since this comic’s inception as a quick, experimental short prose story, I’d always had one scene in mind with a definite color. The character uses a red light in a dark grotto, so as not to disturb the local wildlife. The red light changes to ultraviolet, then back to red, so that the character can find a UV-sensitive egg. This red, then, was my next clue to the comic’s color scheme.

I looked at how red light lends two different tones to a scene. I used only a midtone and a shadow to begin with. No highlights. This kind of color scheme would heavily rely on silhouette and staging to work. Spot black fills were key. I had to hope that I’d set up my inks well enough for this. I was pretty sure I had, but, just in case, there’s always the option to obliterate detail!

Digital comics spread of a wayward explorer using red light to explore a cave full of rocks, eggs, and giant serpents. In one panel she is tripping on the stones and yelling 'Crap!'. She lands on a giant fin. More complete transcriptions will be available when the comic officially launches.I was shocked by how easy it was to flat this sequence.

Since this color was working out fairly well, I went ahead and flatted all of the pages in what I referred to as the ‘red light sequence’… No, not that kind of red light! Anyway. This firmly established this particular red as an important color to the comic. It meant that I needed to find other places to use the red to keep it as a thoroughline color, so that it wasn’t too shocking when the whole comic went monochromatic with red as the only hue. 

Digital screenshot of Photoshop's color picker tool, displaying al the hue sliders and options for selecting colors. A triangle with an exclamation mark next to the chosen hue indicates it's not going to print accurately in CMYK.Photoshop warns artists with a triangle if they’re about to use a color that won’t translate accurately to print. It’s mostly fussy about green tones, but any hue can cause trouble if it’s too bright or the K (black) value is too high.

I also needed to be aware of ink density. I believe that my small press printer of choice, Mixam, does digital as well as offset printing, depending on the amount of copies a person orders. Offset printing tends to be more dull so I relied on Photoshop’s ink density warnings wherever I could. I wanted a nice screen-to-paper conversion via CMYK values. I will find out whether these worked out when I get a proof of this from Milan. This consideration gave me about 4 different reds to work into my ‘red light’ sequence. 

Once I’d flatted the darkness of the cave, I reasoned that, the easiest way to carry this red color through the whole comic was to apply it to Lyrat’s clothes. She features throughout most of the graphic novel. I’d envisioned her as wearing a mauve jumpsuit when I was first writing her, but mauve is just another term for desaturated, dark red.

Digital comic page depicts a character dressed in red in the basement of an abandoned house, which has been rendered in soft, dreamy green tones.First attempt at flatting some opening pages. Green typically complements red, so I went with that.

I sat back and thought about the other elements in the comic that featured prominently. Sure, there was a giant magic doom eel, which was black, but that was already covered by my preliminary spot black fills. Black goes with any color scheme, same as white and neutral gray tones. I also found this lovely axolotl art and wanted to try grouping colors the way this artist grouped their colors. The magic doom eel has a peculiar face which requires many colors, so that gave me another space to throw in ‘all the colors’ and see if it worked. This page, I am hiding, because I would prefer to surprise readers with what the Amphiox’s face looks like. Stay tuned for the webcomic launch to see it for yourself.

My creature design inspiration led me to the color blue. Deep, oceanic, broad, cerulean blue. I had initially colored all the oceans in the comic with spot black. My thought was that this was a reference to the Euxine, to sleep, and to death, but once again I found myself pulling away from stylized colors to more literal ones, at least where the ocean and the water and the waves were concerned. This ocean is an enormous part of the setting so it makes sense that blue would be a major color in the comic.

DIgital screenshot of an ocean texture, rendered with delicate, sparkling cerulean tones.(Regina Spektor noises)

I decided to make the amphiox’s fins blue instead of gray, and I filled in all the water in the comic with this blue color. It’s a warmer blue, not as warm or as bright as cyan, but it easily blends to the greens and yellows of a Mediterranean-climate body of water. This solved most of the comic color scheme in one fell swoop. I improvised in the opening series of pages and at the end to see if I could indicate the passage of time. I used a pea-green teal color to indicate the foggy morning of the opening pages, and purples and oranges to indicate nightfall.

