Some Spectra Art

I made some decent progress with Spectra this month, a sudden writing spree of over 10,000 words followed by some concept art.

Scifi armor that I spent effort coloring despite the fact that the lineart was a very quick sketch, but motivation was there so I took it. I particularly like the mood from the lighting and background.

The writing part was rough at times, I deleted a few thousand words as I struggled to understand two characters who have a similar role but different personalities and characterization. I’m still not sure how to fix it. They’re really meant to be one character but started diverging a while ago. I did write some solid scenes and reinvigorate some other characters though, so overall it improved things. But there’s still a lot of tricky parts and gaps in the series.

Because of that I wanted to make a short story to simplify things and have something not too daunting. Didn’t have many ideas before, but today I got a couple: one for a strategy game in Spectra, managing a colony ship, and the other just the premise of a comic, shown below.

Finally today’s art. This isn’t part of Spectra the story, but it is part of Spectra the world.

If you didn’t know before, the Sunburst Lichen can survive in the vacuum of space and full radiation. Parts of it survived 18 months outside the ISS. So I thought, why not draw a wrecked spaceship or station now overgrown with the only living thing that could survive?

Recent Art

I’ve drawn something for the last three days, so here is a random assortment of concept art.

He’s translucent because it’s a dream, and I’m not satisfied for it setting the scene.

I don’t draw nice digital eyes, it’s just not the same as paper at all…

So I drew a better dude with no face. This one was the fastest of all, painted him in ~10 minutes.

A Small July Update

Recently I got back into drawing, first some concept art set in the Spectra galaxy, and then I continued sketching Badly Drawn Sons of Adawine and updated a few pages.

Just a little spaceport. Not related to Spectra itself, just some worldbuilding ideas.

Then the first new page of SoA, clearly demonstrating the problem of cycling in and out of story projects:

After reviewing pages I had drawn and not previously uploaded, I realized that Chapter 3 is very much an out of order mess in terms of scenes. But that’s okay, because it’s much easier to see how to arrange things when all the pieces are tangibly visible. Draft first, edit later! I have since uploaded the previous pages with an addition, now they form a scene meant to take place before this small scene on the bridge.

This section does need at least one more page to complete it, but the current draft is a single bracketed author comment, so it’s gonna need a bit more before I continue.

From this I’ve gathered I work in thematic segments, rather than chronologically. Which is useful for not getting completely stuck when I don’t know what is immediately next, but that also means ALL the scenes consider themselves up for grabs and pull at my attention. Thankfully, I have a scene checklist to help with that.

A Week of Game Dev

At the very beginning of the week I got the idea, and the inspiration, to try my hand at coding a game with HTML and JavaScript (and CSS). Now, I’ve used HTML here and there before, I dabbled in the tiniest hint of CSS and JavaScript, this wasn’t the first time I wanted to try to make a game. But it was definitely the first time I chose the right tutorials to get the process started and on my way to making a web game.

I still updated Badly Drawn Sons of Adawine each day, and I have to draw more pages for next week, but all my creative energy was poured into coding and pixelart sprites and finding out that this blog won’t let me run JavaScript on it (not without a plugin, which also requires a paid plan, which I have no reason to do at the time being), so I didn’t update anything here about game dev.

But I did find that Blogger will make it work, so I dusted off an old blog of mine that only had two D&D posts and smushed my code together in the post. Which had wonky results at times. But not so wonky that they kept things from working, they just get slightly misaligned or such.

All this to say, if you want to make young, tiny Tristan move around a garden path, you can do so here.

Now, I certainly had some setbacks along the way, enough that I went from naming the game Tile Map to DOOM (Tiles). This title remained throughout the screenshots I took of my progress. This is the finished resulte:

Badly Drawn Sons of Adawine Continues

I am once again posting a comic sketch page each weekday on my Ko-Fi site. I don’t have payments active there, as I deleted my paypal account last year, but I find that convenient because I can upload later comics as I finish them and hide them under the Supporter only option that no one can see now, then change it once the chronological story catches up to it. Seems like a good way to build a large buffer.

For now I’m reserving the Buy Me a Coffee page for potential Spectra pages, that way they won’t be mixed up. I prefer Ko-Fi because the albums have the option to scroll down similar to Tapas or Webtoons, but BMAC has more options for handling payments. But that’ll only be relevant once I’m consistently making pages and getting the story out there.

Right now I have a buffer of 2 pages, plus another page in a later chapter.

Here is what I uploaded this week:

It’s a very rough draft, but it does help me get all my ideas and thematic elements down without losing time refining them into true dialogue. As such, I’m not likely to make regular posts here with the week’s pages all in one spot, because, well, I’d rather keep the untidiness hidden away in one little cyber niche and not everywhere. But if I draw something quite nice looking or particularly helpful (like cityscape concept art) I’ll likely post it here.

One problem I still have with this process is that even with the hidden albums I can add to now, I can’t reorder the pages. They show up in order of being added. So if I make an album meant to be chapter 5, but I first draw a page that’s halfway through it, I’d have to wait until I have all the preceding pages before uploading it. Either that or I’ll have to accept the later albums will be haphzardly Chapter 5: Part 2 or whatever.

Perhaps it would be better to go by scene or theme/arc and not in the estimated order of finished publication, as it’s more important that I be able to look over my old work easily, rather than digging through various computer files. I’ve also thought that I might not even make public any pages after a certain plot point, not until it’s revealed in the real comic. I’ll show the beginning, until just before the Point of No Return, when the first act is about to end. Because that’s when the Spoilers start. And no one wants to learn about Spoilers through badly drawn art.