The Lightbox Expo Online weekend was as adventurous and busy as expected – and I have a heap of notes to work through and a mountain of fresh ideas. Where do I start? Please bear with me while I recover from that amazing convention and do some soul searching.
I might have to tweak my approach to the 100 days of making comics slightly, so I better take a bit of time to breathe and plan aside, before I fully jump into my regular drawing schedule again.
I drew this little fanart of my childhood hero Shodan from System Shock at the expo. I got quite the response, also in the discords later. There are more System Shock fans out there than I thought – and if I hadn’t drawn this fanart for a “dead” fandom I could never have connected with them. Greetings to all of you – you rock. Not even trying is the biggest sin. Get your stuff out there, no matter how obscure.
Fresh work for the 100 days of making comic today: gestures and character design exercise Naruto Fan witch in pink and purple – with more very specific demands. Greetings to all the amazing artists on the Art Work House discord with whom I went through this!
For the design I first threw together a moodboard (the time constraints were hard!) and created a really quick concept sketch for the witch, then tried a couple of color combinations to have the base colors for the costume down. Also differently than usual I started coloring by flooding the whole canvas with a base color. I saw this at the expo and I will probably keep it in my process to never have to worry about white spots or looking for a good base color for the background in the end.
Also this was a great opportunity to not only create a design (I had no time to make a proper character sheet sadly) but to exercise executing it. As a one woman comic team I have to be able to work with my own designs. That might seem obvious but isn’t. Even that is a trainable skill. Ah, I’ll get there with comic making. I just need time, more of it. I quite like how this turned out and I’m eager to throw more of my characters around to get the amount of experience in to become a fully functional comic artist!
Take care and see you tomorrow!
