some more body shape doodles. just seeing what works and what doesn’t for the story.
trying to design the clothes hand in hand with body shapes, which i haven’t done as much in the past as i probably should. the clothes and silhouette are basically the characters’ “brand”, i think it helps for them to build off each other. it makes the impact more distinct at least.
panel borders always kick my butt. it’s still easier for me to draw characters without worrying about panels even after all this time. a lot of times i like how a character silhouette looks in a vacuum but when it’s on the panel it clashes with other elements. oh well. still learning
there are times when I need to think about mechanisms that may exist in the background of the comic, but are not focused on heavily.
I admit that prisons and legal systems are not a topic that I know a ton about, especially in regards to cultures or times of which I have limited understanding. for most cases like these, I tend to just gloss over them in the story. work to your strengths. and the anthology nature of the stories mean I can flit between different tales without having to commit too much to areas outside of my ‘expertise’. That said, it’s still a fun thought exercise to play with relatively unknown topics (for me) to see if I can figure out how things would work. I try to look at history to see what people actually did, and I try to use common sense. How successful will I be? I guess we’ll see!
though i doubt prisons in motherland are anywhere close to the industry that they are in many places in real life, i also doubt they are rare. probably still rarer, because in most places in the gulf they would just make prisoners into slaves or execute them instead. that way they would either be free labor or permanently out of your hair, a much more pragmatic solution. an exception would be political prisoners, who you could use for leverage or ransom (in the case of a powerful individual, a hefty sum). of course i’m sure the law isn’t going to be just executing any joe schmoe who commits a petty misdemeanor but I doubt prisoners in this world have a lot of rights. if you owe someone, they are gonna try to get their payment – likely often seizure of property or person (indentured servitude, which has been very common throughout history). if by necessity the debt necessitates prison, so be it. or so I would assume.
I’ve heard things about ancient roman prisons like they more or less only existed to hold people for trial. I’ve heard that some of the prisons were in absolute darkness and many who were kept there indefinitely went blind. is any of this true? It is hard to say, no one alive today was there. it is difficult to trust scholarly analysis at face value because humans make mistakes and often manufacture facts from theories. human nature doesn’t change however, and there are constants that I think can be gleaned from any subject.
like anything, I’ll have to learn more about it. or just see how well I can skirt around the issue in the comic 😉
I believe that we can’t fully comprehend the greatness of the Christian God, that’s just part of being a finite being trying to comprehend an infinite one. I am so glad he makes himself known to us and that we aren’t saved based on our knowledge.
I sigh when I see people try to disprove God. I mean no disrespect, but it seems to me like to a bacteria doubting that the dog it lives on exists. it can’t see the dog. dogs are probably a myth. and all of its bacteria friends agree: dogs don’t exist. but in the end, the dog’s existence doesn’t really depend on what the microbes think about it.
the bacteria is trying to punch above its weight, so to speak. the dog is just too big to fathom. it’s just like us, we can reason all we want but as finite beings trying to understand the infinite, I feel that relying on human logic over the logic of God is pretty laughable. human logic is just not big enough. it’s not that we’re stupid, but we sure aren’t smart enough.
that said, I believe that God still gives us our intellect for a reason and I (try) to use mine. I muse. Though my logic is minute compared to the vastness of infinity, I still have a thought.
by my human logic, the single “proof” I have as to the truth of the Christian gospel is that it openly says that you can’t be good enough. I’ve been in the pit. I know I’m not good enough to save myself or even really make myself better. And nothing that I’ve seen that other faiths tout that could ‘make me good’ enough are possible to achieve when you really confront it. Every other faith says “try harder”. I tried the hardest that was possible and it got me nowhere.
Now, maybe you are a stronger person than I am. I suppose it’s possible. But I have seen no evidence than any human is good enough to reach perfection. If you think you are good enough, then I propose that you haven’t thought much about how good perfect really is. Or you haven’t reached the true depths of the pit yet. Let me tell you, trying to earn your value is a straight path to that pit – saying this from experience.