Digital comics spread of the character on an island, tossing her rope into the abyss. Everything is lit with blue tones. The island is a vibrant yellow with green plants here and there.Then I worked on this spread, which I found to be very playful and bright. Exactly the tone I want in the comic.

Having flatted most of the comic, I took a break. When I came back, it was time to fix the airship village spread.

The airship spread returns! Complete color description is in the post below.Here is what I ended up doing.

While this spread had initially appeared very complex and needing tons of colors, it was actually a large variety that made my composition unreadable. There was a pair of dimensional planes that needed definition for the story of this spread to work: The meandering village in the sand down below, and the flight of the manta rays from the ocean. Any more colors and this spread loses all meaning. It was here that I invented the sandy yellow beach to contrast with the blue manta rays, and this yellow would  become more important later. There’s a thing called ‘atmospheric perspective’ which generally relates to the color blue and far-away objects turning more and more blue as they approach the horizon line in the distance. Here, I used atmospheric perspective, but with yellow. All the characters were colored with various shades of yellow, except for the two small characters that I want everyone to look at first in the top left corner. Yellow atmospheric perspective makes the scene look dusty but I think an airship village in the sand would be that way.

Digital art of an abandoned house overlooking a shore strewn with airships and the ruins of a highway. In the distance is an island. It is all covered in murky green fog.I still had some problems with the overall color scheme within the comic that I needed to address.

This panel looked fine on its own. The next page also looked fine. But, within the context of the whole comic…? It really didn’t match, at all, even though the pea-green showed up elsewhere in the comic. My favorite spreads were the ones with vibrant jewel tones. An art director friend, Sarah Dungan, reached out with some constructive criticism: Among other things, I needed to put the yellow from the airship village on the beach. I huffed. No!! This was my misty foggy mysterious opener!! How dare!

Same panel as above, but with an expanded composition to show more sky and more of the setting near the abandoned house. Abandoned picket fence and the shadows of electric equipment dot the cliffside.Well. I tried. This still didn’t look right, but it also didn’t feel right to walk it back to what I had.

As it turns out, there just isn’t enough room in a 48-page action adventure comic to properly display the slow, calm passage of time. This was also affecting how the sunset in the final pages felt — purples and pinks are very nice, but if they’re not really omnipresent in the rest of the comic, it feels weird for them to be central colors all of a sudden. It was time to dial back something about these spreads to be less literal and more stylized, fitting the style of the pages I already liked.

Same panel as above, but all the green is now a muted desaturated blue.Desaturating a blue can make it seem ‘greenish’ when placed next to something that is more deeply blue. Sarah is, after all, often right.

So, now my comic has two ‘modes’ of color instead of four. It has ‘outdoors’ mode, and it has ‘deep in a grotto with a monster’ mode. I think these are the most dramatic and exciting transitions for the reader, and having more modes would make it harder to sink into the world I’m trying to convey. Would I have room for more modes of color if I continued the comic? Most likely, I think I would, but I’m still going to keep mode-switching to a minimum and rely on the blue and the red the most.

Some good news though! My printed proof is coming shortly, after which I can tweak the colors to print better. I’m also in the process of designing a website and a preorder campaign for ordering the book. I’m just going to see where this goes!

Care to read more?

A Fossil Returns to Life

A Fossil Returns to Life

What Do We Do with Old Art that People Really Liked?I've been doing conventions for awhile now and find them very personally fulfilling. I have so much fun setting up my display, rehearsing my sales strategies, and figuring out which things sell and why. Of course, my...

Amphiox, Continued

Amphiox, Continued

Defining Steps in a Personal Production PipelineMy Amphiox short comic is an exercise in art production. Up until I attempted it, I'd never really done much longform comic storytelling. Most of my practice was in one- or two-page micro-stories. I chose 48 pages as a...

