This is the 1st of a 2 part piece about the evolution of my webcomics. Part 1 covers my first webcomic, “The Wolves of the Wynd.” The character Emeric is in each panel, so you can see how much my style changes over the course of that year and a half.

I am on vacation for the next two and a half weeks (yay!). Next week I’m posting Part 2 of this. The comic will resume on June 5th.

This week’s post is about some 3D concept art I’ve been doing. I’ve been using Lego bricks to build caverns for Pelkern. This is to help me make comic pages with backgrounds that work as a three dimensional space, and are consistent panel to panel. I have mostly been building caverns, then deconstructing the caverns, then starting over, to get a better feel for the medium of bricks. The little guy there is for scale–this is a colossal cavern system. : )

I’m going on a two week vacation next week. I will be posting a comic about my art progression, part 1 & 2, for the next two weeks, then a funny drawing the next week. The Pelkern Cycle will resume three weeks from now.

These past two weeks I have experimented with different options for making my overall process to be faster.

I made a significant change to my inking process–I’ll only be doing woodcut style only in parts (like hair and clothing wrinkles), and then use drawing regular lines for the rest.

Grayscale didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, so I instead worked to speed up the coloring process. I created color libraries for each character in Photoshop and made custom color swatches for them.

I’m working on keeping the backgrounds simple in more panels, too.

Overall I’m pleased with the changes, which are already speeding up the process. This should result in me finishing the pages on time, and hopefully getting more of a page buffer going. ; )

I have been brainstorming some new ideas to see if I can make pages faster.

One idea I’m investigating is the possibility of doing the comic in black and white.

When I was getting my painting degree, I did several black & white paintings and drawings, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Here is some of the first sequential art I ever did: my Paris Project. It is Icarus, drawn from sculptures I had photographed in the Louvre. I drew the images with white pencil on black paper. I put it into the comic format here, but the originals are each 8×10 drawings.

I have a four day weekend trip coming up. That, combined with getting Page 34 done two days late last week, means I’ll be posting Page 35 either next week, or the following week. I’m feeling burn-out, though, so I’m pretty excited for a vacation.

I had some trouble fine-tuning the expressions on this page, so it’s going up a little late this week. 😀

In the meantime, here is a concept design drawing I did for Sol, back in 2017.

Page 33 will go up this afternoon.  : )