I’m not a debater. I just wanted to share the hope that I have. I’ve heard it said that other faiths ask “what can I do?”, while Christianity asks “what did God do for me?”. It gives me hope, because I’m not good enough. Thankfully, thanks to Jesus that pressure is off of my weak shoulders.
I find silhouettes and shapes just as important as detail. Silhouettes can be tough for me to integrate into the background and still make it look good. always learning.
I find a lot of these have interesting shapes which can help differentiate characters. the types of clothes a character wears is just as important as their body shape and body language, since it helps the audience recognize them. it is their ‘brand’, if you will. it also makes certain poses more or less difficult to draw. 😉
what are half of these outfits? i have no idea. the story of my life: we can take it further.
It’s probably an oversimplification, but I feel like people tend to fall into two camps: learners and innovators. This is how I will define each:
To learn is to take what someone already knows and apply it yourself. To innovate is to experiment, test, and play with ideas in order to refine a concept into a practical method, which the learners then can apply.
Innovation is no better than learning, and learning is no better than innovation. They are both vital. Nor would I say the skills are mutually exclusive to each person, but I do think people tend to lean more heavily one way or the other. However, I would say that I think it is much rarer for a person to be an innovator than a learner. Both because of how I think people are naturally wired, and because of how society operates.
I have an example. Think about adding fletching to arrows (those feathers at the end). adding three fins stabilizes the arrow in three-dimensional space and makes an archer much more accurate. To my (admittedly, limited) knowledge every society that knew about fletching added them to their arrows, because they are so much better than having arrows without. and yet, there are still some isolated tribes out there even today that do not use fletching. they have had thousands of years to invent the concept, and yet, haven’t.
You would probably think that it wouldn’t take a lot of time for someone to figure out that adding such a simple device to an arrow would aid so drastically in its efficiency, but I believe that is neglecting the effect of peer pressure upon an individual. Perhaps someone did indeed have that idea, but imagine how actively they would have to fight back against any backlash, because they would have to choose between experimenting and doing ‘work’. “Playing around doesn’t make arrows, Timmy. Quit wasting time.” You can understand the logic. I can’t imagine how many countless times this has happened in history, and I am genuinely curious how many inventions could have been made but weren’t for the simple fact that the innovators listened to their peers and ‘got to work’.
That is just a small example, but I think it happens in some form constantly in every society. Just think about having a great idea to speed up the workflow at your office job just to have it shut down because it would either require change on the part of others, or time to test on your own. Both disrupt the workflow temporarily. And even though a temporary slowdown may be worth the long-term benefits, it is often hard for humans to see the forest for the trees.
I do think that society tends to become more specialized over time as populations grow. You may have very well been able to manufacture your own arrows, bow, clothes, and learn to hunt, clean, and cook your own food for a living. Good luck trying to create your own automobile from scratch. You need assemblers to create it, you need miners to gather the materials, you need engineers to design it, and that isn’t even including the vast amounts of work hours and manpower that goes into designing and creating the machinery and technology, etc. You can only create a car after hundreds of years of buildup. It is hard to come up with how to create a car. But once you know how to do it, the challenge is much less.
Work specialization in theory is of benefit to innovators overall, because it tends to let them focus more on their innovative strengths when they have to worry less about their personal balance between ‘efficiency’ and ‘progress’, but that is just a generalization. And I doubt it changes life much for the learners, because they would still learn from others in the same way as a more generalized setup, albeit with a narrower focus.
It tends to be much easier to learn, and I would say that goes for not only the individual, but society as a whole. People are lazy. They just want to know how to do something and do it with minimal hassle. Having to discover your own way of doing things takes a lot of work. It takes a ton of work to learn how to walk when you are a child. But once you learn, it’s no big deal. Likewise, it takes grueling effort to learn how to ride a bike. But again, once you learn it is trivial. Now I ask you, would it take less time and effort to travel 50 miles by walking or by riding a bike? I say clearly the bike. But in our own lives, think how many times we metaphorically learn to walk and say “that’s good enough”, unwilling to learn to ride the bike. We do that as a society too, because society is people. There is a better way that exists (even if no one has discovered it), but it is a risk. There are people who may be willing to take that risk, but that is time they could otherwise be spending working in time-tested, safe ways. Their new way may be better, but it may be not. But they need time to figure it out to see.
