Tag: art process

Terrain, Workbench

Scratch-Built Fantasy Village, Part 6

The first building is finally finished, and I could’nt be happier with how it turned out!

After the flock and shrubbery was secure, I added a couple of plastic railroad trees that I was able to twist in extremely twisty ways by soaking them in boiling water.

The rest of the piece was just a matter of concealing joins and gaps with shrubs.

After all of the flock was set, I poured clear resin into the moat for a water effect.

It’s a really fun piece, and will make for a thematic center-point for my games!

Workbench

Making a Splash

Water is hard. I don’t mean in the jump-from-too-high-go-splat sort of way, either. It’s hard to draw. Fluid, in general, doesn’t like to be constrained to two dimensions.

The latest pages from the Miller’s Daughters see the ultimate demise of poor Ophie, and that meant some water needed to find its way to paper. It turned out pretty nicely, and will be even better when I add shading later this week!

The second page shown is the Rake, sauntering off out of the woods, his murderous mischief quite managed.

Morbid Tales

The Angel

As I was proofing earlier pages of the Miller’s Daughters, I realized I had made a pretty big mistake. I had missed an introduction of the Miller himself, and went from a nice scenery page to a page detailing the family dynamic of the Miller and his children. Oops. Over the weekend I put together a new page to introduce the poor old chap, and thought I would share. Here are the finished inks for the page, followed by the same art with shading.

death

img_0201

I’ll be adding text to the bottom of the page, and amending the text that was on the original second page of the story!

Morbid Tales

Sweets

I’ve been trying to get a page a week finished on the Miller’s Daughters, but it’s not going quite as assertively as I would like. No bother, really, progress is still progress. Here is the newest page:

md-page-24-tapastic

The whole series can be found here… There are still some edits that need to be done to the long-form story, but it’s still a pretty entertaining read!

 

Uncategorized, Workbench

Monsters and Luchadores! Monsters! AND! LUCHADORES!

I get these horrific creative blocks from time to time, and nothing that I am working on has the power to move my pen. When times like these come up, I draw monsters. This week, though, luchadores worked themselves into the mix, because, well, luchadores.

Luckily for me, these little drawings got me fired up about the Night Circus, so I designed the background monsters for the circus:

img_0194-edited
the Night Circus artwork ©2016 L. G. Kade

I got lucky this week, too. The next page for the Miller’s Daughters decided to stop being such a brat, and I was able to get the inks done for that one, too. I should have the fully finished page up tomorrow!

img_0197

I have a few friends that extol the virtues of warming up with “meaningless” doodles before a drawing session, and I am really beginning to understand why. That practice not only loosens up your wrist and fingers, it also loosens up the creative faculties in your mind, making you a better conduit to express your thoughts!

Workbench

The Crystal Ball Predicts…

This week’s look at the workbench is for an upcoming storyline in Grimmleigh’s Morbid Tales for Dreadful Children. The story is called the Night Circus, and it only draws a ton of inspiration from Something Wicked this Way Comes. In this story, the circus comes to a new town during the new moon, and when the sun rises all of the adults of the town are gone. The hero of the Night Circus is a little girl who wakes up during the night, and realizing her mother is gone decides to take matters into her own tiny hands. Here are a couple of pages of concepts for the story:

monsters

Obligatory “Comic Con Wiped Me Out Trip Down Memory Lane”, Part One

Salt Lake Comic Con just wrapped day one, and I am shot. Happy and deliriously shot, though. I moderated 3 panels today, one about our cultural fascination with magic, and two on table-top gaming. I really appreciated seeing how many women are getting involved in gaming, it’s refreshing to see a paradigm shift in a traditionally musty, man-centric hobby!

I must apologize for not being as on top of posts as I had hoped to be, but I am going to accept my limitations and realize that I might not be able to hit the post count that I would like. Instead, I thought I would share the origins of Grimmleighs from a few years back!

In 2010, I asked my wife if she would crochet a Nessie for me. We stitched a panel of muslin to it’s head, and I painted a face on it. It was primitive, but it was also an amazingly fun project to make. That was the first Grimmleigh, and we went into a pretty steady production mode for several years. Ultimately, we must have made over a thousand of them!

Ultimately, we couldn’t justify the amount of work involved with the amount of money we made. We had a hard time charging what we should have for them, since we really just wanted to share our cool little monsters with everyone that saw them!

A lot of what you see here has carried over to the monsters I included in Grimmleigh’s Beastly Oddities. I really missed seeing these goofy little creatures, so I am pretty happy to have the “legacy” of Grimmleigh’s live on!

Morbid Tales

Breakdown: the Miller’s Daughters, page 24

Page 24 and 25 and probably the hardest for me, because I really held out hope that I would change my mind on the outcome. On the other hand, I already wrote the ending of the story back in November of 2015, and the outcome of these two pages are crucial to the story’s resolution.

Several different drafts of the page breakdown have come and gone, with the conclusion that the long-form, single panel page works best for this part of the story. Here is the script for page 24:

PAGE 24

Full page panel: A waterfall takes up most of the page, with little Ophie perched in her tree on the left. Foam and spray from the river below take up the bottom of the page. Text takes up the middle portion of the page.

The Rake slowly, reverently unwrapped the package, he took extra care not to spill the small cakes and pastry (he had an infamous sweet-tooth, and cavities to match) that had been wrapped up within. He licked his lips, gathered his sling, and began to fling the sugary treats at the poor girl in the tree. Being as he was an excellent shot, the branches surrounding our poor, doomed child were quite liberally spattered with sweets.

The Rake opened his pack and prodded the excitable badgers within to action. The poor little creatures had been left in an intentional state of constant hunger, and smelling sweets nearby, the badgers furiously scrambled up into the tree, climbing in a most chaotic fashion towards the increasingly panicked girl above.

Ophie lost her nerves, and began to shuffle slowly away from the safety of her perch. She lost her footing on a patch of sugar-coated bark, and tumbled out of the tree.

He really is a despicable character; I have omitted several pages of his backstory just because he is so rotten… but I might bring them back in, those pages would be a lot of fun to draw!

Here is the original concept art for the Rake, from late 2015:

Rake Concept Art