Oraq, the ancient god-empress of the Allanos. An important symbol for the nation, so I wanted to get the look down.
some concepts of her design. i wanted it to be elegant and authoritative without being too ornate. her mask would have a pearl-reflective sheen as mentioned in a previous lore excerpt.
figure i’ll show my current process. people seem to dig that stuff. the process is heavily subject to change as i find new ways to be lazy.
^ these are the layers i use in case anyone is interested. i use a surface pro with clipstudio. i like clip a lot but am by no means an expert. part of me would like to do it with ink on paper but digital is way faster and more flexible. i may experiment with traditional media for a mini-chapter at some point before i commit.
i have a rough script and plot points that i have written but no huge storyboard. so from my rough idea of what i wanna do i then make the background sketch. i draw this in blue but i changed it here to black just to help visibility. after that i make the panels (which clip makes very easy to do).
i pretty much sketch it straight on the page as shown above and occasionally use the lasso tool to move parts of the image around to get a composition i like. that level of detail is about the best balance for me between intricacy and speed. i often find if i make the sketch too in-depth then when i do the final lines it looks really stiff and lifeless.
often i’ll play around with a few panel layouts to get the flow right but generally i do one page’s layout at a time. i rarely sketch out more than like 3 pages in one go. ‘wing it’ is a dirty term to some people but that’s basically what i do. me and my soul mate toriyama. if i storyboarded out the entire comic chapter all at the beginning i would 1) be bored to tears and 2) likely waste a ton of time because i’ll get to page 3 and decide i want to change something, meaning i’ll have to storyboard a lot of it all over again. again, some people work that way but i do not.
after that i do the main lines. it really doesn’t take super long assuming i’m not braindead. i do most of it on the Char[acter] layer and extra stuff on the FG and BG just so it doesnt get too messy. i’ve been using vector layers lately. they seem to work well, especially in regards to coloring and rotating parts of the image. a lot of times if i drew a character’s arm too long or something i’ll just lasso it and move and rotate it and whatever. vectors make that pretty painless. if it was raster it would be all blurry and nasty and also a pain to color.
to further help coloring i also work with aliased lines at a big resolution. if they were anti-aliased i couldn’t use the fill bucket tool as easily. after i shrink and export the final image for web use you can’t even tell.
then colors (b&w in this case). clipstudio makes it easy to fill in big areas even without completely closing the lines. after that i also do the stars (which are just a scatter brush). for this chapter i am using two gray shades (30/50%) and it seems fine. i may do something else in the future. i did it with just the one 30% gray originally but it was a bit flat at times. way back when i used yellow instead but i switched it out for a few reasons.
after all that i do the speech bubbles and that’s pretty much it. in total it takes a few hours give or take. i really don’t have it in me to draw for like 8 hours like some people. i’m sure in a year i’ll have refined the process further but i thought i would share. feel free to ask questions if you dig.
since chapter 2 is wrapping up fairly soon, I thought I should show some of the character design i’ve been working on for the next. starring: OLD LADY
geezer represent
mainly working on face stuff and tattoo designs. simplifying things. trying to get rid of tedious-to-draw stuff now so i dont have to deal with it when i’m actually working on the pages. this is more preliminary stuff, i will refine it as i doodle more.
for the tattoos, it can be tough finding a balance between a lore-friendly, interesting design and one that doesn’t muddy the body language or expression. in the real world, if they were this crazy about their tats they would probably cover up a lot more of their bodies that I’ve shown. but like i’ve said before that can really muddy the silhouette and body language for the reader so even if it’s ‘lore accurate’ it’s not always ‘the thing that should be done’.
so anyway i’m currently leaning to the tat design on the lower left. the design on her arms is the one she got as a teenager, the design of her family. inspired by some polynesian designs. the one on her torso (the grey part) and head is the design she inherited from her husband’s line.
throwing around a few more tattoo ideas.
based off a bit of maori stuff. more or less. i imagine if these people were real they would tattoo themselves all over the place and try to show them off (like we do), but for reader clarity it can muddy the silhouettes a bit if you aren’t careful. can take a long time to draw too.
also i mentioned this a while ago but it might be a little hard to see for the casual reader. above is the tattoo design for the main characters of chapter 2, more or less in the colors it would actually be. the dad has the ‘father mark’, basically the full tattoo for the family crest. lain has the ‘daughter mark’, a partial version that would be blended with that of her husband’s family mark if she got married. it’s seen as poor form to have the daughter mark take up too much of the face since it’s basically insulting the husband’s family if they got no space to put their bling on there.
men and women both get their designs when the come of age, so little kids don’t have them.
no page this week unfortunately. still got a doodle for yall
(patented rob liefeld tinyfeet™)
i hadn’t really drawn sago (ch 1 character) since I got my new tablet. the main reason why the two chapters look a bit different is because by the time I started ch 2 I had a tablet with a screen. I don’t care how good your hand-eye coordination is, you are not drawing consistent and quick straight lines without seeing your pen. it was really hard to do any hatching other than very tiny lines and that just isn’t enough flexibility.
the new tablet is a bit harder to vary the pen pressure with on the other hand, but I’d by far rather have accurate lines. i’m way too lazy to take more time than I need to.
