Weekly Update - 51 (Patreon)

First off, I want to thank Riley Vinet for upgrading to the Scavenger tier!  Thank you so, so much!  There’s just so much love this month, thank you!

Second, I wanted to restate the announcement that I’m skipping a page post this week, but there’ll be some sketches going up instead on Wednesday and Friday as per usual.  I say “sketches” only because they take me ~4 hours to make instead of ~6 days, but at least one will be about the same quality as last week’s Riley montage, so color, shading, basically everything except without the usual care given to edges and linework.  I’ve been going at it pretty hard lately, diligently pumping out one per week despite everything else going on and the way this last page was going I’d really rather redo four of the panels than try to force out a page that isn’t up to my usual standard.

Poster Progress:

Kiera - Flats and 1st shading pass started.

Max - Tier 3 Sketch

Riley - Tier 2 Sketch

Drawing: Page 95

Playing:  Satisfactory and WoW

Now, each of my characters has derailed my plot in some form or another.  The first draft of Kiva’s story was very different.  I’ve talked about it a little bit before, but today I wanted to deep dive into how, specifically, Max derailed my original plot.  I may touch on other characters at other times, but he probably made the biggest splash.

In his first ever appearance in my original sketchbook, Max was a one-off, throwaway character that I intended to use as a way of showing how shrewd Kiva could be.  Max was Kiva’s neighbor, a naïve, hopeless romantic who believed that he and Kiva were star-crossed lovers, and Kiva had no special attachment to him, seeing instead how he could use this for his own personal gain.  (In the first draft, Kiva was kind of an unrepentant asshole, so… yeah, that’s changed too, but I digress).  Their personalities were still more or less the same as they are now, but originally, I thought Kiva was meant to toy with Max, play into his wants, in order to get valuable information out of him or use him as a sort of agent to advance the plot when needed.

I hadn’t drawn a lot of pages featuring the two of them before I saw there was some real chemistry there.  An interesting dichotomy I really liked between their vastly different personalities.  It no longer seemed to me like Kiva was just using Max to get what he wanted, but instead that Kiva NEEDED someone like Max to bring out the better qualities buried deep down inside of him.

After I’d scrapped the first draft, Max took a larger chunk of the story for himself.  He became a much larger part of Kiva’s life, a bigger part of the narrative, and there was room for him to become the main love-interest.  (Not every story NEEDS a love-interest, mind you, but he fit in there so naturally).  He went from being Kiva’s weird neighbor to being Kiva’s best friend.  He went from being a one-off throwaway character to being a core part of the recurring cast.  My brain went wild with the history of these two.  One was absolutely head over heels in love and the other longed desperately for that closeness, but kept it at arm’s length.  A pair who understood where the other was at, and were both more or less satisfied with how their relationship was, though they both, in their own, different ways, hoped it could be something more.

To go into any more depth might start to get a little spoilery, but suffice it to say, Max completely derailed my plot -- for the better, I think.

Kiera, Riley and Kiva all derailed my plot in some form at some point as well… but each of those is another post, another time.  Any questions, comments, or suggestions for future updates, lore posts or sketches, feel free to leave them below!