So I Went Adventuring…

So I Went Adventuring…

Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel"Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel of Gürtelfischer Manor (she/her) is an adventuress who has gained some notoriety as a skilled and fearless swordfighter in recent years. Her origins are somewhat mysterious. While she is more than happy to talk about...

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Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Geek Girl Con ’22 Recap

Photograph of my assorted art zine, Crab Rare Arts Best, next to my calico cat, neatly arranged on a bean bag.

Where to Sell my New Zine?
I recently compiled a selection of my Pandemic drawings into an art zine. The fun of zines is sharing them with someone who will read them.

Photo of my calico cat turning away from an open zine in my hands. Drat!C’mon. Just read my stuff…

Having exhausted my household of zine-readers, I decided to table at Geek Girl Con. This is a convention that takes place in Seattle and was on hiatus during the COVID days. I had only tabled once before but the feeling of the convention was, well, a weight off my shoulders. Geek Girl Con feels a lot more personal than big comic cons, but it still has lots of people attending and there is plenty of workshops and panels to attend. I don’t feel bad for being an indie creator at GGC! In fact I feel very encouraged to continue doing my own thing. The sales last time I went weren’t bad either.

Digital artwork of a dragon chomping a dove. This is painted in a medieval style. The dragon is on a red background with a title of 'crab rare arts best' in the background. Doves perch in the tree, fearful of the dragon.Crab Rare Arts Best – my new 48-page zine featuring odds and ends, including drawings, doodles, and short comics.

This zine is named via magic square, so the title isn’t supposed to make sense. Scraps of knowledge were collated by ancient people and protected with magic squares instead of properly being titled. So I did that in the same vein. It’s 48 pages of unrestrained nonsense, pulled together by virtue of ‘this is everything I happen to have on my desktop right now’.

I also created giclée prints of my elasmotherium unicorn, my gastronomy chart, my medieval cat meme, and various small artworks I’d made on my livestream. I used my inkjet printer and archival-quality cotton paper. To fill in the rest of the table, I brought leftover acrylic fossil charms (some of which were in blind boxes) and some older zines from pre-pandemic times. Warlock’d and Hands & Feet made their appearance. Then Devin and I masked up, loaded everything up in the car, promptly snapped off the side-view mirror while backing out of our garage, and called in a Lyft to get the rest of the way to the convention. I totally forgot my banner so I sent Devin back for it. He arrived with all my forgotten stuff and also…dumplings. He’s sort of amazing.

Digital artwork of an elasmotheirum depicted as being unicorn-like in a field of interlocking flowers. The 'unicorn' has clearly stomped its way into a small fenced paddock, leaving ruin in its wake. The pomegranate tree from which the unicorn snacked is falling over. Regardless, the unicorn wears a beautiful blue collar studded with gems as well as a gold chain twining around the tree. It's a pastiche of the classical medieval tapestry 'The Unicorn in Captivity.'Of Pomegranates and Unicorns –  $60 print I had for sale.

I thought for sure this print was going to be the star of my show. I even made extra copies and an additional design with the recently-reconstructed horn. I only sold one, and I only sold it while I was away from the table! Maybe I should have Devin pitch this one in the future.

Digital artwork of a constellation chart. The joke is that these constellations are all food-themed, so that the chart is a 'gastronomy' chart instead of an 'astronomy' chart. The artist's personal favorites are 'Burger-cules' for Hercules and Drink-o the Dragon. Gastronomy Chart — Another $60 print I had for sale.

Much to my delight, Gastronomy Chart sold several copies. I even had it hiding behind the bone charms because the contrast of the dark night sky made the bones pop out. People still had a fun time discovering it and that probably added to its charm. I was worried about this one because online it’s never been very popular. Just goes to show that social media literally means nothing when it comes to point of sale.

Digital artwork done in the style of a 14th century illuminated manuscript piece. A small calico cat is angrily plinking away at keys on a pipe organ, while passive-aggressive flowers curl and twist up to the cat's thoughts: Mother!! print — a $40 offering at a smaller size than the big luxury prints, same quality of paper and printing though.

