Weekly Update - 137 (Patreon)

Wow! Two new patrons this week. Thank you so much to Nelren Marith for subscribing at the Landlord tier! And a special thanks to Borderline Axolotl for subscribing for a full year at the Trader tier!  And did I ever thank Henry Jesionowski for upgrading to the yearly rate at Trader tier as well last week? I should have! And I don't think I did!

Thank you all, so, so much. It means a lot to me that you all feel like I'm worth it, lol.

And again, like, seriously, if any of you are subscribed at the monthly rate and you're not planning on unsubscribing any time soon, please do yourselves a favor and subscribe to that yearly plan to save yourselves 15%. There's no downside (from my end anyway, obviously do what makes the most sense for you to do financially,) and I've been making God Slayers for about five years now and I don't plan on stopping any time soon.

Even if I finish Kiva's story, there's more comics to be drawn about Kuserra and its surrounding territories. Surrounding it, and underneath it.

Alright! With that out of the way...

Comic this week? I was at a small local furry con this weekend, and it unfortunately ate into a lot of my usual art time. Couple that with the fact this next page is more involved than usual, and I've been working on multiple pages at once, it's not looking good... but I'm going to try.

Drawing: Pages 156-160

Playing: Rimworld, just in preparation of binging more Rimworld on Friday when the new expac comes out. Because there's never enough Rimworld.

Ramble:

This weekend I got to meet Toivo, the creator of Foxes in Love, and his partner Juha, who came all the way from Finland to attend some cons and hang out with our friends for a little while in our sleepy little town.

For the most part they were pretty busy, exhausted, jetlagged, the con had Toivo scheduled for at least three panels and he also got super sick from hotel food on the first day. I did my best not to fangirl all over them.

But still, we were able to do lunch a couple of times, and getting the chance to talk to a comic creator who is legitimately super famous was really neat.  Obviously the styles of our comics differ quite a bit. Foxes in Love is a cute comic about two foxes that love each other and have quirky real-life moments that always make you feel good in the end. God Slayers is... probably... NAND that. But it was really awesome to hear like, the principals we use to create our very different comics are still similar. We were able to connect on a number of topics like, how your art style changes over time and with practice and what makes a character feel alive. Toivo said it best, characters need consistency, emotion and motion.

It's one thing to make a comic with two characters speaking, with the dialogue going back and forth, but in order to make them really feel alive, they should be DOING something. Motion. Gesturing, walking, going somewhere, playing with something or just doing something with their hands.  I've rambled on this before, but it really is what makes them feel alive, because it's rare that people just stand and talk in one place and hold a whole conversation that way. It also just contributes something to that character's personality. And you can use it to emphasize personality traits better without expressly calling attention to them. One character that is stoic and disinclined to expend excess energy (Kiva) might be contrasted nicely by one that is always in motion. (Max), but if every character is showing similar traits, then what are often interesting character traits can fade into the background.

And as we started down the road on that topic I realized Toivo and I are very similar in that our characters often give themselves that life. It's a subconscious thing for us as their creators, when we're drawing a character and we realize they're doing a lot of "something" while they talk. It comes out on paper first, and then if we like it, we consciously emphasize it from then on. My examples are Kiera always playing with her hair, or Riley always looking for something new to tinker with. And even as a creator of that character we might not originally understand WHY they do it, but it's something they do a lot and so it becomes a consistency we can use to help identify them. It becomes a part of that character and makes them feel real.

I dunno, I don't know how many paragraphs I can really ramble about this sort of stuff, but I look forward to hanging out and chatting with Toivo and Juha a bit more this week before they head home.

Toivo is also working on a graphic novel as a sort of side project. In a very different style than Foxes in Love. That will no doubt be available from Fenris Publishing once it's ready, so keep an eye out for that too!

And an extra special thanks to our bestest friends, Rex and Leo, who make these kinds of life experiences possible. My husband and I would probably never go anywhere or do anything interesting if it was left up to us.