been working on this for a while now. Since there are a variety of people groups and nations in the story, I am doing my best to work on making each nation have shapes (roughly) specific to them. not last airbender level or anything where “this country only wears red clothes”, but still. it’s a hard balance to keep in mind. at the very least, distinct clothing and silhouette elements that represent one nation I’ve been trying to keep separate from other nations.
Up to this point the comic has only covered a single nation, Allano. In hindsight, I probably should have limited the variety of their clothing, but you live and learn. That said, I am consolidating the core ‘essence’ of what the allanos wear and trying to differentiate it with the other groups. i’ve dabbled with the designs of other nations here and there but the past little bit I’ve really been trying to make a concerted effort to make things decently distinct.
In real life of course there is a lot of trends that carry on over the border, but sometimes it is necessary to limit that just so the audience can tell where the heck this character is supposed to be from. at the end of the day it is a loose guide and I won’t lose too much sleep if it isn’t an airtight system.
my main strategy is using designs I like the best on places where I will spend the most time and filling out the rest from there. everything is heavily subject to change as always. I choose to hold off on giving away too many details to avoid spoiling anything interesting later 😉
but the might I wielded before was nothing compared to this new dark power I have discovered. behold!
it’s really interesting how many flags are designed to be off-center towards the pole (the “hoist”). it looks odd when viewed as a static image, but when you see them in motion you realize that they actually look centered since the tail of the flag moves more than the rest. try plugging in the bangladesh or french naval flags into the flag waver link above to see what I mean. there are a lot of design considerations like this to factor in that may not be obvious.
I think that’s a big reason why I appreciate flags so much. They are such a good case study of “practical art”, art that exists to communicate a message as quickly, efficiently, and stylistically as possible. a clear advantage of graphic design/art over other communication mediums is how concise it can be. and I also appreciate them for their historical and societal connotations. they are symbols, and symbols are powerful. they are neat, and I appreciate the minutia of the design of good flags. there are a lot of factors that make a good flag good which post people don’t even realize.
i understand that this blog is becoming a fashion one more with each passing day but what are you gonna do I suppose.
mens suits suck.
they are the same thing over and over again with nearly no variety. in my opinion the design isn’t even that appealing. I understand that something neutral and minimal can be classy in the right circumstance. still, there has got to be some more variety before I lose my mind. at least women in the west can get away with more pizzazz.
man even just tiny little stripes or blocks of color can add a ton. and while I know that is what neckties are for, i have a very deep, personal, and petty vendetta against ties. ties were locked up in the dungeon where they belong for this exercise.
and while I hardly think that “new is always better” in anything, I swear that suits haven’t changed much at all since the colonial period. look at like rembrandt paintings or whoever. what we have today is basically the same thing. featureless black mass of cloth with a few points of contrast around the neck and sleeves.
I’m sure this is heresy to many, but if we had to settle on a design for hundreds of years, couldn’t we have settled on something good?
whatever. I’m not advocating that every business executive needs to start parading around in a tie-dye hippie wonderland, but surely we could play around a little bit with mens’ suits. I understand having a muted main color and simple shapes. start small to aid the easily-startled. but let’s at least get some slight variety in here so I can feel a little less like a bystander from Mr. Roboto.
i’m hardly saying that all of these designs are winners. they are concept doodles like anything else. need to experiment to throw away the bad elements and keep the good. but goodness I feel like even these few designs have more interest than 99% of the suits I’ve seen in my life. and this is just scratching the surface, you could go way more creative than this. I was playing it safe to make something I think a businessman could in theory wear today in an the ocean of peer pressure.
i can only hope that one day western suits can look as good as this.
the idea is that the shield is connected to the arm and the weapon can fit into a slot in the shield to keep it steady and/or allow the user to use both hands for aiming while still keeping the shield up.
how practical is this? probably not very. still looks neat 🙂
even though i really enjoy firearms they probably won’t show up in the comic, at least in forms this close to real-life examples. i have some other ideas instead.
