Category: Dumping a Dragon

Dumping a Dragon, Manga, Writing Journey

on the DL graphic novel proj

mary v.

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…

Art!, Dumping a Dragon, Emotia, Manga, Original Characters, Ryan & Me, To Trust a Dragon

of markers and endeavors

mary v.

and also scary new wordpress editors

Well I would say in the last few weeks I have officially begun getting the hang of my new alcohol markers…but the problem I have discovered today is that my poor old flatbed scanner is not. a. fan. 

I never knew that losing saturation would be a problem for me in my unsaturated, blues and reds world. But it was super sad and I still don’t think the scan does my latest drawing justice.

I had always wanted to do a real, thorough Snowbelle personified drawing and so I fixed in on what she would look like NOW as a person…which would be stumpy, and chubby, still mildly terrified of everyone, but always eating mom’s favorite foods.

So I gave her some cute love handles and gray track pants and some FUCKING DELICIOUS looking ramen, and voila. It looks like I know what I’m doing with color sometimes.

Snowbelle <3

So this one immediately went up on my ever-changing art wall over my desk and even now looking at it it’s confusing because the bottom corners color of pink is actually called “Light Violet,” which is alarming as it turned out on the computer more like a light violet than it did on the paper, haha. What? Okay. Whatever.

Other marker practices include this random fire girl, and a cute drawing of me and my nerd.

Kinda hate her. Didn’t really know what I was doing yet. Should have finished with some lineart but I am 100000% moved on from its mediocrity. Her hair is pretty though.
Ryan’s hair shading turned out better than literally anything else in this. And any of the shading I did well honestly just kinda died when I scanned it in. :/

Andnndndnndnd two other pieces of news.

Emotia News

One, I’m very slowly working on a new Emotia painting. I’ve been trying to synthesize myself a bit and figure out where I’m at, and where I’m about to be going, what with starting grad school (again) in a few weeks, and settling into my new less direct care role at work. In some ways I haven’t really changed all that much since my last Emotia, so I think that’s why I did this fabulous paint sketch of my new one and then kinda screeched to a halt, because I’m not positive yet if it’s time for a new one, even though I could just do it anyway. There’s something about this series in particular that has profundity that I really don’t ever want to damage, and part of keeping it sacred may be knowing when not to make one, if when I want to it feels too trivial.

Very very very tentative new project news

Very very very tentative because as per usual, my whims are capricious and difficult to pin down, so I may put two hours of work into this over the next few days before pretending like I never said anything about it – anyway, I was trying to force myself to finish the book I’m reading, a less compelling sequel to Seraphina, and reading about other people’s dragons made me pick up To Trust a Dragon again and then I thought about how all these scenes are like, SUPER VISUAL, and then I was like…*steeples fingers* DO I WANT TO DO THIS? Well, I always do have good timing for shit like this, so yeah MAYBE! We’ll see; I did some preliminary sketches of Noeli and Siv in dragon form since I realized he would spend most of the story as a dragon, and I think they would be really, really neat characters to work on. Noeli would literally be the only human I’d be drawing until she gets to Adriana, so I have to make sure her model is compelling, which I kind of already knew it was.

So, now that I’m done blogging and settling into my art space I was gonna go see what I can do on this. Wish me and my cranky technology luck.