Sketchbook Oct2017-July2018 + Commentary (Patreon)

Here's another sketchbook of mine that we can look through! This one spans almost a full year because I was working on A LOT of comics during this time so more of time was spent drawing digitally. The full PDF will be attached at the bottom but let's look through some specific pages!

An early page has these redesign attempts of my wrestler girl Sugar that has kind of been put on the shelf since I don't really know if I want to do anything with her at the moment. I have a few digital drawings of her from both 2017 and 2019 so I'll include them here too.

Here's a few pages with some background character designs for Red Muscle. You can see on the first page that I was thumbnailing pages for Chapter 3 while these designs are for people at the convention in Chapter 4. I don't usually work on two chapters at the same time so the timeline is a little strange to me. I must have been drawing 3 and writing 4 so I was preemptively getting these character ideas out of the way when I ran out of steam on thumbs. There's also me trying to update Lovely Baby's design from the very first pass I did that was in the first version of Ch1.

Here's some more figure studies. I desperately needed to practice my male bodies so I remember being really proud of those bald dudes, haha. I think they helped me a bit get the idea of the shoulders being the widest part of the torso but getting rid of my habit for wide hips is still hard to break! These ladies on this page have some TINY waists which was definitely a big problem for me too, Scarlet being a victim of this at the time in a particularly bad way.

Here was around the time I was starting Ch4 proper, with some outfit ideas for when Scarlet is in the home gym. You can see my try to do a funny prop for Scarlet's drink that ended up without much personality because I never wrote anything on the label in the final page. The Muscle Juice looking like a bottle of Oil for a car is something I forgot but that makes me laugh seeing it now. the second page here had some ideas for what Scarlet could be encountering while walking the convention floor, and I had tossed around the idea of her buying a school uniform to be full on weeb but I never used it. There's also just some silly Ula doodles here too, and I still like that colored one of the classic Ula sporty swim outfit. She has a really nice shape there even though she's not supposed to be THAT curvy.

I'm gonna go just a tiny bit out of order and throw this one up next because the others are related, but here's another example of the kind of studies I was doing for my page layouts. The Red Muscle has a strict no-bleed rule I set for myself to keep layouts incredibly simple so I could just practice my drawing and acting and not need to be pushing my compositions too much. Studying these pages still gave me a better understanding of the basic tools of page layout that I think got me better at comics so much faster than if I just tried to intuitively design pages without pushing my knowledge. I think my studies are a bit literal in terms of dissecting what the framing does for the flow of the events as a reader and how they create the major gravity pulls to important moments. I think that has become my main thought process for my own pages, but I think playing with overlapping images is still a little nebulous and I could study that more. To me they are half narrative and half just for the aesthetics so figuring out their purpose is a bit harder, it mostly comes down to a style thing so deciding how to use them is not very clear cut and everyone will view it differently. Anyways, moving on!

These pages are where I was first designing the proto versions of the characters that would later become Yuka and Ren in Exposure. I wanted to draw an adult comic just to draw some sexual content because I had never really done that before and thought it would help me get better at drawing bodies, along with just being fun to draw that kind of stuff! The first pass of the story was about a male photographer and his female assistant who do nude/sexual photography and go out to eat after a day of shooting. They'd both get a little  drunk and are quite playful with each other in general already so they end up talking about their shoot and the assistant mentions how sexy it would feel to model like that. The photographer would make a play and ask her to model for him back at the studio and she'd basically be like, "sure, why not?". They'd both get into it and in the heat of the moment they'd make love in his studio. It's not entirely that different from how the story ended up but it was much less fleshed out and the specifics of this version just felt a little problematic. Porn is entirely in the realm of fantasy and exploring what-ifs that don't actually play out well in real life so it's not really a thing that I would have to be concerned about if I didn't want to be. I was still honing in on my personal brand of storytelling and what I value and I decided that I didn't want the story to just be porn, I wanted people to take my writing seriously (even if it still ends up cheesy or lame) and feel that I made an effort to write characters over just draw sexy content. Who's to say if I succeeded at that with Exposure or not, but that's not really the point of this post so let's move on!

This chunk of pages have a lot of iteration on the Lovely Baby design until I got to the one that I ended up using in the final version. There's a lot of weird ideas here and you may have seen them in my last post about my current Lovely Baby story exploration. Besides that we have some page thumbnails for Ch4 and some design ideas for Camille and her friends, which one of them turned into Ren! There was a lot of mixing of ideas around this time, and theres a page in the PDF of proto Ren and Yuka before I decided anything so that's fun to look back at and see the through line after the fact. Also don't mind Mariel and I trying to draw Blink 182 from memory with no references, hahaha.

I'm also including this page here because this was my attempt at some yoga pose studies that I did when I had the idea of making a set of Yoga stickers for conventions. I thought it was a great representation of what I wanted my brand to be with these cute ladies in appealing poses but looking very natural. I never ended up doing the sticker idea and repurposed the yoga theme for my Sailor Moon print. Seeing this now does make me want to try a yoga sticker set again though! Maybe with all my different ladies, now that I have more characters that I can use. Anyways, here's the Sailor Moon pic just so you can see where that idea came from.

That's all for this post, hope you enjoy seeing me ramble about art stuff! more comics on the way!