Erraunt yit Forvard - Caged, Rough (Patreon)

Another piece of Wilfrith promo art I’ve been working on. I can’t really call this “pencils” since there’s still a lot that remains in roughs form, but my digital process is so nebulous and patchwork anyhow that parts look like finished inks while others look like simple gestures.

(Caged, digital roughs to promote Wilfrith and Grwn)

One time I was on a train in Northern England, starting the journey back to Glasgow after visiting Thought Bubble in Leeds. There were some teen boys sitting across from us in those overly-social facing rows of seats their trains have, clearly bristling with energy from having visited the convention themselves and they just straight up asked me if I knew what an OC was.

As an Anime Expo teen, myself, and a survivor of early 2000s deviantArt, being asked if I knew what an original character was sorta slapped my up the face sideways. Just completely gobsmacked.

I’ve lived and breathed OC-adjacent for the entirety of my adult life. You can’t not as a drawer of things. He gushed about his character, talked about the art he was commissioning of them and sort of just excited at my direction for half an hour until his stop. It was cute.

But I’ve never been OC-brained, myself. I have characters for things; they have lives in scripts and comics, and while I’m thinking up their existences, they exist entirely within those boundaries. Outside of that, my enthusiasm for drawing them dips to almost zero. So I don’t really have OCs, so much as I just have Cs.

That said, I’ve always really loved and admired that enthusiasm that other artists have for their little dudes. It seems so nice to just get completely sucked in and obsessed. That kind, doting energy radiates outwards and builds audiences for the characters in their constellations of illustrations and text snippets. A creation that leaves lots of juicy gaps for a viewer to pour themselves into.

I wanted to make a series of Wilfrith illustrations with that intention in mind: giving him a little life outside of comics.

So here we have Wilfrith hanging out with Cinnabar, both showing off their cock cages while being buds.