Sketches with Watercolour

Apologies, folks. It has been a little while since my last update. Things have been busy, but in a “slow simmering” kinda way.

The big news is that I finally took a deep dive into the world of WebToons. There’s an interesting learning curve there, mainly oriented around adapting my work to the constraint of that format. Plus the constraint of the specific platform I’m using (in my case, Naver WEBTOON). I get a little jealous of prose writers; as long as you respect a few guidelines, it is not difficult at all to transform one’s prose into .epub and have it beautifully reflow on all kinds of devices. Comics? Well, that’s a trickier beast.

For those not familiar, a WebToon vertically scrolls, so it makes comics ideal for reading on small devices like a cell phone. However, horizontal panels in comics (everything from wide panels to splash pages and a lot in-between) are not ideal. That means that things have to be “rejiggered” quite a bit. I’m still in the experimental phase right now, but it took quite a bit of research and a goodly amount of math to figure it all out. As with most things, trial and error does the trick.

I’ve put two of my short stories up. You can find these at https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/wizards-for-hire-cheap/list?title_no=959052

Am I going to continue with this format? Well, that’s harder to say. The big problem I’m running into — aside from the sheer amount of work that it requires to transform my comics to vertical scrolling — is that there are a lot of comics on that platform. A lot. It’s mind-boggling, actually. That means that discovery is a problem and one I’m not sure how to solve. That’s always one of the problems with the internet; it is an amazing resource, but the sheer amount of content on it can make finding things tricky. Even on a dedicated platform like WEBTOON, it’s not easy. To quote Wikipedia, “As of March 2023, Webtoon (sic) has grown to receive more than 125 billion views annually. It has 85.6 million monthly active users worldwide, and has become the top webcomic platform in the United States with 12.5 million monthly active users.” In an ecosystem like that, I am an incredibly small fish.

To transform WOLF’S HEAD into that format would require a good chunk of time. And the key point is this: it would take a lot of time WITHOUT any guarantee that I would find many readers. So it’s a bit of a poser and one not easy to resolve. I’ve got more figurin’ and thinkin’ to do!

And now, here’s some art!

Another Quick Perspective Sketch

I posted about doing this a few months back, but I had some free time so I did another one recently. And it was so much fun that I thought I’d work it right up to colours, but this time doing so with watercolour!

My goal is always the same: just how fast can I rough out a perspective drawing? And especially: how loose can I keep it while having “enough” drawing to be able to ink it? It can be a bit tricky, but the goal is speed, relative accuracy, and fun. Never underestimate fun!

To avoid getting too fussy with details, I do these sketches with ink, using Zebra and Tombow brush pens as well as Paper Mate Flair Fineliners. If I make a mistake, I can fix it when I actually properly ink the piece, not at this stage. In other words, if mistakes are made, I live with ‘em. Who cares?

As many know, I generally ink digitally now, but that’s not always the case and I do “bounce around” between traditional inking and digital inking. For this piece, I went digital to speed things up. I avoid any “tight” pencils or anything like that; I just scan the sketch in, set it up in Manga Studio EX 4 (yup, I still use it!), and away I go to inking.

With this piece, I thought it would be fun to throw some colour in there, too.

I didn’t keep track of total time, but it wasn’t long, which is the whole point and goal. Zip, zip, zip!

Oh! If you’ve reached this far, don’t forget: I’m starting to put out free digital copies of my comics. Head on over to my “Pirate Von” section and take a peek! It’s at https://www.vonallan.com/p/pirate-von.html.