#cgoodin

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This December, I have worked on a festival Christmas drawing of my comic book characters with a mistletoe. This is only the first Christmas drawing I'll be posting.

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All I could do today was practise my line art for comic explosions for my comic series. One day, I might get time to colour them in. Although I can't decide if I should use my acrylic colouring markers or colouring paint.

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This is just a simple image of Dasher running and sliding down the coaster rails of the Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

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This here is my method of creating a character. If anyone is looking to develop a character of there own, the best piece of advice I would give is to make sheets of different head shapes, nose, eyes, eyebrows and chin designs and use all that to plan how you want your character to look. Then, depending on what gender your character is, you would us the body shape sheet to decide if your character body shape is trapezoid, rectangular, oval, triangular or an inverted triangle. Next, you get to draw your character at different angels using the character sheet and draw your character's pose beside their rotation.

[cgoodin]

My Journey

As a youngster, I loved art and designing cartoon style characters, especially Superheroes. This has helped me generate a suite of ideas and characters which I was unsure how to bring to life. But I had a name “Dasher”!

A chance encounter and successful interview at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) solidified my want to explore animation, from which I gained a 1st Class Honours Degree in Animation. My first 2 years at UCLAN covered the tools and skills to create character designs, the basics of animation, and application of associated software suite (Adobe & Toon Boon Harmony), to enable students to create a suite of 1- and 2-minute animations to build our experience and skills.

In my final year, I had the choice of either do Comic Book Writing, Game Designing, or Animation, to follow and support our final year Project. Picking up from my childhood enjoyment of developing cartoon and comic characters, I chose Comic Book Writing in order to bring to life my “Dasher” superhero comic idea I have held for a long time. To support this, my lecturer suggested for me to add animation to it so I can bring my animation skills to a forefront as well. Using the skills developed in my first 2 years and the courses attended in my final year, I developed my first issue of my Dasher comic incorporating animation to several pages/panels of it; which helped me obtain my first class honours degree and commendations from my lecturers. This journey and experience gelled and inspired my calling to become a Comic Book Writer (but I still retain all my creative and animation skills). From a young age I had a vision of being in charge of my own destiny, and so post University I took the brave step and threw myself into developing my business/website “Goodinmaginations.com”; to develop my Dasher superhero comic series. Hopefully, I can start a superhero universe set in the UK, present it to the world and build my dream and legacy.

It hasn’t been and still isn’t easy. There are plenty of times when I doubt myself and worry that my stories of Dasher and my artwork aren’t good enough. However, I have to remember that my business is still new and under development. All the comments I get should only improve me and my product and not hold me back. Nothing happens overnight, it is and will be for a while very hard graft to get my vision and product into the public eye and build my dream.

In my first few years I have created 6 issues of Dasher, which are available on Amazon Kindle, and also Globalcomix. Issue 7 is in development. To support this all, I have written the first novel for a trilogy call “The Child Age” which is under editorial review.

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This drawing of Dasher is an experiment to test how serious and hardened I can make the character look. Whatever way his helmet got damaged is up to the viewers' interpretation.

I started with pencil work to build the shape, then applied black fineliner over the pencil, and added colour to the drawing. Please let me know what you all think by commenting.

I'm always looking for ways to improve my art skills. Thank you. 😀

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At the beginning of 2025, I had begun to plan the story for Dasher volume 2. I planned a mind map for the whole volume and used that to make a mind map for each issue so I could develop my comic scripts. I plan for the first issue to be numbered as issue 7 to continue on from issue 6 from volume 1. Unlike the first volume, the second volume will be 9 issues long, and each issue will be 24 pages long.

After months of working on my comic scripts and the thumbnail sketches, the second volume is ready to be developed. I will begin to work on Dasher volume 2 at the start of 2026 after the Christmas holiday.

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Blackpool sewers layout

For issue 6 of Dasher, I wanted to plan how the sewers were are going to look by planning out the layout and the look of the sewer tunnels. I based my designs off my research of the sewer drains so I can get the look and feel of them for the next Dasher issue.

The difficult part was to find the images of what was inside the sewers. Based on what I found, I used Adobe Photoshop to draw these two images at the top. One tunnel made of pure concrete and the other build up by brick with large sewer drains on the walls. On these two images, I had added some dirty texture onto the walls to give it the feel of a place that was disgusting to be in, exactly like how a sewer would be.

I thought about designing the inside of a sewer pumping station. In the comic, I thought about making Dasher's conflict in issue 6 take place in this exact spot. Again, this image was based on my research on sewers in the UK.

This here is my texture display for the sewer images. I have made a list for each image so I know what texture is on which walls. I've also made a list of textures of the dirty water too.