14 – Just to establish a few things
Before you ask, if you have questions about how this story relates to the Lord of the Rings, they will be answered in the next page. Please hold off until then.
Featuring special guest appearances from (in order left to right):
Gullimar from Nnewts by Doug TenNapel,
Dabbler from Grrl Power by Dave Barrack,
Kalindra from Inscribing Ardi by A. Story,
The Masked Blob from Atomic Laundromat by Armando Valenzuela,
The Robster from The Adventures of Dr. McNinja by Chris Hastings,
and Ethma from The End by Ran and Cory Brown.
All characters are used with permission. And if there’s anyone there you don’t recognize, go read their comic. They’re all really good.
Ah, so this comic is posted on Halloween. Like, not even the week of Halloween, but right on Halloween. I wanted to do a Halloween special and draw my characters all dressed up in costumes (I mean, other than the Inuyasha costumes that they’ve been wearing since day one,) and I even already know what most of them would be dressed as. But I’m still so close to the start of this comic. Not only would that slow down the progression of this first storyline that I need to get through, but hell, a bunch of the characters I want to dress up haven’t even been established yet!
I’ll have to wait for some other year, I guess. The next time Halloween is on a Wednesday is in six years. I should have all my characters established by then.
Drawing these guest characters was a fun experience. I wasn’t satisfied with just drawing them as I would draw them, but I wanted to match the style of the original artist as best I could. Some of these came out better than others, and in all cases, I have a lot of thoughts on drawing them that I have posted on my Deviant Art page if you are interested.
As for the background though… Drawing that was a bit frustrating. See, in case you didn’t already know, I’m a drafter by trade. I have a floorplan sketched out, and I just wanted to build it in Revit and render some perspective views. But I couldn’t do that. Not just because I haven’t had access to Revit since I graduated a year-and-a-half ago, but because one of the things I need to do is increase my artistic talent. If I build the background in a drafting program then I don’t get better at drawing.
And yet when I hold myself to that standard, you’d think I would have done a better job than this. It might not exactly be a *bad* job, but I didn’t stretch myself as much as I could have; I didn’t try hard enough to learn anything new. But I did try new things by drawing those guest characters, so I’m not amiss about the whole page.