Hello, you dead-looking site attracting only spammers!  Just popping in to say that I am currently taking Webdesign classes, so that I may hopefully be able to do something about the style sheet of this place… Someday, everything will look fine!

So: no, I have not forgotten this site – not by a long shot.

Happy New Year!

If all goes well, 2011 will be the year in which the comic finally kicks off for real…

While you wait for the Real Thing, feel free to check out (and criticise!) my layouts at the Sleeper’s Den. A short comic, bridging the first and second main story arcs, is being launched there tomorrow.

Look, watercolour sketches! These were done mainly to try out some colours for Gawain, whose red hair I still have to get right.

The last two pictures were done without the benefit of a pencil sketch, which is why their eyes are closed. I just painted the face as an oval and shaped it by adding the neck, hair and features, without leaving white spaces for the eyes.

In other news, I updated the site with a new version of WordPress and a new version of Webcomic – thereby deleting my archive. Because  as yet I understand too little about programming to enable me to make a backup . As there were only test files in the archive, it is hardly a problem, but I do need to figure all this out by the time I start posting real pages…

My Illustrator teacher showed me how to vectorise my line art. It’s fun! By turning my rasterised images into vectorised ones, I can enlarge them as much as I like without loss of quality. Only, as you can see below, I need to learn a thing or two about what else I can do with my art once the lies are turned into paths . These are just my first attempts.

While I am working on the design of Gorlois’ fortress of Tintagel (not an easy thing, in view of my Epic Fail at buildings and perspective) I distract myself by reading and viewing Arthuriana. You are welcome to read my reviews here on my Blogspot .

I would love to share a few sketches as well, but I am temporarily without a scanner. Hopefully that situation will be remedied soon…

I inked my first page. Finally. I am waiting to post it until I have built up a buffer – the idea is to post a page every week, which means that I need to be sure that I can finish a page per week. As I am a little slow (*g*) and still need to find my rhythm, I occurred to me that it might just be best to draw a few pages so as to make sure my service runs smoothly…

That means you will have to make do with sketches for the time being .

This is a pencil drawing that I coloured very quickly in Photoshop. I think I’m going to play around with my inked page too, to see if I can get a nice effect with some minimal colouring.

I’m glad I drew costume designs (the first time I actually did these before starting on the page – it’s imperative to make this a habit, also with locations) because I ended up checking them all the time to keep the jewellery and stuff consistent.

I tried ‘heavier’ colouring here and failed utterly. This is pretty horrid. I’m also not happy with Gorlois’ face in this one.

Gorlois is difficult. When I drew the storyboard I didn’t individualise him very much, but I have a fairly clear idea of his looks in the meantime. And he has to look right.

Comments are very welcome!

I am still working on the site design. Actually, I started all over again – with a new title font and a new illustration. I’m not sure how far I can go with the customisation – I really have no idea what I will be able to program, seeing as I have never done anything of the kind before. So I am playing around in Photoshop, and hesitating between a radically different look on the one hand, and a few tweaks to the default style on the other.

In any case, I made an emblem in Illustrator. I think it’s pretty cute, but you may disagree. This time, I designed my own ‘celticised’ version of Gawain, based on the illustrations in the Book of Kells. Yes, he looks a bit clueless, but that’s the effect of the Celtic wide-eyed style combined with the equally Celtic eyebrows. Aww, I feel like patting him on the head .

Yea or nay? – Well, it’s yea as far as I am concerned, so I’m afraid you’ll have to learn and live with this design until I feel like changing it .

File under: Experiment.

I am trying to figure out how best to go about drawing the comic. The questions are many: colour or monochrome? Pencil or ink? A4 or A3? It is important to get everything right, so that I don’t run into trouble at some point in the future.

I had more or less decided on inks and monochrome, because black and white is what I think I do best. Colour still gives me trouble. I adore watercolour, but I am not good enough at it to paint a comic. I have seen digital colours that I like, but I don’t have the Photoshop skills to achieve them myself. Nevertheless, in a comic in which the colour of the hero’s hair and, occasionally, the colour of his enemies plays a part in the story, it would be kind of nice to have colours.

Now – one way of colouring that I do feel up to is with colour pencils. I like what I can do with pencils on the pages of my Moleskine notebook, so I sought loose sheets on which I could more or less reproduce that effect. The paper that I think comes closest to Moleskine is Bristol board. So I had a try with that. The result is this:

The original is very crisp and, I think, rather pretty (if I may say so myself). I think it reproduced fairly well… The skin tones are very delicate, and some of their subtlety got lost, as did the blue of her eyes – but all in all I think the scan is not so bad.

In order to judge the effect in a comic page, I will have to actually draw and colour a complete page, I guess. Still, I’d much appreciate your opinion about this little test. What do you think?

I also made a version with texture added in Photoshop. This is not difficult and could easily be done in the comic too, I suspect.

One disadvantage that colour will always have is that it is more expensive to print than black and white. That is in case anyone besides myself would like to hold a paper version of the story .

Anyway: I would love to hear your opinion on this – on the feasability of a comic drawn entirely in pencils, a comic coloured with colour pencils etc. Please let me know what you think!

While you wait for regular programming, have a picture of the comic’s hero . He tends to be rather difficult, especially when I try to draw him. Here he looks more or less as he should.

Young Gawain (pencils in Moleskine sketchbook)

I get more fond of pencils every day. In fact I get tempted to draw the entire comic in pencils and forget about inking. But – well, maybe it is not such a good idea.