I also started using Clipstudio instead of photoshop and I personally like it a lot more. it makes it a lot easier to color and set up panels. the main thing it does worse is text (it isn’t great, but has gotten better). still recommend clipstudio to anyone though, it’s a waaay better price too.
at some point i’ll get a big ol off-brand cintiq type monitor tablet and then i’ll really be captain lazy. but doggone wait till you see how spicy my lines are then champs
Body markings mainly serve an out-of-universe purpose of helping the audience to more easily tell non-human characters apart, but also have justified reasons in the world. Tattoos are extremely common for Arkan characters and are basically coat of arms for the family. The color, position, and design of the tattoos vary widely between cultures and even families, but similar styles obviously exist within close areas. The designs are designed primarily with the men in mind, as they are the ones whom the family line is passed down. Women generally receive father marks, which is about half of their family’s mark – they will later receive the other half of the mark of their husband to symbolize a unity of the two families. It is seen in poor taste for the father mark to be unnecessarily large compared to the husband’s or not leaving enough space for the wife’s other half, though this tends to happens more often than it would seem. Some families, especially wealthy ones, tend to make it almost a competition who can have the largest markings. For the reader this may not be shown in full as it will distract from body language.
Some powerful women that are unmarried may have the entire father mark. It is extremely difficult if not impossible to remove tattoos. They tend to be in areas easily viewable with clothing such as the face, arms and tail (though again for reader clarity this may not be accurately represented). Non-permanent body paint is also used in some circles, often for war or events.
The high Renes view the practice as barbaric. Note that they also treat their ridges in ways that the Arkans think of likewise. Other Arkans also may not tattoo as heavily, like the Otigos.
Designs can change somewhat over generations, and some add in major family events on the tapestry for instance (e.g. grampa killed a bear so we’ll show him killing a bear in the design from now on). They also change if they find their design is at odds with the popular trends, and can also ‘suddenly’ change to just coincidentally mirror those in power or royalty. Royalty and nobles hate this and will charge commoners if they find their mark to be infringed and the line is often extremely blurred.
An idea. Technology doesn’t progress in the same sequence in Motherland as in real life.
People in real life often take for granted that technology progresses as it currently does. Many feel it as this inevitable thing but I disagree. without specific people with specific ideas, specific inventions would never have come along at the same time, and they never would have influenced others in the same way. There is no reason something like the compass couldn’t have been invented centuries earlier or later than when it was. The vast majority of people only know about inventions because they are already known and recorded. Say the concept of global magnetism was never discovered. Do you think you could invent a compass single-handedly without ever seeing one before or knowing the mechanism of its function? I never would. I only know about it because someone told me, who was told by someone else, who some where back in the depths of time was discovered by some sharp (and perhaps a bit lucky) individual who caught something that everyone else missed. I think that’s incredible.
As far as we know, the world population didn’t even hit 1 billion until the 19th century. We have septupled in population in just over a hundred years. Some estimates place the entire world population at 1000AD around the current population of the United States. Think how much more rapidly group knowledge and learning occur in the current environment compared to the days when cities of 30,000 were considered massive. I don’t think we’re smarter now than we were in the past, we just have more access to the knowledge of people before us to build on.
When it comes to technology as related to different eras, I see the same pattern constantly – especially from european-influenced works – history is inevitably shown as going from: ancient -> classical -> medieval -> renaissance/neoclassical -> industrial -> modern -> future. This is hardly the only way it could have gone (and it only represents the sequence in a small corner of the world anyway). I want to play with this concept a lot in the comic. Not to mention the Motherland world is not earth – different wildlife, climate, seasons, chemistry, etc. This changes a lot. I threw around an idea that fire is either nonexistent or difficult to create due to the atmosphere composition. Just imagine life on earth if fire wasn’t a thing. Apart from the obvious like heat and cooking, imagine trying to forge metal without fire. No metal means no tools, and much later down the line no industrial revolution. Coal and oil would be useless commodities. But what if electricity was discovered early? Lack of fire would mean coal generators to power the current wouldn’t be viable, leaving hydroelectric generation as the primary source. Maritime nations having access to electricity while neighboring regions without river or sea access would drastically change the balance of power practically overnight. The butterfly effect can be extremely pronounced with even minor changes.
