Category: BLOG

Rene outfittery snazzle bedazzle

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Cal

doing some other art stuff for jobs in real life so haven’t had too much focus for the comic as of late. still gonna be slow going. if only we had some snappy clothes to make the wait less painful—-

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mostly made up designs again but of course have some elements that I stole from other designs I liked. these outfits are ideas for the Renes, the powerful neighboring nation that is attacking Allano at this point of the story. trying to make them their own thing but there are some elements of deco and the byzantines thrown in there among others. some of these designs may be a bit too modern for what I’ll end up using but I have a plan to use them later 🙂

these are clothes worn by rich people. people who do manual labor could neither afford nor would want to deal with getting these dirty. certain colors and patterns were much more difficult and time consuming to create before machine production.

If only I was a programmer

Posted on June 20, 2021 by Cal

playing around with some pixel art stuff.

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inspired a bit by dungeon of the endless because i love that game.

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probably would have fairly simple terrain. should help the characters pop and I think it could look good. but also because i am lazy.

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I actually have a really fun game concept in mind. Some kind of roguelike hybrid with elements of oregon trail and also having party peacemaking as a main focus. you gotta try and make your party get along for the greater good and it would have branching dialogue options and stuff. lots of stats and crap too cause that makes me jazzed.

I would LIKE to make in the future but I have no idea if it’ll ever get off the ground. I am not a programmer. tried to teach myself some Unreal but it is slowww going. the sprites and game ideas are fun though even if nothing comes of it.

The tragedies of colorblindness, part 2

Posted on April 30, 2021 by Cal

the wife helps with color schemes a lot lmao. color helps but it’s not really my thing. doesn’t really excite me and i don’t think in color. kinda sucks cause I think it would help differentiating the characters but B&W lets you do things color can’t too. color can get a bit messy and miss the silhouettes and body language if you’re not careful. which I am not.

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sometimes I just play around with doodles and color those though. but most of what i do is doodles anyway I guess. do what you like i suppose 🙂

If only we weren’t colorblind

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Cal

some more outfit ideas.

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mostly made-up but they have some inspiration from african and some middle eastern designs. i steal elements from things i like all the time just like pretty much every other artist on the planet.
again, trying to keep things practical but interesting. the daily climate is more extreme on their world than in ours since the days are longer. It gets hotter and colder since the sun faces towards and away from the planet more. a lot of their clothing is layered so they can take it off easily once it gets hotter. this of course varies depending on where they live and the seasons.
trying to think of what people would have the patience to wear in their daily lives. the rich people can afford more impractical stuff because no one is making them move. 🙂 poorer folks obviously wear less extragavant stuff but it’s by no means bland. poor people knew about the magic of the pattern in real life. bland middle age peasants who only wore brown is more true to hollywood than real life. ancient bling baby

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color isn’t really my thing but theres no reason the motherlanders would style it up any less than we do. and theres no reason people in the past wouldn’t try to style it up just as much as folks do today. people don’t change.

It’s more practical than it looks

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Cal

in the days before industrialization, women deserved some major props for their work especially when they had to carry loads themselves. in many places around the world they still do, and carrying supplies on their heads still is a common way to do this. I feel like this isn’t shown much in western media really even if it was common in the west too in ye olden days.
looks pretty rad too

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(pothead lol)

apparently you can carry over 60% of your body weight on your head if you’re used to it. the more you know

Gulf phenotypes and ethnicities

Posted on March 30, 2021 by Cal

thought i’d share something i was playing around with.

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getting the look of different ethnicities of the region where I want them. at the end of the day, this is at most a glorified easter egg. I will not expect readers to be able to judge where a non-human character is from in a made up world by their face (and I am not that consistent or patient to make it exact every time anyway).

mainly playing around with shapes that I think are fun. trying to apply some logic with facial feature patterns varying based on climate, one people group conquering another, etc. at the end of the day i’m not gonna stress to much about making it super duper consistent and I imagine that different ethnic groups would blend together over time anyway.

with geography factored in:

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Allano is the nation seen in the comic so far, and in the recent past were a branch of the ethnically and politically related Avato, looking similar as a result. I could say more ideas that I have but I’d rather let it play out for now. everything is of course subject to change anyway. 🙂 any questions or feedback help me out a lot. take care all

Words about words

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Cal

As mentioned previously, I spent a couple weeks before ch3 doodling the characters and trying to streamline them more before I had to draw them in motion. In hindsight I wish I did that more for ch2, but hopefully I learned my lesson.

Silne was based off of a sketch i did a couple years ago, and was originally going to be a specific different character. I ended up splitting Silne and this other character who I will still likely use. It wasn’t the right time yet. Though I don’t mention verbally it in the story, you can tell by the two sets of tattoos that she has that she was once married.

The story itself was one of the earlier ones I came up with and remained mostly unchanged, though of course I tweaked some details as I went. It was originally going to have much less of Arbo, the old man, but previous chapters focused quite heavily on two characters and I wanted to branch out just a little bit. I still think I enjoy working with few characters rather than a gigantic cast, at least in a per-chapter basis.

The armor of the rene took a little bit to get down too, since I wanted to show similarities with the armor in ch1 (for both Allano and Rene) without making them identical. they likely wouldn’t have much standardization between troops if this was real life, but you also want to make it recognizable to the reader. The allanos have armors similar to malwan’s outfit from ch1, but the militia organized halfway through the chapter is more rag-tag since they are not professionals. I ended up with the rene’s “shark tooth” helm because I thought it was cool and unique. All of these designs will likely show up in the future to some capacity.

sharp-eyed viewers of a previous post may be able to infer some interesting tidbits about the rene.