This passive-aggressive cat meme was the surprise hit of the show. You can really tell when someone is responding to something on the table. People would run up and show their friends or reference roommates. Glad I made a few prints of these as a joke. I couldn’t even use my tactic of redirecting purchases from the pricey $40 print to the $15 zine — People just wanted the cat, and they were willing to pay the meme premium.

In terms of other sales, I sold the average amount of zines, and was surprised by the enthusiasm for some of my older zines. Someday I will shift those out of rotation. Still have a few left.

Among the various cosplayers and con-goers near my table, I encountered a very tame iguana on top of its owner’s shoulders and I got to pet it. Everyone was wearing masks. My usual sales tactic of handing people stuff off my table to handle it was a little awkward, considering. Devin was also somewhat better at selling my stuff than me. I think he pulled in more sales. Lesson learned: I should just go walk around and relax more at these things.

You may have noticed the high quality of photos taken of my table in a previous post. At the convention, I met an amazing photographer (AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps) who offered to take shots of my table. Sporting an impressive portfolio of print media photography, I was very excited to make her acquaintance and see what she saw through her lens. The organizers at Geek Girl Con put her in touch with me and it turned into a cool collaborative adventure.

I also met someone from the Sequential Artists Workshop in person for the first time! We both live in the Northwest area so it was cool to get my local social circle widened a little.

Photograph of a watercolor print arranged on a warm table, next to a cow-shaped succulent pot and on top of a cloth with delicate leaf embroidery. Paintbrushes lie near the print. The print itself is a bright crop of a restful, happy blue whaleshark swimming through a school of yellow fish in teal water.Look at this adorable whale shark print by Rebecca Martinez!

I picked up a moon rabbit sticker from Rebecca and couldn’t be happier with the design aesthetic. Now I just have to get back to drawing traditionally so I can get a new sketchbook, as I like to crown my sketchbooks with stickers. I highly recommend grabbing something from Rebecca’s Etsy shop if you can. It’s certainly inspiring me to do something digital, so that I have somewhere to send all this leftover stuff from the convention.

Should You Do Geek Girl Con?
All in all, Geek Girl Con only lasted one day, but it worked out really well. People had to buy then and there so I did about as well as I do during a three-day convention. It does make me wish that artist alleys were only open for one day, so that artists have more time to browse around and escape their tables during the rest of the con. I adore this convention and highly recommend it as just big enough to get visitors to your table, and just small enough to make you feel like you’re part of something special.

As far as health safety goes — everyone wore masks. It was still tricky to navigate health boundaries because part of a convention is handling merchandise and saying hello to tons of people. I know I accidentally thrust my hand out to a baffled person because I had totally forgotten not to do that anymore. In general I could feel my social skills grinding slowly into gear, but never really overcoming the awkwardness of basically holing up for 3 years with my partner and losing all of my small social groups in the process. There wasn’t anything particularly special in terms of health requirements outside of the masks and I believe (?) a vaccination requirement as well. So, do this one at your own risk when it comes to skirting COVID.

Geek Girl Con also does plenty of remote outreach via their Twitch channel. Geek Girl Con is something you can interact with all year round from any distance that is safe. I really appreciate all the work they do to make a safe vibe for a convention. Just really positive and light all around.

 

 

Care to read more?

A Fossil Returns to Life

A Fossil Returns to Life

What Do We Do with Old Art that People Really Liked?I've been doing conventions for awhile now and find them very personally fulfilling. I have so much fun setting up my display, rehearsing my sales strategies, and figuring out which things sell and why. Of course, my...

Amphiox, Continued

Amphiox, Continued

Defining Steps in a Personal Production PipelineMy Amphiox short comic is an exercise in art production. Up until I attempted it, I'd never really done much longform comic storytelling. Most of my practice was in one- or two-page micro-stories. I chose 48 pages as a...

So I Went Adventuring…

So I Went Adventuring…

Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel"Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel of Gürtelfischer Manor (she/her) is an adventuress who has gained some notoriety as a skilled and fearless swordfighter in recent years. Her origins are somewhat mysterious. While she is more than happy to talk about...