People always ask why the characters are not human. in the beginnings of the project they were still always the kangaroo lizard aliens, but originally it was just because i was an edgy teen who wanted some sci-fi spice. that was really about it. but now i am a boring adult who wants some sci-fi spice but also realized how useful a non-human is as a tool to make the reader re-evaluate their expectations.
i was looking back through some of the old drawings and realized i sometimes forget how different it is now. the first official page was only completed in 2017 after i graduated college. it was a good seven years from its inception until I began to work on it in earnest. a lot changes in that time.
tastes change over the years of course, but people really don’t. i have pretty much the same underlying motivations as an adult as I did as a child. I’ve come to realize that understanding is one of the most important things to me, though that understanding can manifest in different ways. I want to understand the motivations of people and I love playing with ideas strange and mundane. the comic has always been about that and almost everything I make has that motivation somewhere at the core.
of course, ten years helped me understand people a lot better. it helped me understand myself better as well.
i’ll never claim to be particularly fast at working on things. nor am i a particularly fast learner, art included. i’m a pretty slow boy. long story short: this page process took way too long. it wasn’t sustainable while getting pages out at a rate that didn’t wear thin on the patience of others or myself. i learned from this that I needed to do it in monochrome and simplify the workflow. which is fine. i never cared much for color anyway.
even the first published chapter of the comic took a lot longer than the subsequent ones. people occasionally note that it looks a bit different in style compared to the others and they are correct. some of that is that I switched tablets and software that made certain line types either more or less difficult. but honestly most of it is, again, I found that i needed to simplify the workflow more. chapter one was created between 2016-2019 during a pretty dark period of my life. i worked around eight jobs over the course of a year and realized later that I was also putting undue pressure on myself with the comic. I was driving myself nuts in addition to difficult circumstances. i had to ease off a bit.
I definitely enjoyed working on the comic more after i eased off. chapter 2 and especially chapter 3 were much more fun to create in the day-to-day. ‘professionals’ in the comic field crank out many more pages a week than I do. four is about the max I can do, usually fewer than that, sometimes none at all. but this is just how I’m wired. all we can do is the best with our gifts and our circumstances. I’m definitely a lot happier in life when I give from what I have and not from what I don’t. and trust me, i’ve tried to change who I am. I wanted to be more of a hustler. but you can’t really change how you’re wired. I’m more at peace with that now. does being slow or unproductive make one a bum? maybe, but you would only know by comparing yourself with others. comparison never ends well. it will either fill you with arrogance because you see yourself as superior, or it will lead to self-hatred because you think you are worse. neither is good. we all have our strengths and struggles for a reason.
so where do we go from here? one day at a time, as always. I’ve found there’s no use worrying about the future. God will provide and he will continue to meet my needs. I have invaluable worth apart from my work. I personally need to ease up on the self-pressure. if I’m a slow man, forcing myself to be otherwise isn’t sustainable.
perhaps in another ten years i’ll revisit this topic and see what’s changed by then. 🙂 hopefully this journey can bring encouragement to others who struggle with similar hurdles.
the concept that would morph into this comic started back in 2010 back when I was in early high school. i was really into bionicle and sci-fi and history and i wanted a way to combine these interests.
At that time I had the fairly common habit of doing endless concept art and not much real comic work. but in hindsight I don’t really regret it or think it was a mistake. I personally wasn’t prepared at the time to do consistent pages. I was still in a major period of honing my artistic skills and I just needed time. I was learning. some pages or layouts were attempted here and there as tests but nothing took off. I wasn’t ready yet.
and I wasn’t even really sure what I wanted the story to be about. I had all these ideas for settings and locations and concepts (still the way i am!), but not really a good idea for the story itself. i am not a writer. i don’t deal much with plots, i tend to focus more on shorter character pieces rather than having some big overarching saga. but at the time i was more unaware of my own strengths, and wasn’t really working towards them well.
the original tale revolved around lain (a very different character from what she ended up being) and her journey across the land. there were always sci-fi elements and the sudden attack of the renes with an unknown weapon. it always took place in a pseudo-ancient setting with anachronistic elements. I enjoyed working on it a lot, despite angsting over it as only a teenager could. but i’m also glad looking back that i didn’t really ‘release’ it until years later. it just wasn’t very good. it did have core elements with merit, however.
