Making The Time Hump Chronicles Cover (Patreon)

I am still incredible pleased with how the Time Hump Chronicles cover came out :3 Here's some of the behind-the-scenes processing that went into its creation! 

If you're not familiar with Orange is the New Black, The Time Hump Chronicles is a story subplot in season three that features Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren writing an epic sci-fi porno story that takes the whole prison by storm. You can read about it more in-depth on Bustle. Warren picks up a fan girl groupie by the name of Maureen Kukudio thanks to her erotic novel.

In the show, Warren reveals that bad boy Captain Rodcocker was based on prison guard Donaldson, so that made it easy to build his character design. At first I left out his trademark double wangs, because with that positioning there was no way for them to show up. But Matt wisely sketched them in for me, because if you can't create anatomically impossible compositions for the cover of a pornographic sci-fi romance then WHERE CAN YOU. On an aside, it makes my heart sing when I can ink on top of Matt's drawings. It doesn't happen frequently, so I treasure it. Even (especially?) if it's two giant penises.

Gilly and Edwina, however, were given no descriptive clues to their appearance, so I had more liberty to invent them from the ground up. I opted to base heroine Edwina on her creator, Suzanne Warren. It's kind of the Disney Princess Android version of her. Sweet, good-hearted Gilly I based on none other than shy, new inmate Kukudio. I went for an aquatic creature design because 1) Gilly = GILLS, obviously, and 2) I like drawing sea anemone-type heads.

Unfortunately I was working on it at home, so I couldn't recruit my studiomates to pose for me and had to make due with just Matthew and me roughly portraying all three participants. It was a bit trickier than I anticipated, but we got the poses close enough to what I wanted that I could work from them.

Because I was (once again) working the weekend, I felt guilty asking Matt to do a fancier coloring job on the cover since there wasn't much time for him to do so-- but he reluctantly agreed and I'm SO HAPPY with the end result. Of course he's full of "I coulda done better if I had more time!" type moans, but I think it's lovely!

This comic was also extra fun because the Masturbateer is a real person who signed up to be my model during the Volume Two Kickstarter! Oh my gosh, drawing my volunteer Masturbateers is soooo much easier than making up a design that I cobble together from my folder of "Interesting Faces I've Collected from the Internet" (It's... not quite as creepy as it sounds? Or maybe it is. I've lost all perspective at this point). Our Real Life Volunteers send me a set of (clothed) photos of them from specific angles so I've got this great turnaround model of what they look like from all sides. Makes turning them into a moving character EASY PEASY, as opposed to me figuring out someone's profile based off of a single face-forward shot. 

So there ya go. That's how that cover got made.