Want to chat about this?

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern Promo

Digital artwork of the absolute oh my god edgiest edgelord dagger ever. It has an obsidian blade, purple leather wraps, a brass handle with a weird clover design on it. It's surrounded by a halo of abstract angels and pool-table green fields with fleurs on them. You can probably order this knife out of a knife enthusiast magazine. It would also not look out of place in Hot Topic. And this knife is not a phase, Mom!

Where to Stick This Knife?
One fine morning a little over a year ago, I set up a silly poll on Twitter. I asked everyone, since we were all thieves in a treasure room, which item to steal. About thirty-seven thieves weighed in and decided upon, among other things, taking a single knife from the treasure store.

In response to this, I created the absolute shiniest treasure knife possible. I streamed its creation live on my weekly Twitch stream. I gave the knife an obsidian blade, per chat’s insistence. Then I messed around with the symmetry brush because that seems to draw people in. I imagine it looks really cool live to see a mandala spiral out of nothing. I based a color scheme on the silly obsidian used to craft the improbably blade, and while it somewhat reminds me of the green felt on a billiards table, I liked it.

The knife then sat, fairly un-used, for a long time. I came up with a mystical moonphase archery set to accompany it later, but there’s something a little more special about the knife.

Digital artwork combining medieval lunar charts with book illumination, a wooden Ottoman horse bow, and fletched arrows. It is gilded with gold. The lunar chart combines the phases of the moon with eclipse patterns. A green orb representing Earth is in the middle. The bow has an arrow strung to it and is aimed downwards.

Flash forward to Geek Girl Con ’22. It was going to be my first in-person convention since the end of the Pandemic. I’ll have a more detailed post about this con later. It was very, very good. It was sort of a reinvention for me, moving away from painterly offerings and into more comic-book style art.

Photograph of my table at Geek Girl Con, courtesy of AnnaMarie Jackson-Phelps of Violet Daisy Games. The Warlock'd zine is posed on top of a gold tablecloth. More copies of it and the Crab Rare Arts Best zine are cropped by the composition. In the background, there's a couple of prints: One is the moonphase bow and arrow set, and the other is the edgy obsidian knife.Hey! I recognize that knife back there. Photo courtesy of AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps.

One of the reasons I go to conventions is that I meet so many great people. The person I met of note with regards to this post was AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps, a game photographer and TTRPG designer. She took this and many other photos for me. Then AnnaMarie granted me permission to share the photos on my blog. It was really kind of her and I hope she had a great time!

You Don’t Meet in a Tavern
In the follow-up email, AnnaMaria asked if I’d be interested in participating in her upcoming TTRPG prompt book, You Don’t Meet in a Tavern. While I couldn’t immediately commit to making new art for the book, I wondered…Maybe…maybe there was a home for my edgy obsidian knife here? I had a really honest open conversation with AnnaMaria about art licensing and I’m definitely very happy with what we decided to do.

I’m pleased to announce that my knife will appear in this collection! Keep an eye on Violet Daisy Games for more information.

Care to read more?

A Fossil Returns to Life

A Fossil Returns to Life

What Do We Do with Old Art that People Really Liked?I've been doing conventions for awhile now and find them very personally fulfilling. I have so much fun setting up my display, rehearsing my sales strategies, and figuring out which things sell and why. Of course, my...

Amphiox, Continued

Amphiox, Continued

Defining Steps in a Personal Production PipelineMy Amphiox short comic is an exercise in art production. Up until I attempted it, I'd never really done much longform comic storytelling. Most of my practice was in one- or two-page micro-stories. I chose 48 pages as a...

So I Went Adventuring…

So I Went Adventuring…

Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel"Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel of Gürtelfischer Manor (she/her) is an adventuress who has gained some notoriety as a skilled and fearless swordfighter in recent years. Her origins are somewhat mysterious. While she is more than happy to talk about...

Want to chat about this?

