Wilfrith and Grwn - Roughs - Pages 6-7 (Patreon)

Our flashback starts with (fingers crossed) some illumination that I put a lot of design effort into. I only gave a general ideal here in this stage, but I figured it made more sense to design with a greater sense of what’s going to be on the page.

(Pages 6-7, digital roughs from Wilfrith and Grwn)

With page 6, I wanted to do a big foresty tour, like the start of the Nausicaä manga. All vibes and environmental storytelling. I love getting into a deeply textured forest drawing, even if it takes so much time. You get to overlap all sorts of mathematically repeating shapes and have to strike a balance between lights and darks with lines. It’s the perfect task for a mapping nib—my favorite.

I also wanted to break away from the rigid paneling of Wilfrith and the Golem Stonemason to give Wilfrith and Grwn its own immediately-different visual identity.

For page 7, my idea was to do a big hero shot to introduce Grwn (at this point as an unnamed hunter). He stalks through the forest and we get glimpses of his methods behind him.