The Sleeper's Den

Gentle reader,

Here I am again with a new page of my wildly popular comic, The Darkest Hour. Universally acclaimed on Twitter (1 like), Facebook (2 likes), Tumblr (8 likes) and Instagram (7 likes), this epic, crafted with much sweat, tears, but even more love is bound to assure me a careless old age living off the profits.

...I realised that the last time I posted here, I was on page 86, so - that's a few pages ago! I'll just link you back to The Darkest Hour p. 87 in case you were waiting for that - and which just happens to be baby Arthur being born!

Page 102, incidentally, used to be page 85. The comic has expanded quite a bit in the redrawing, but I hope I'm done now and can just continue to the end with the pages as they were planned.

Sooo... This year, I didn't take a break from the comic during the summer months. I kept on posting, but I didn't get round to posting it here as well. I have the coronavirus to thank for the possibility to draw a page every week. The fact that I didn't have to commute, but could work from home, really changed my comic-making life. That said, it still wasn't easy, and more than once I have finished a page at 2 a.m. on a Thursday, my posting day.

I'm well on my way to expanding TDH by some 10 pages... Page 86 used to be page 80. That means the entire story is likely to come in at around 140 pages. New pages have been added because I felt some of the transitions were too abrupt, or because the draft pages had too much crammed into them. I've also made some alterations here and there because I felt that in my original draft, I hadn't expressed some of the ideas as well as I could have. I'm thinking of putting up a comparison on my Gawaincomic blog later on, even if it's just for myself.

...Coming to think of it, with some 50 pages still to go, if I keep managing a page a week, TDH should be all done around this time next year.

I still haven't managed to make a new buffer of pages, so for weeks now I've been scrambling to post a page every Thursday XD. So I don't get round to posting links here every week, but sometimes I make time :p. We are six pages behind again...


If you want to hear me talk and giggle my way through an interview about my Gawain comic, the Arthurian Mythia podcast episode with me is out :).

Ick! Ack! I forgot to post a link to page 42 last week! Here it is, then...

Morgause is getting a little fed up with her little sister's antics. Siblings...



The Darkest Hour p. 42

Page 39 is live! Stuff is happening at Dun Tagyll while Uther and Gorlois fight each other...



The Darkest Hour p. 39

I drew this Morgause with little Mordred on Day 5, but was really unhappy with her.



I don't know what it is - Morgause is just difficult? :/

Fortunately on Day 12 I managed a really cute young Gawain. I felt a bit foolish for wanting to draw him playing the flute, because it's tricky to get the hands right - I needed reference for that. But I'm really pleased with the result.



Finally, because my Morgause picture convinced me that I'm useless at drawing women, I attempted a Morgana on Day 14. Morgana nearly always works for me, which is just great. I love Morgana :).

Whoops, I've been quiet... I'm working on commissions (proposals to be scanned & sent) + fest entries (Top Secret) and not on the comic so much (though some progress has been made with the script, yay!), and I'm also trying to fashion a dress for Morgana. The latter enterprise is arguably the least successful of the lot :( - for a n00b seamstress like myself, making a dress for a lady with resin boobs (of considerable size) is not a walk in the park. Dear me! So for the time being, she's mostly wearing yards of fabric with pins in it :/.

Autumn is really setting in now. We have lots of dead leaves in our small garden. They made me think of Morgana and her 'touch of death' (which you'll see in action soon). I took a few pictures of her with dead nature.





I know I'm a bit doll-obsessed these days, but it's just so much fun to have your characters sitting around in mini versions and to be able to create a 'real' look for them XD.

First off: I'm sorry I'm not more active on LJ these days. I'm awfully busy with my two jobs -_-. As always when I'm awfully busy, I have lost of creative urges, so whenever I have a bit of spare time, I break out my pencils and brushes. But it's either that or hanging around the Net. I doubt it's going to get much better until the Christmas holidays - so I'm already getting a bit panicky about when I'm supposed to paint my cards. Not to mention the Snape pictures I owe to various people. AARGH!!!

Today, I bring you a tiny painting. I really did my best for this one. I thought about cool and warm contrasts. I mixed all (four of :P) my paints in advance. I took care not to use too much water and to dry my brush regularly. I used only transparent paints. I blended layers with a damp brush. Do my efforts show? I have no idea. But at this moment, this is probably the best I've got. Plus a kitty.






( Textured version )

I haven't gone "all digital, all the time" or anything; I have just been reconnoitering in the Mysterious Land of Photoshop. Two things I have tried on the way are painting without line art and line art without painting :). NATURALLY I am happier about the latter attempt than about the former. I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that, well, lines are love, and that in all other fields I'm even more amateurish. Eh.

OK, introductions:

The painting (which could have looked better, but was certainly fun to do) depicts Shelby Sweet, an OC belonging to Haius, who won my 30,000 kiriban at dA. I was rather happy with the picture when I had just done it - probably because I had seen it grow step by step. In the meantime, I think things are wrong with the proportions of the face and the colouring is too ... bland. Whereas I can mix a good skin tone with watercolour, I am clearly not succeeding with Photoshop. Also - though it is not relevant to this particular picture - it bugs me that I still have no idea how to get that particular kind of smoothness that Japanese-style digital colouring tends to have. ( Read more... )

Our second guest is Morgana, who helped me discover the new brushes in CS5. I guess I basically started off with the intention of finding out whether or not these new brushes made the idea of doing line art digitally more appealing. The answer to that question is yes - but so far, I still like my pens and brushes more. Still, I might turn out a digital concept sketch now and then.

I guess the thing that bothers me most about working digitally, apart from the brush quality, is that I just don't find it as comfortable as drawing on paper. The simple fact that you can move a sheet any way you like is something I miss. Sure, CS4 and CS5 have a function that allows you to turn your digital sheet, but somehow the effect isn't the same - at least not for me.

Anyway: ( Morgana )

Next time: non-digital stuff.

Ever since I started reading Arthurian stories (and I really can't remember when that started, only that I must have been younger than eleven), I have liked Morgana the Fay. I'm not entirely sure why, because especially as a child I was very uncritical of heroes, and Morgana kept herself occupied trying to thwart those heroes. But I was always fond of witches and magic, and Morgana is a great sorceress. Maybe it also amused me that there were few men in the stories, if any at all, who didn't fear her. Another possibility is that I was simply drawn to a strong female character in stories that invariably centred on the heroic exploits of men.

When I drew my very first comic at the age of twelve, Morgana was in it. I needed a good, powerful villain, and I immediately thought of her. Admittedly she made a rather painful exit, overclassed by the magical powers of my self-invented heroine. But then it is common knowledge that nobody can resist the Very Speshul Powahs of Mary Sue :P.

Morgana is an intriguing character, appealing enough to make cross-overs into other legends. She also appears in the story of Ogier the Dane, which belongs to the cycle surrounding Charlemagne. She is still popular today, and her name has even become attached to a natural phenomenon, the fata morgana. Writing her is a bit scary. People have certain expectations when they see the name "Morgana" appear. Whereas it would be a bit boring to meet them all, to make her too different would likely put people off.

I know that it's silly, because comments can vary for all sorts of reasons, but when I saw that the number of comments to my last instalment of the comic had halved as compared the previous entries, my first thought was that people didn't like the fact that Morgana explicitly identifies herself as a nun. She's not usually a nun. She is known as a seductress, a femme fatale, a wicked sorceress. I suppose that 'nun' seems to exclude all of those almost by definition. If Morgana is a nun, doesn't that take all the attractions of her character away?

Honestly? I don't think it does. Not in this story, I should hope.

( Morgana, with pictures )