A Fossil Returns to Life

A Fossil Returns to Life

Digital art of a very fancy tea part being raided by three small yellow pterosaurs. One is coming in for a landing over the manicured lawn. Another is fishing the tea bags out of the teapot with its beak. The third has adopted an overturned teacup as its home, where it can secret stolen sugar cubes. There's a rainbow over the scene. The tea party was shaping up to be pretty good before the pterosaurs arrived: A petit four, cupcake, donut, and fancy cutlery lie askew on a patterned tablecloth.

What Do We Do with Old Art that People Really Liked?
I’ve been doing conventions for awhile now and find them very personally fulfilling. I have so much fun setting up my display, rehearsing my sales strategies, and figuring out which things sell and why. Of course, my favorite thing to do is make merchandise in the first place. When I was starting out, I learned quickly that fancy prints are good for attracting people over to my table. I learned which paper and which printer to use to get the best-quality prints. There’s just something very nice about making a piece of artwork and then packaging it up to go to someone’s home.

Earlier version of the digital art featured in this blog post. It is much simpler: Just a teapot, the three pterosaurs, and one sugar spoon on a blue handkerchief. This is all on a plain white background.

The original Ptempest in a Pteacup, circa 2013.
I did this in Adobe Illustrator with vector shapes because…I enjoyed pain.

Of all my prints that I’ve ever made, I’ve sold the most copies of Ptempest in a Pteacup. As much complex analysis of this piece as I want to do, the general consensus when I ask is that it’s ‘cute’ and ‘like nothing I’ve ever seen before’. I think the fantasy of owning a small prehistoric creature is a common one, or at least one that can be tapped into easily when observed for the first time. I think people liked the clear silhouette and ability to make out what was going on, and the weird/shiny surfaces.

It hurt to retire this print. It also hurt to sell more of them.

Why did I stop selling it? Well, it’s a very slow style rendered in vector graphics. I can’t easily or quickly replicate this style. The underdrawing also isn’t something I particularly adore. It looks kind of lumpy. That may have been part of its charm, but I’m not that artist anymore. I’m a different artist now! Finally, the size wasn’t large enough to fetch the higher prices I could see it selling for. This was an 8.5 by 11 print and the maximum I feel comfortable charging for that is $25. I wanted to make it an 11 x 17 so I could charge $40 per print. Most home printers can’t do 11 x 17 so I want the novelty of a larger print to factor into its appeal.

On the docket: A size update, and a style update. How do I do that while preserving the magic of the original? Do I truly understand what people liked about my own work? I’m going to ask this question over and over again. What do people like? How do I update something people like, but still have it reflect the original work?

Digital sketch of the final art. It's more or less what we see in the final, but scribbled in and not colored in yet.

My 2nd or 3rd attempt at a sketch. Not sure where the earlier ones went, but this is where I landed.

My goals with this sketch were to fill out more of the page, make it more of a full illustration instead of a spot graphic, really justify the scene by printing full-bleed. I also wanted to make the perspective on the teacups and teapot cleaner, and just in general make the designs more elegant. I’m not the greatest at paleontological reconstruction but I felt like the pterosaurs deserved more care in their construction and posing. One of the pterosaurs was moved into the sky so that the viewer can see a whole body and how it flies. This should make it easier to imagine the rest of the other pterosaurs whose forms are hidden.

Some very rough color studies, one with a sunny day and one with a rainy day.Color studies. Sunny day and rainy day.

I only did a couple of color studies here. I knew I wanted to keep the pterosaurs yellow so that they’d jump out at the viewer as ‘odd’ when passed by. Purples and blues were there to support the yellow. I messed with the idea of a rainy background but sunny foreground, a fox’s wedding effect. Ultimately that felt a bit convoluted for this piece and so I moved on and vowed to keep it simple. The rainbow was a joke but of course that’s the thing about jokes…Perhaps my friends who join my drawing livestream dared me to leave it in!

Digital lineart of the pterosaurs attacking the tea party. It's blank and ready to color.First iteration of lines. Available to freely color under a CC-BY-NC 3.0 License

This, I felt, was pretty good. I’ve been getting faster and more confident in my lines. It’s approaching the balance I want between polished lines and getting the lines done at all. Right now I’m really enjoying the monowidth look done with Pencil tool. Maybe I’ll expand it with thinner lines on some of the surfaces in the future, but for now, I let colors do most of that work.