Obviously the effects are different in the Motherland world, but just think about it as an example. Who is to say some bright individual wouldn’t come up with an alternative to fire that no one had ever thought of? What if a unique chemical compound from alien fauna not found on earth combusts without access to oxygen? What if the planet has ready access to geothermal power? Tons of possible ideas and solutions. Just because something wasn’t done in real life doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done. What if the cure to cancer is the one mundane compound everyone overlooked? What if the secret to time travel is peanut butter? How would you know?
Humanity is much more naive about the world than it likes to think. I’m okay with that.
Did some more concepts. looking again at a lot of real life designs, these have elements influenced by a variety of asian and middle-eastern pieces from cultures like the Mughals. It’s difficult to come up with original designs that are practical, because most of the practical designs people came up with in the past were already made. Generally if you can think of a ‘unique’ design there is often a reason it wasn’t used historically. A major issue with a lot of fantasy armors is they are often impractical on or off the battlefield, sometimes both. Designing a bulky suit of armor to provide ultimate protection might work for its intended purpose but would be extremely heavy, hindering its user in combat. Not to mention something oft forgotten – you end up wearing a suit of armor out of battle much more than in battle. I doubt anyone would want to wear an extra 60-100lbs (or theoretically more in the case of many fantasy designs) any more than they had to especially when marching on foot, sitting down for dinner, etc. People in real life sure didn’t.
People tended to wear what they could get away with and what they could afford. Armor was expensive and difficult to manufacture, especially large plates of metal. European knights were often wealthy and could afford plate armor, the lower status footsoldiers and such as far as I know generally wore cheaper materials. Mail and lamellar was cheaper and easier to make than plate armor or more people would have used it. I’ve heard that some cannibalized common tools like scythes into helmets and such in emergencies which wouldn’t surprise me. Thick fabric is also much better at protection than many people think. If something was useless in real life it quickly died out, but even a crummy helmet is better than none at all.
Feudalistic societies don’t really exist in the current Motherland setting and the economics of resin production and crafting is different than that of metal (easier to create large sheets), but the general principle of cost and practicality is still very applicable. People are still people even in alien lizard land.
(click to view larger)
some armor design concepts. on the whole metal is rarely used in Motherland due to a variety of factors, but the majority of regions have access to substitute materials. these alien ‘resin’ compounds are mass-produced from several species of wildlife and have no true real world analogue, though most have properties somewhere in the realm of rubber, chitin, ceramic, and polymer. among a myriad of other uses, they are used to make armor and weapons. it’s a big goal of mine to have some crazy setting weirdness and still try to make designs that make sense. I’m heavily basing armor and weapon designs off of real life ones since they actually work instead of hypothetically work.
pretty much all of the armor shown here would be ‘elite’ models that would be very expensive to create and own. common soldiers and guards would make do with much less. chainmail doesn’t really exist per se due to the tensile properties of resin, the city guards in ch 1 were using scaled or spined hauberks which is much cheaper than plate armor but still fairly effective. many of the (wealthier) renes shown were using plate armor which was inspired by the designs of real life armenian cataphracts, the manicas in particular. i just think they look cool.
this is close enough to a character concept in my opinion.
it can be pretty tough sometimes but it’s always fun to have to design clothes and armor and such with non-human parameters. Of course the motherlanders aren’t that different from humans but it’s enough. One of my mains goals with this story and setting is to create things that are realistically exotic but could still conceivably exist within the setting. it’s not high fantasy, so I’m really trying to make designs and such that would believably be created by the people there with their resources and technology.
For instance, very little wood or metal is used in the Motherland world. it’s too rare or hard to shape with their resources. Much of the armor used by soldiers and such is a type of molded resin, along with kevlar-like hauberks made out of durable fibers from the local ecosystem. A wide variety of construction methods and designs exist in this era, influenced by cost and efficiency, and of course, looks. Rich people can afford more expensive and efficient protection than your average town guard. armor evolved in real life to counter the weapons of the day and vice versa, and here is no different. That said, the evolution of their technology can be anachronistic at times compared to our own history.
I really want to try to make things that are realistic-looking while still looking cool or at least interesting. A helmet in real life is designed to protect your face first and foremost above looks (with some less than “cool” results for the sake of efficiency), and boy do these characters have a lot of face to protect. a mask that totally covered their entire snout and ears would be very protective and practical, but looks real goofy as a result. It’s a challenge to find designs that do enough of both practicality and aesthetics, but that’s the fun in it.
