With the new year came a decision to change up my working process in many ways. The first of which you can see above, I invested in an XP-Pen 24Pro 4k Tablet Monitor and have made the full dive into digital production of artwork, including much of Citadel. Resisting digital, as I had stated in my previous post, was a hill I didn’t die on, but instead rolled off of right into acceptance and investment in the media. So far it’s been a rousing success and I love the speed this new tool has granded me. It’s made drafting tremendously easier and, as a result, I feel I’m putting in effort I previously was uninterested in pushing through.
I hope to continue experimenting with these tools several times a week on my Twitch Streams and show continued improvement in my work through thier use. I’ve started experiementing with 3-D modeling to help with character consistency and general figure drawing improvement. Design Doll is the software I’ve put a lot of trial time into and I’m considering taking the dive to purchase a full license and begin to model out every major character in my comic so I can very quickly pose them, export a “skeleton” image after setting my camera right and use that as the base-line for drawing each figure in Citadel’s many many many future pages without struggling with consistency and proportions as I have in the past. Special thanks to Kathryn of the comic We Are No One for introducing me to the program and showing it’s incredible use for cartoonists.
Citadel’s New Sunrise
Introducing digital toolsets fo my workflow is not the only major change I’m making to my artistic process. There’s even more in-the-weeds changes coming to Citadel. You may start to notice them immediately once the next batch of pages releases. Yes, you read that right…batch of pages.
At the behest of my editor Ezra Vietch, I’m changing up the working process for Citadel entirely. That in of itself is the first major change; I now have an editor. Ezra has stepped up my game substantially since we starting working together on the project and I’ve spent the last several months really shaping the story and more concretely laying down the structure, arcs and plan for execution of the comic writ-large. It would have been impossible without his guidance and our partnership going forward will mean hopefully a much better comics reading experience to come. Thank you Ezra!
Back to the comics production. Citadel is no longer going to be a comic that I try to release new pages on a regular schedule. The age of the webcomic has passed me by, in many ways, and there’s no real reason to try and revisit that publishing format. I have much grander ideas for the story, characters, art and future publishing goals for Citadel, and I’m going to work on it in a way that better jives with those goals and my new work flow.
I now plan to release the comic by full chapter. Like waiting for your favorite season of whatever streaming show you like to drop so you can binge-watch it on a weekend (Though, admittedly, even the streaming platforms are moving back to weekly-episode releases in many cases!) Comics of my scale and story type are best absorbed in complete chunks. I will be penciling (digitally) the entire chapter, then inking the entire chapter (Traditionally), then inkwashing (digitally) the entire chapter that I am currently working on.
Once the pages are lettered and complete, I’ll most likely dump an entire chapter upload onto the website no longer as a full-on web comic but as a gallery of all the chapter’s pages. The cover art will serve as the new “Comic” page that you see at the top of the page when you first arrive and from there I’ll navigate everyone to page 1 to start reading! If all goes according to plan, hard copies of each completed chapter may also become quickly available so if, like me, you enjoy your comics best on paper you can have it the same time as the digital version goes up.
TWITCH
Of course, you can watch every step of the art process for the comic creation live on my Twitch Streams! I stream at least 3 nights a week and one Morning per weekend. Currently I’m live Mon-Tue and Fri from around 6pm to 8 or 9pm. Sunday mornings I try to go live at 8 or 9am and go until 10 or 11 depending on time. Saturday gaming streams also happen occsionally for something different or more relaxing!
Note I do not plan to stream the final completion of the page where we add balloons, lettering, captions, SFX, or anything like that so as not to fully spoil the comic before it’s release. Twitch streams will be focused on the art-side excluseively. Fridays tend to be Fan-Art Fridays where I stream fun illustration experiements and drawings focusing on the game and other characters I love! I will also interrupt comics art streams to complete any illustration work or commissions that come my way, provided I have permission to do so.
Supporting Citadel
There are a few ways to support my illustration work and Citadel coming. I have opened a Threadless and Ko-Fi store front, though they are still under construction and don’t have much to offer yet, but I’ll soon be filling them with art goodies and ways to support. If you subscribe to me on Twitch, donate bits or subs to other viewers that also supports my artwork and ability to keep my gear for straming updated over time. Amazon does take a 50/50 cut of revenue, so there are other, better ways to more directly support me, but I’ll let everyone know when those methods are ready for prime-time.
Lastly, I do plan on opening up comissions more publicly in the future, in the hopes that I can create some fan art or otherwise for folks who already like the work I create for myself. Citadel-related art is also in the plans, so stay tuned! Obviously supporting me financially is not a requirement to enjoy my streams or web-based content. I won’t paywall Citadel or any of my illustration work online, so I hope you can support me in other ways by attending streams, commenting on my work, or engaging me in the many discords I’m a part of to talk about art, comics, gaming and our shared fandoms!
Thank you all for reading, and I’ll see you live, on the internet!
