PATREON UPDATE, 9/1/24 (Patreon)

last month’s update

Hello again, everyone! It’s time for our second ever Patreon update! This one is going to be a bit lighter than the last, but we promise we’ve been busting our butts. This month, most of our time was consumed by a secret project and conventions. Unfortunately the secret project is something we can’t talk about at all, but when we do get to reveal it, we think y’all will lose your minds. Know what we can talk about? 

CONVENTIONS

This month, we did two conventions, Belly County Comic Con in Texas and Louisville Popcon here in our home state of Kentucky. Both were a great time! We got to travel a lot, hang out with some great friends, and meet a lot of cool new people. Here, have some pics!

 Most importantly, though, these conventions were a massive learning experience. It’s tough to fully describe, but this is our first year doing conventions seriously, and with each one there has been a mounting inspiration coming from everyone around us. Seeing all the other artists, creators, vendors, etc busting their hump has made us want to go even harder and continue to improve our setup, our product, and ourselves. We have big plans for our next show and a good chunk of time to prepare for it—at Galaxycon Columbus in December, we plan to go all out!

KINDRED HEAVENS

Kindred Heavens this month was all Scott, so we’ll let him take it away from here:

Very busy month! Like Bryce said, we took on an extra project we can’t talk about. (We know, we know, the purpose of these is to make us talk about stuff we don't normally talk about. But this one involves other people, so lips are sealed!!)

Because of that, plus the two conventions this month, I actually wasn't able to do all of the pages I had planned. I'm confident I can make up for that in September, though.

 Here’s a look at my current progress:

 And here are some shots from the new pages!!

HUNTER

Exciting news about Hunter! This is going to be a small update for something that took an immense amount of work. The entirety of Book One has been sketched out!

There is still a lot of work to be done, but this is a huge step. Every page now officially has some artwork! Lonnie has been working immensely hard on this and deserves all the praise in the world. Here, have some of his beautiful artwork!

CICI THE FOREST CRITTER

 This month we finished writing Book Two of Cici the Forest Critter, which was an immense challenge. We mentioned before that Cici, in its original state, was meant to be one long book, and we knew that in the process of converting it into a series, this section would be the toughest to work on. The biggest hurdle was length—in the original, there wasn’t a very natural stopping point for a book, and we feared we were going to have to either cram too much into too little pages or have too little to put in too many pages.

My approach to solving this problem was to take every idea we had, every scene and important beat, cut out all the details, and rearrange them in a way that wasn’t entirely the same, but wasn’t entirely different. If I’m being honest, it was a huge challenge, because I had to separate the way things had been from the way things needed to be and think outside the box to solve a lot of the problems that popped up.

 What helped the most is a style of thinking I learned from Mark Pellegrini, the writer of Kamen America, which was to make every single page an idea. Before every book, before I start writing, I sit down and plot out the idea of every page. This helps to keep it focused and clear from the jump—basically, I do all the heavy lifting before I start the heavy writing.

Then, again before I start writing, I take those ideas and stretch them out into three smaller ideas. The thinking here is that, if every book can be at least or just three panels, then it is the perfect length, not too crammed in but not too short, either.

This step took the longest of the entire process. It took me a week just to outline the pages—it only took me a week to write the entire book.

In the end, I’m very happy with how it turned out. It’ll be a little bit before I write Book Three, but I’m excited to see what challenge that brings at well!

And that’s all for this month, everyone! Hope y’all enjoyed this. We’ll be back on October 1st with more updates!