Musings of a Wandering Game Mage
A few weeks back I posted inks for page 25 of Morbid Stories for Dreadful Children, and today I have the shaded page finished. I played a bit with the paint settings in ProCreate, and really like how the textures came out! Enjoy!
The full story (as it stands at this moment) can be found here…
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.
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.
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!
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:
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!
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:
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!
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!
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:
And here, for your casual entertainment, is page 23 of Grimmleigh’s Morbid Stories for Dreadful Children: the Miller’s Daughters.
The other big project around the labs has been Morbid Tales for Dreadful Children, which has been nearly a year in the making. The most recent page finds the Rake taunting little Ophie Miller; breakdowns of the pencils for this page, as well as the script, were posted earlier this week.
Once I have my pencils done for a page, I scan the image in and do the inks and shades on the iPad Pro. With this page in particular, I took the time to add some atmosphere to the shading. I really want to add a sense of beauty to the setting, even though it is full of mayhem and murder.
Here’s a time-lapse video of the process, I hope you enjoy it! Just a word of caution, though: I uploaded the video in HD, so it might take a moment or two to load!
Comments and questions are more than welcome!
This week we’ll look at Victor Fries, another down on his luck resident of Gotham who has had several unfortunate run-ins with Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego.
Like Selina and Harvey before him, Victor has taken to hiding from the authorities in the slums of the city. Police are afraid to do more than cursory patrols of the area, and even the Vigilante sticks to the outer fringes of the slums to enact his “crusade”.
Dr. Victor Fries was a brilliant Cryogenics expert who had pioneered a life-saving procedure that could suspend a person in “deep freeze” until cures for their diseases could be found. Eager to start live trials on human subjects, Victor put his terminally ill wife Nora through the (ultimately successful) procedure.
Lucius Fox, CFO of Wayne Industries, found the cryonics pod that Nora had been suspended in. Using his discovery as leverage, Fox forced Victor to use his knowledge of super-cold elements to plunder riches from unbreakable safes around Gotham. During one of these heists, a chemical reaction caused an explosion that doused Fries in a volatile compound that dropped his body temperature to near arctic extremes.
Surprisingly, Victor Fries did not die. Unfortunately, though, his sanity was shattered. His extreme body temperature makes him fragile in typical Gotham weather, which has caused him to retrofit an old Soviet era diving suit into a walking cryogenics lab. Dubbing himself “Mister Freeze,” Victor haunts the streets and alleys of the Gotham slums, plotting his revenge against the man who destroyed his life.
Odin’s Day again? Time for another look at what’s on the workbench!
Work on Morbid Stories for Dreadful Children continues, with Volume One: The Miller’s Daughters about two-thirds finished. Here are the pencils for page 23:
I am laying in digital inks now, and will feature a time-lapse film of the finished art on Friday! For a look at the scripted breakdown of page 23, take a look here!
The next coloring book is underway as well, with pencil concepts making way for some background art. First up, a Nosferatu who has the unfortunate job of Sewer Inspector:
Here’s the finished inks for the sewer:
Rough concept for the Phantom of the Opera, who landed a terrible gig as a Karaoke DJ:
These will be featured in Grimmleigh’s Classic Monsters (with terrible jobs), which I am expecting to have available in late September!
And these two are super rough speed sketches that I put together while watching old Hammer Horror movies the other night. The tree scene will probably be used with a vampire or in one of the fairy tales, and the graveyard will be for a Slavic grave goblin:
I really am drawn to floating apparitions in the woods…
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Have a great one!
Grimmleigh's Lab 