Another page of this. Still a lot of fun to do. This one was far more pieced together, which is no problem with me. Makes it a little harder in the end, but the results are satisfying.

Updates. It looks like we've seen these before, but there have been changes made. For the first page, which is now page three, i tried to use overlays to change the tone of all the characters, but they didn't output properly which I couldn't fix. Also, with the others pages, there was more of a monochrome look to things to better highlight a single character. So I redid the colors so that this page would better match the following ones. Also, it was the wrong size. I changed a little of the titling at the top. I was going to have a page of crawl that described where they were going and what they were looking for but the hell with that. I'll let that stuff come out in natural dialogue. This is a D+D type comic. It's not supposed to be real deep.

As for the crawl itself, I actually woke up at 4am the night after I made it and thought, "Why did you write 'men' instead of 'humans?' That was rather sexist of you." No excuse that it's the old or 'proper' term. Inclusion is important. So the word was replaced, and the text was all moved a little to better frame it. Now stuff looks better and more cohesive. Moving on.

Ok, I ignored Silas today and did another one of these. It felt right as that was what was still burning in me. There are NO reactions to this elsewhere, except poor Vince who is kind enough to favorite my stuff. That means I am literally making this comic for just me. When I stop and think about that, it's depressing as hell and yet I have so much fun making these pages. So there's that balance I have to deal with, and deal with it I shall. What else can I do? I guess the Silas comic is about that very thing.

"The Crawl" for Ghiroy. I should go back and adjust the color and the little narration on page one and then things should be fine. This is technically page one as it explains what the hell's going on and who these people are. Wish I had a decent font program but the good ones are all too expensive. So I did this (mostly) by hand. It was worth it as will all the lettering be.

It's monday, unofficially Ghiroy day. So here's page three. I need to insert at least one page of text, the 'crawl' if you will that explains what this comic is about, who these people are, etc. I decided that I will be using tropes and even clichès from fantasy comics in this mingled with stuff that's decidedly not at all those things. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just paint it different colors. That being said, these are a lot of fun to do. They're kind of graffiti-like in style and while that wasn't on purpose, I'm glad it's that way. Bright, jumbled and colorful is something I definitely wanted. I can easily see how the skater mouse comic led to this and that, too is fine. I wonder what I'll do when things quiet down a little, and I want to do a little quiet stuff or a little character growth. Guess we'll see when I get there. So far, there's no planning this at all, just me sitting down, looking at the previous pages and penciling something out. That being said, there was a LOT of fiddling about for compositional reasons this time around. That, too is fine. These tickle me. That's all.

Did a 'cover' image this morning just for fun. The whole point of this comic is to keep things simple and fun, drawing just to enjoy drawing. I moved the comic to its own tumblr as it really doesn't interest anyone but me. It's kind of sad, but I like making it so much, I'll just have to try and divorce myself from the whole idea of anyone but me (and maybe poor Vince) reading it. A page a week is what I'm aiming at, while working on Silas. That comic will be WORK, this one is meant to be a little break between. I put SO much work into this and Delve Deep, I hate it just sitting there doing nothing. And if I daydream about Ghiroy being its own cartoon show, who can blame me?

Snuck in another page, though I changed the approach to color a lot. Should go back and 'fix' the first page similarly. Might. Otherwise, all I can say is that doing this is fun.

Messed about with this today. Took the layout style of the weasel things I did awhile back and applied it to Ghiroy. One of the reasons for this is that I don't really even need to do thumbnails for this, it's an easy, relatively quick style in which to draw and, for me, it's fun. As a side project, I think I can manage this if I aim to do just one page a week. Took me maybe 45 minutes to pencil and about 3.5 hours to make in Affinity. Did have a strange problem with AD this time around, something which might be something of a dealkiller; when I exported the image, I had some overlays so that I could change the overall tone of each character. When the jpg was viewed, those overlays were very different and really made the image unusable. Removing them gave a decent result but I was really hoping to use this feature. If I can't figure out why it's having trouble, I'll have to go back to AI which is disappointing. So we'll see.

Been away for about a week so haven't drawn a thing. Took a day off before going back to work to exercise the drawing part of me, do laundry and the like. I think what I'm going to do is take one day a week to offer up to Ghiroy and concentrate the rest of my energy on Silas, which is likely the much stronger project. Did some drawings of the guys today, mostly Crow who's pretty much utterly designed and doesn't need any more. Mikilo doesn't really need all that much more, either but I haven't done as many of him. Francesca needs some work but is pretty much there. There's not a HUGE difference in this version of the characters than from some of the others but I think they're more sustainable and more quickly drawn which is important if I want to do this at all. So, this.

One last for the day, the elf, Mikilo. Too cute? Maybe. He gets angry sometimes.

And here's some bad guys.

Who's a sexy beast? Another one of these. Personally, I'd watch a cartoon with this guy in it but I'm biased as hell. Affinity Designer, which doesn't seem to do gradients quite as well as AI.

And on the other end of the spectrum, there's this. I had a long week of work which pretty much drained me each day from wanting to do much of anything in the evenings. Silas will continue. There's lots done on that comic and I will be working on the final songs next week and the week after. Then comes some editing and then I'll start drawing based on the songs and the stuff that needs to be there to augment what's in the lyrics. My enthusiasm is still high. I'm more attuned to this idea than anything since Tamino. That being said, my head went into D+D land in the last couple of days. I put so much work into drawing Ghiroy characters, I can't really let them go. The original idea for the comic, before it got WAY out of hand was to just draw a fun, quick and dirty D+D comic. That's not what happened. And I stalled because, I think, the whole thing got blown out of all proportion. But. But...I recently poked at the designs again and thought of a way I could use them, go back to the original idea and pretty much not have to do any writing at all. So this morning, I worked on some color versions. So here we go. This. And a long explanation.