#stovcomic

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Roar's namesake, along with some teef and movement sketches.

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Some sketches of Roar in a series I like to call Roar Does Stuff. More to follow.

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An older concept art/style test. Designs and colors of Brite and Roar have changed since, and may yet change some more. I'm still leaning towards a lined characters and painterly backgrounds look, and emulating my favorite elements of both comics and animation. Going forward I'm going to try and push the look more, while still aiming for a workflow that's time efficient - I spent a lot of time noodling on this and there's a lot of future panels to take into consideration. Tons of things that need tweaking in general, but there's also many things I like about this first shot at the comic's style. So far so good.

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Meet Brite - a creature of undeterminable origins, but with a spark to match her namesake. To Brite, the unknown is an adventure, and a new acquaintance is a new potential friend. She is trusting, hopeful and ready to believe that everything will probably turn out alright in the end. Just make sure to bring snacks, or she might get hangry. Below are some expressions for Brite, including both her current design as well as an older design which I will post more of in the future. :)

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Welcome to the project blog for the graphic novel project 'Støv'! 'Støv' (meaning 'dust' in Danish) is an after-the-end fantasy comic set in a world that was ravaged by a large natural disaster. As balance and life returned, new races and civilizations popped up and are still finding their foothold in the much-changed landscape.

Britt, an optimistic and adventurous orphan girl, is given her coming-of-age task in the swamp village she grew up in - to find the truth about her own origins and the source of the strange 'pull' she's been feeling all her life. While she's never traveled the world and is ignorant of largely all its dangers, she's helped by a special ability: she breaks every language barrier, making her able to communicate with everyone she meets, and vice versa. Roar is an aging warrior, grizzled and jaded from a lifetime of fighting. Shunned by his own people and running from a past he'd rather forget, he bumps into Britt by chance, or perhaps by fate. They form a partnership to help each other out as they make their way through the changed, scarred and beautiful world.

But the sins of the past are not easily buried, and a hopeful future may not always be what it seems. Throughout their journey, Roar and Britt must learn to rely on each other as danger lurks and new truths come to light. The story of Støv is a story of found family, parenthood, friends turned enemies, identity, wonder, survival, control, hope and forgiveness.

Currently a one-person venture, this project is very near and dear to me, and I'm incredibly excited to be sharing it here. I'm a long-time fan of work-in-progress projects, I collect art books and love following the journeys of all kinds of creative works. It's always been a goal of mine to do a large scale project of my own, and in that project to open up my process and share my progress, struggles and triumphs to anyone who might love to follow along same as I do. You can find more of my work on instagram where I post my other art as well, some of which might seep into this blog from time to time.

All that said, I wish you a warm welcome once again, and my greatest hope that you stick around and find it worthwhile - there's a long, exciting journey ahead.

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As promised, the Roar expression sheet. For an old man who's mostly just grumpy, he can be fairly expressive. Credit for the original exercise sheet: Nancy Lorenz

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A colored visual development piece for Støv. These kinds of works are designed to help me get closer to the final look I want the comic to have. I'm very pleased how it turned out, and I especially like the progress I've made since my last piece like this. There are, of course, still some hits and misses, which is good because uncovering them is the whole point and very informative. Things I like: - The vibrancy of the colors. I'm a sucker for bright and vibrant fantasy worlds (also evident in the map I made, so no huge surprises there). - The painterly background vs. the cell-shaded characters. The animation-style look suits the story. - The fact that I worked from a thumbnail this time. Usually I just splash color right on the final canvas and start noodling away. The thumbnailing helped solve a lot of early stage issues and made my work more focused overall, handling fewer issues at a time. Main things to improve on: - It takes way too long to do, and this is an old problem. If I'm going to be filling entire panels and pages with this style, with all the many pages required for a grand travelling fantasy story, progressing too slowly is going to break me. I'll need to work towards simplifying the style as well as becoming faster overall. - The background detail level is all over the place and kind of random. I'm very proud of the tree in the back with all the moss growing up on it, but that kind of detail should probably have been pushed more to the front. The two trees closer to the viewer look under-rendered in comparison.

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An illustration that doubles as an environment exploration and a story piece. I do a lot of work digitally, but there's a specific pleasure to rendering something fully in pencil. I'm reminding myself to do that more often.