I wouldn’t say I had some grand point, I just hope this will get someone thinking. Just please be careful that you don’t stop someone from learning to ride a bike when everyone else is walking.
I really do like drawing and designing clothes. which is kind of odd since I don’t care at all how I dress in real life.
playing with shapes, playing with ideas, the norm. trying to make believable designs that I could see someone wearing in real life, even if they are not necessarily practical. these are intended for the renes, though I may end up stealing elements to use for other nations. the renes in particular do not like showing skin. part of that is their colder environment, but i would hazard a guess that their climate and their particulars of modesty play into each other over time. I think that tended to happen in real life.
patterns add some flavor, but they can be a little difficult and tedious to do in B&W without breaking silhouettes or muddying the body language. if I ever use designs in the comic I have to do B&W versions to make sure they work. but right now the shapes and the silhouette are more important.
i always thought it was odd that in fantasy or scifi it is a lot more common to see “ancient clothes + modern setting” than “modern clothes + ancient setting”. i get that they wouldn’t necessarily have modern materials, but design trends seem pretty arbitrary to time.
i’m sure having logos and stuff is a lot harder without screen printing, but you never know. they might have found a workaround with the tools they had. patterns definitely have existed since the earliest days of humanity. peasants flinging mud and dressed in brown is probably more true to monty python than real life, though some colors of fabric and the details of some patterns would undoubtedly make things more expensive.
shoutout to my man alec for letting me unapologetically steal the design of his duds. like I’ve said before, it’s not about coming up with some original idea out of the blue, it is putting your own spin on it in a way that is creative. doing iterations often helps to weed things out and narrow things down.
playing with some more ideas. can you guess which parts are ripoffs? 🙂
played around with him for a bit but just wasn’t feeling where it was going. so I decided I’m gonna make him a dwarf. why not. it’ll add some interest. it’s always fun to do a new spin on something.
he is specifically of the achondroplasia variety, which I believe is the most common type. meaning he has an average sized head and torso with shorter limbs. I tried to give him the forehead and posture that I notice many dwarfs have. I might play around a bit more, but he’s getting there.
Stories existed long before writing. Some of the most ancient texts we know of likely had a long existence as oral accounts way before they were first penned. Oral traditions do rely on the faultiness of memory, yes, but I think they are much more accurate than many give them credit for. Especially if your society is organized around these histories, they would take every precaution possible to prohibit the corruption of information. Many probably trained their whole life to be oral tellers. One particularly interesting technique I discovered recently is that storytellers often skipped a generation (so a grandparent would tell their tale to their grandchild, skipping their child), which I think is really smart. You would have half as many steps for something to go wrong.
Many cultures far removed from the west still have strong oral traditions. It is fascinating how many cultures who had no contact with each other have shockingly similar stories about a global flood. 🙂
Anyway, here is some insight to the design process of a major player in ch4, of which storytelling plays a large role. He likely has been a teller for most of his life, and is respected by his people as such. He is their library. They would trust him much more than some joe schmoe telling the same story.
kids exist. and in the same space as adults, no less! shocking.
i find kids a little bit more limited of a canvas to experiment with body shapes compared to adults, but it is still possible to make some fun designs. while i believe in both nurture and nature to a degree, i find people often underestimate the role of nature. the ‘child is the father of the man’ so to speak, in my experience your temperament as a child can be easily seen when you reach maturity. i hope to show those personalities in the comic. even one infant is so different from another. i don’t think that you can necessarily be anything you want to be. I do wholeheartedly believe that you can be what you were created to be 🙂
as usual, shown above are some main characters, some minor characters, some background, and some that I probably won’t use.
feel good. had a very productive week or two. finished the opening of ch4
