Tag: art

Flat-footed

Posted on October 16, 2021 by Cal

I never quite know how alien to make the motherlanders. they should be alien enough to challenge cultural expectations and force you to relate to someone different than yourself, but they shouldn’t be so alien as to be unrelatable. there can be quite of a grey area.

there was a time where the comic characters looked much more alien. even though I liked the exotic factor, I ended up toning it down for a few reasons, the main one being I did not want to kneecap their relatability. even now there are many people who are turned off from this comic by the single fact that the characters are not visibly human, but like I said before, the reason for that is to force you to learn about cultures/people that might seem alien to you. I would hazard a guess that people who are immediately turned off by appearance may need to introspect a bit about their priorities.

the most recent example of this conundrum was my constant wrestling of whether I wanted them to be plantigrade or digitigrade (“human-feet” or “dog-feet”). it isn’t a huge deal either way, but i spent more time wrestling with the design than i’d like to admit. You can see me not committing in the early parts of ch2 if you look. in the end I settled more or less on plantigrade (human-feet), again because it made the silhouette seem more human. I could play with figure poses in a more natural way. drawing someone run when they have dog feet looks a bit “off”.

and sometimes it just looks better to leave it a bit vague. don’t let the rules of the design get in the way of what the panel needs.

Setting the setting

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Cal

As some may have noticed, I don’t like drawing backgrounds. They drive me nuts and bore me to tears. it’s not so much that I can’t, I just don’t care. In particular, I hate interiors.

But I knew that the next chapter would take place primarily indoors. So I did some thinking and came up with a house based on a kiva that meant I wouldn’t have to draw as many angles and could go with my trademark vague background swooshes. Much less painful.

I actually did come up with a floor plan, which I actually more or less stuck to for once. but like wiser artists than me say, don’t let reference get in the way of what works in the panel. I need to follow my own advice.

the pit in the middle is built over a geothermal vent, which can be covered up if needed. I think that the vent also goes to the (unseen) outhouse to make for some less chilly dumps. The entire region has an abundance of these vents and they will show up again. Silne and her husband probably made it themselves years ago. I think you could make it with two people without too much difficulty since you’re basically just digging a pit.

Many people lived/live in these types of dwellings. They are pretty common in motherland along with tents.

An anachronistic (?) choice of head coverings

Posted on September 18, 2021 by Cal

i’m cool making style choices that might seem anachronistic to us. turns out golf visors would be perfect for antelope ears. even if i doubt they would be familiar with a good 18 holes of the king’s game

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there’s no reason that a baseball cap in our own history couldn’t have been invented way before it was. someone of a completely alien culture would decorate a cap much differently than us I’m sure.

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

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.