I’ve spent the last 2.5 weeks working tirelessly – truly, tirelessly – on the graphic novelization of To Trust a Dragon – which, as a graphic novel, is probably more suitably titled Dumping a Dragon. Or something. I suck at titles.
Anyway, it’s been a LOT of fun to work on, and the pages look great, and super professional. Everything Cadence struggled to be what with my conflict between digital and traditional. In this project’s case, my Cintiq is doing literally everything it should be. Its drivers have been cooperating, so rather than like it had been over the summer where I would start my computer up, try to start my tablet, and then various things were broken that required 2-3 computer restarts, it’s been a lot more plug and play.
And I don’t know if I’m just really stupid happy with the character design for my kids (Siv and Noelia…finally added the A to her name; I tried so long to go with Noeli, and I tried to rename her, but nothing fit. So I added an A and voila…she feels real) or what, but I literally love drawing their faces over and over. The biggest tell will be when I switch Siv from adorable expressive tooth-scar man with the foof of colored hair to being his true dragony self. I will fully admit I’m scared that’s gonna put a damper on my retelling. Like I’ve got all this momentum and I’ll get like 20 pages in and get to the bulk of the story and then be like fuh I don’t wanna color 70 more pages of dragons smoking and shit. But like, at the same time, I’ve been going so nice and easy on myself that if I need to change Siv’s dragon design from one page to the next for any reason, hell, I will. But I also haven’t been stressing about saving my pages as JPEGs, because that’s so final and makes it harder to reliably go back and change things if/when I want to, so the idea of changing a character design so I can draw it more fluently isn’t super terrible.
Nothing is technically stopping me from setting up a blog for this either, but I feel like that would tie me down to this project in a way that’ll potentially scare me off from it. So, for the time being, I will make my husband help me with it, and make myself happy, and that’s about it.
Anyway, I’ve gotten 10 pages done in 2 weeks. I don’t think 5 or so pages a week is a bad rate by any means.
And without further ado, I’m testing WordPress’s new gallery block and hoping it won’t fuck everything up!
Snaps from “Dumping a Dragon”
Noelia’s hipster (like herbal tea, thrift store job hipster) lil sister Adriana, being dubious 
Aww bbs, this is from the first page and I can’t believe how different my lineart looked! 
Raging chibi Noelia, so kawaii, 11/10 would squee 
I take my art ssssoooooo seriously 
Some slicy intimate panels 
Sivarthis no 
lololol my TRACED minneapolis institute of art, FUCK ARCHITECTURE
And last but not least, my personal favorite, my avatar for whenever I am driving/dealing with annoying people/dealing with my computer being difficult/having to convince myself not to have Dairy Queen after dinner every day…