i would take short breaks from it here and there, dabbling occasionally. i’d come back to it as I grew and wondered why I did some cringy thing and update it. then i’d look back on the update and update that. this happened for six or seven years. but gradually i began to feel that I could finally deliver some quality work as I became more confident in my art and my understanding of people. I began it in earnest after college once I finally had time.
the character interactions definitely became the primary focus over the years. i realized how much the story was changing over those years and saw no reason to think that it would really ever stop changing. i’m just not a person who can sit down and commit to a decade long story. in hindsight i really think it was a wise choice to go with the anthology format because it makes the story so much more flexible. I can basically do whatever I want and I can switch off when I get tired of one thing. It was probably the best choice I could have made with the way I work. but I don’t think I would have known that was a strength of mine unless i doodled and didn’t ‘have much to show for it’ for those years.
it’s hard for most creatives to not cringe when looking at their old work. creatives tend to be detail people, and being a detail person means you notice flaws easily. this very much includes your own flaws. but I think it’s important to keep old work around for the sake of others. for a curiosity of course, but hopefully also as an encouragement. if I could get something out there then many others can too. 🙂
since i work on each chapter somewhat non-linearly, sometimes I have too many ideas to jot down without forgetting about them. sometimes doing pages back to back makes me forget the main points since I get so caught up in the minutia. i’ve found for me that doing these thumbnail pages really help me keep on track.
it lets me see each panel at once for one thing. that helps me out a lot. each panel can act as a sort of landmark for a beat in the story. since I don’t think very linearly (i tend to see lots of small details all at once, not always in an order), having all the panels at once actually helps me get less confused.
i’ve mentioned before that i tend to do a pretty rough plot outline first and then fill in details as I go. i don’t know exactly where the stories go at the beginning, though I do have an overall idea. things like individual actions and character interactions are handled as they come up. it’s like I’m getting to know real people and I enjoy that. but this process can make it a bit easy to get lost in the mire of small details and lose scope of the whole story if not careful. I may find a better way to do this in the future, who knows. it works for the moment.
got pretty hung up on stylized comets and planets with rings on this one.
when doing comic concept I always try to do most of it in B&W. I didn’t used to but I learned my lesson. things always manage to look different in color.
I really like this batch overall. just some tweaks here and there. i think most of them would be fairly striking even in B&W. I found the Good Flag, Bad Flag pamphlet to be a good resource. it breaks down flag design and why things work and other things don’t in an understandable way to the layman. i am by no means an expert on flags, but hopefully i have enough design experience to make something striking and poignant (or at least recognize when a design isn’t).
on a side note, i wish my state flag (Kansas) could be one of these. or something like it. or just something that isn’t the flag we have at the moment. it’s just so bad. along with the like 20 other state flags that look just like it. none of them stand out, and you can’t even see what’s on the seal at a distance. in my opinion many badly need a redesign.
with these two designs at least they would be fitting for kansas with kansas-y colors (sunset, sky, fields, clouds). simple and distinct. the mostly unknown state banner is fine too, we could always use that. a man can dream I suppose.
like the last post about flags, a lot of these are ripoffs of real-life flags. also like last time, it helps to weed out generic ideas in favor of something that hopefully will have more legs. just playing around as always.
the goal of a lot of these is to make something distinct but still have competent flag design. it can be pretty hard to make a design that is simple and distinct. it can be hard to keep it from getting too cluttered or busy. i see why many flag designs have (what i feel are) too many elements. it can be pretty tempting. but it is also for good reason that most real-world flags air on the side of minimalism, even the incredibly old ones. keep in mind that you also need to recognize a flag at any size, what if you are on the border of enemy territory and see a flag in the far distance. It is only a millimeter in size relative to you. I hope you will be able to tell if it belongs to friend or foe.
also for these flags in particular it’s important to keep in mind how these look in B&W. pretty useless to come up with some crazy colorful pattern when the comic is monochrome. it’s not really that big of a deal, because I believe that the pattern of a flag is much more important than the colors anyway. it’s like its silhouette.
i dance about as well as a large tree but i do find it pretty interesting.
body language is of course important to me and dancing obviously opens up a lot of fun opportunities. it’s also just how some people [and cultures] celebrate and praise even if I don’t. it helps me understand others even if it’s just in small ways.
tails fulfill a similar function to dancing skirts in real life. in artistic terms they assist the line of action.
