Cartooning: The Final Frontier…

While I know I’ll never be an artist (at least in the way that I think of an artist), I am happy with my progress in my cartoon so far. Each episode I do, I try to push the boundaries of what I’m capable of, and often surprise myself with the results.

Of course, there’s something to be said for keeping one’s expectations low too… and I actually don’t mean that in a negative way. I don’t want to compare my work with the pros, I just want to be happy with my end result and enjoy the journey it takes to get there.

This week that journey is taking me into deep space.

My big challenge now is to try to incorporate scenes from the game world into the comic strip, which means drawing starships, space stations, and planets, as well as all the character based stuff. But anything I do has to be my own. No copy/pasting other people’s work.

I started with something simple, a drum-shaped space station.

I used a drawing as reference and to help with determining shading, but ultimately this boiled down to dealing with simple shapes. It fit the bill. It doesn’t look “real” but it fits in the Fuzzy Knight cartoon style.

This becomes far more challenging when trying to do spaceships.

Yeah, I wasn’t happy with this. I wanted to keep it simple, but the perspective is clearly all wrong, and it just doesn’t feel right. But rather than scour the internet for spaceships to crib off of, I decided to make my own.

In movies there’s a thing called “kitbashing” where people will create a model out of pre-existing parts to create spaceships, buildings, or whatever you need. Like next-level Lego. And there’s a 3D modelling app called Blender that has lots of kitbashing sets available (many free).

So, taking some time to learn the basics and follow YouTube tutorials, I ended up with this…

Sure, it ain’t much, but it isn’t supposed to be, just a reference I can manipulate and use in my comic. Like so…

Which then becomes…

Granted, I am tracing over the ship, but in my defence, I created the ship in the first place! That’s gotta count for something. Besides, it’s far more important for the angles on ships to look sharp, clean and accurate than it is on organic characters.

Again, it doesn’t look real or highly defined, but it does look consistent with the rest of my comic, which is the most important thing.

And then, using all my layering tricks as well as some filters like speed blur, I can make some exciting new scenes to set the story…

Next challenge: Action poses for the characters