Simple flat coloring on the lines of the pterodactyl artwork. It looks very dull because no shading or highlights have been added.Without much of a variety of color studies, I explored my way through this scheme.

Some color schemes can be explored through. I would never do this with a client, but in this case I needed to do it for myself. For fun. Because that’s all art really is, right? I also started plotting where the highlights would go. Highlights function to draw attention to key parts of a piece.

Closeup of a sketch depicting a Victorian manor reflected in the surface of a teapot, warping and gleaming included.I also had a small adventure figuring out the landscape around the picnic.

What was I doing here? I was figuring out what would reflect on the teapot, and where. I think porcelain’s reflectivity is not too high so I felt comfortable blotting in colors and leaving it at that. One feedback I got on the original pterosaur piece was that the ‘shiny teapot’ was very desirable. I didn’t like how artificially shiny it was and so I sought a more sophisticated effect here. Which leads to designing a small Victorian garden that most people won’t see. That’s life. And art.

Digital art that is the same as the first image in this post, but there's one thing missing...I sat on this for a couple of days.

And so, many layers of shading, rainbow gleams, research into confections, spot black applciation, and a custom repeating pattern for the table cloth later, this is what came out. Something still bothered me about this piece. I think it was the proportion of subject matter. The teaset seemed to be the main part of the piece. I wrestled with what to do. I didn’t want to add another whole pterosaur, because that would be too much pterosaur. It was like measuring out milk and sugar. The tea flavor still needs to come through.

Closeup of the pterosaur hunkering down in an overturned teacup.Hang on. This one’s looking a little cramped there. Where’s the wing going?

Same screenshot as above, only this one has been edited so that the pterosaur's wings are free of the pteacup and spread widely outward.Boop! Wings. Done. 🙂

Care to read more?

A Fossil Returns to Life

A Fossil Returns to Life

What Do We Do with Old Art that People Really Liked?I've been doing conventions for awhile now and find them very personally fulfilling. I have so much fun setting up my display, rehearsing my sales strategies, and figuring out which things sell and why. Of course, my...

Amphiox, Continued

Amphiox, Continued

Defining Steps in a Personal Production PipelineMy Amphiox short comic is an exercise in art production. Up until I attempted it, I'd never really done much longform comic storytelling. Most of my practice was in one- or two-page micro-stories. I chose 48 pages as a...

So I Went Adventuring…

So I Went Adventuring…

Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel"Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel of Gürtelfischer Manor (she/her) is an adventuress who has gained some notoriety as a skilled and fearless swordfighter in recent years. Her origins are somewhat mysterious. While she is more than happy to talk about...

Want to chat about this?

Amphiox, Continued

Amphiox, Continued

Digital artwork of the opening page in a 48-page comic titled 'Amphiox'. It depicts the title in loosely-kerned Alegreya font as well as a section of some sort of eel, fin included.

Defining Steps in a Personal Production Pipeline
My Amphiox short comic is an exercise in art production. Up until I attempted it, I’d never really done much longform comic storytelling. Most of my practice was in one- or two-page micro-stories. I chose 48 pages as a test for art production because that’s a typical length for a ‘floppy’ comic book, like the ones that debut monthly in comic shops. As I continue to work on it in drafts, I have to define particular stages of production. This frees me from judging myself too hard too early; if something’s not working, I can do my best and then leave it for a later pass.

At the moment, I’m working on inking. However, prior to this I needed the following passes:

  1. Thumbnailing
  2. Value Sketch
  3. Roughing
  4. ‘Clean’ Roughing

I don’t like two separate stages of roughing. For the purposes of figuring out how I like to work I had to give myself the opportunity to ‘let go’ on any given panel in my comic. But, will this be a fast enough process to deliver a comic according to a tighter schedule with more people’s livelihoods on the line? Most comic art I see has a roughs stage, then a lineart stage, nothing in between. I wonder if I have to sharpen my confidence to get to that stage?

