I teased that I’d be cooling down after the big project milestone with fun exploratory art and part of that carefree fun art has been brushing up on my sequential art (comics) skillset.  I enjoy taking little scenes from our tabletop campaigns and turning them into one-shots like this for a lark.

Comics also make excellent drawing practice for anatomy, perspective, storytelling, the works!  So I thought you all might enjoy a peek at this one-page comic plus some WIPs I didn’t share on social media.

Programs Used – Procreate for the lines and colors, Clip Studio Paint EX for the Word Balloons, FX, and Text.

The Premise:  Welcome to the Cyberpunk setting of Carbon 2185!  Parablepsia is the name of our campaign featuring a disparate band of street runners who wake up in a morgue to find themselves embroiled in a corporate war for power and technology.

Then there’s Nightingale (Gale for short), the character I play who is a synthetic humanoid singer who believes she has no business being caught up in this mess.  Little does she know that she’s been programmed with ninja skills without her knowledge!

Making of the Comic

It all starts with the rough sketch and scribbling in the dialogue so I know that the dialogue will fit in the panel.  The expressions are also pretty abstract since I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this while I figure out the positioning of all the various elements.

I also didn’t know how Gale looks since I hadn’t drawn her before this comic, so I ended up going through a few variations trying to nail down her look.  Which one’s your favorite?  I tried to channel feather shapes like her songbird theme.

I had a good laugh making expressions into my camera trying to nail down Gale’s various shocked expressions in this comic and how silly, yet accurate the rough drawings of her face were to the emotions she was expressing.

The final comic:

• Watch a timelapse here.  My process is absolute chaos, but it’s kinda fun to watch a story emerge from the scribbles!

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Will I share more comics here?  We’ll see!  It’s something I haven’t done with consistency because it’s difficult and time-consuming, but it’s also a lot of fun.  It’s very satisfying when those expressions work and the comedy lands!

I’m still learning how to use software, brush up the written script on longer stories, etc. which has been my hobby time fun lately.  I’ve been sharing more of this exploration over in my Discord server, which is open to both my Patrons and the public. Patrons can connect their accounts for access to my Secret Sketchbook there, while free fans can join the public areas here.

For now, I hope you all enjoyed this errant one shot!  Stay tuned for more character portraits and a painting over the next few posts.  Meanwhile, I hope you all enjoy the end of the year.  Stay toasty and warm!

– Ang