I tried to make my own characters in some creator :P ( I don't have time to draw full-fledged reference art for everyone yet💔 )
In the future, I plan to write a story about them; they have rock band. This will be a story like a found family.
💚 - sound engineer + fixes things if they break, can do everything
🧡 - designer of merch and other items
💚 - he is lonely and he is more and more satisfied with everything
I would also like to share an excerpt from the first chapter :))
Please note: English is not my native language, the text was translated by a translator!!!!
Early March. Third year. The garage. Late evening.
Winter hadn't let go yet. The snow had mostly melted, but once the sun went down, the cold crept back in, raw and damp. The garage smelled of old rubber, mildew, and the warm lemon tea from the thermos Andy had swiped from home for everyone. The single space heater rattled away loudly, though its warmth barely reached.
Cecille sat behind her drum kit in fingerless gloves that she swore looked cool, though honestly, they didn't do much against the cold. Every so often, she'd breathe into her cupped hands, and the steam would curl up toward the single bare bulb swinging overhead.
Derek paced tight circles around the cramped garage between takes. "Are we a rock band or a polar expedition?! Maybe we push the recording to May??"
"May is exams, Derek, unless the word's slipped your mind completely," came Jang Mi's voice, muffled beneath a mountain of layers, stationed at the keyboard. Derek's scowl deepened, and for a moment, he looked ready to escalate, but he bit it back. Jang Mi was hunched over the lyrics for the tenth time that evening. The longer the session dragged, the more scratch-outs and scribbles bled across the pages.
"Maybe we leave it as it was? It sounded more... alive. " Lin, holed up in the corner tuning her guitar, spoke up for the first time that tense, freezing evening. Jang Mi relented. Some words, after three hours in a cold, dark garage, just land differently.
Andy, having poured tea into plastic cups for everyone, sank back into his chair by the heater and picked up his sketchbook. He was trying to rough out the cover for their first demo. His elbow caught his cup, and a splash of tea soaked into the page. He hissed a curse under his breath, but once the tea dried, the shape of the stain was actually kind of cool. He started sketching into it, filling the accidental splotch with tiny figures of the four core band members.
Li Jin sat on an old tool crate, laptop balanced on his knees, staring at a budget spreadsheet: garage rent, space heater, other demo expenses. Note to self: cheap heaters are a trap.
The green-haired sound guy, after certain takes, would just go, "Aight." And that meant the take was good. Sometimes he said nothing. For a painfully long time. And everyone would just start playing again. And again.
During the very last song, Cecille got so into it that her drumstick flew out of her grip and sailed straight toward the nameless sound guy — the one Li Jin had introduced everyone to not too long ago, who didn't so much as flinch.
They recorded deep into the night. By the time everyone took off (Derek and Andy left still arguing loudly about something like "my song is not having a stain on it" and "I'm not done with it yet, you prick!"; Li Jin gave Lin and Jang Mi a ride back to the dorms, where they barely talked their way inside; then he dropped Cecille home), the green-haired sound guy stayed behind in the garage alone. He mixed tracks straight through to the following evening. Andrew, meanwhile, had finished the cover at home - not without "corrections" from Derek - but now that the tea stain had become an explosion blooming in the background, the design was officially locked.
Both messages landed in the group chat right around 10 p.m. Jang Mi read them the next morning, sitting in Room 116 while Lin still slept. In the drawer beside her bed, the song sketches still lay there - but now, three of them were something you could actually press play on.
I published before, but here's a drawing with Derek :)