Just for fun, here’s what the above stages look like on the most complex spread of my comic so far. It’s an airship village that I named ‘Villagespread.psd’ and it’s fun but I also am expecting a lot of myself with it.

Digital artwork of a very scribbly, simple 'airship village'. If you squint it might be full of airships.Thumbnailing

Digital artwork of the airship village, rendered in stark black and white. The shapes are still very abstract. There's stick figures running through it shouting 'Amphiox! Amphiox!'Value Sketch (with extra panels to indicate the path the characters take)

Digital artwork of the village spread, now drawn more competently and with grayscale shading. It's still pretty rough but at least the airships are visible.Roughing (with grayscale study)

Digital artwork of the airship village spread, with more work on the characters and refined setting pieces.‘Clean’ Roughing

Digital artwork of the airship village spread with the rough sketch set to low opacity, and a few polished lines on the left of the composition.
Inking (Work in progress, of course!)

I also did some late-stage editing on the writing in this draft. When test readers went through the comic they were greatly misinterpreting the following spread. They thought this was a rescue team. I came to the conclusion that this was just a few too many threads in a very short, simple story.

A rough spread with a subterranean submarine, new characters, banter, and uh yeah it's confusing.

However, it’s a bit late in the game to commit to a spread that is equally complicated as this one.

Digital artwork of a view over a hill. There's an airship village on the beach. A rickety house sits on the hill. Off in the ocean there's a grotto. There is text: ONCE UPON A TIME... A traveling village perched upon a shore.  The villagers kept an eye on the horizon. Hungry and deep, the ocean growled. The villagers called their planet, 'haunted'.

I schooched in a ‘prequel’ spread using graphic design to minimize the amount of art I needed to draw. White space is more than about being artsy or airy…it’s also about freeing yourself from extra work. This spread also solved a problem with staging that I had. It’s important that the reader be able to ‘feel’ the location of the airship village in relation to the Amphiox grotto and the haunted house on the hilltop. I’m not the greatest at prose but hopefully I could give a little bit of cultural context to how people react to giant magic doom eels.

Scanned traditional sketch of Lyrat with a patchier outfit and more utilitarian clothing.

I also redesigned Lyrat Poes (‘Poesy’ in the comic) because I didn’t want her to be so symmetrical. I also felt like her original balloony clothing was going to get caught on stuff. Now she looks more like she mods her outfits for jobs rather than fashion.

What’s Next?
Inking! So much inking. Especially that airship spread, wow. I was averaging about 3 full spreads per day before I hit that one.

How am I Feeling About Warlock’d?
Right. This was meant to be a thing that helped me with Warlock’d. Okay, so, I’m feeling intimidated by the amount of work I have to do to make a very long story (300+ pages) coherent and as polished as I am making Amphiox. However, I think that I can commit to polishing individual chapters and editing layouts in the same way that I’ve been editing Amphiox layouts. Am I glad I made Amphiox? Yes. Do I enjoy how much time it’s taking from Warlock’d? No, but at the same time, I needed a break from Warlock’d.

Care to read more?

A Fossil Returns to Life

A Fossil Returns to Life

What Do We Do with Old Art that People Really Liked?I've been doing conventions for awhile now and find them very personally fulfilling. I have so much fun setting up my display, rehearsing my sales strategies, and figuring out which things sell and why. Of course, my...

Amphiox, Continued

Amphiox, Continued

Defining Steps in a Personal Production PipelineMy Amphiox short comic is an exercise in art production. Up until I attempted it, I'd never really done much longform comic storytelling. Most of my practice was in one- or two-page micro-stories. I chose 48 pages as a...

So I Went Adventuring…

So I Went Adventuring…

Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel"Lady Sigrid von Eisvogel of Gürtelfischer Manor (she/her) is an adventuress who has gained some notoriety as a skilled and fearless swordfighter in recent years. Her origins are somewhat mysterious. While she is more than happy to talk about...

Want to chat about this?