They Meet in a Tavern…

Welcome to the Fantasy Story process blog!

Fantasy Story is a comic project I’ve been developing over the past year, in between juggling school, illustration work, and raising a tiny human being. FS is the first comic I’ve ever let escape out into the world, and I’m so excited to finally be sharing the first three pages today.

If you just want to read the comic without interruptions, head on over to The Story So Far.

In addition to hosting the comic itself, though, I created this site as a place to share progress shots, creative trials & tribulations, and commentary on the story as I release it. If you’re into that sort of thing, well then read on, my friends…

Ok first here’s a look at page 1. Meetcha below 🙂

(Again, if you just want to read the pages without the commentary you can find them here).

PROGRESS not PERFECTION

Alright. Confession time: for years I’ve been labouring under the dumb impression that before I could make comics, I first had to be good enough to make comics. So I’d do other things: dream up story ideas and character designs and read a lot about making comics and I’d do other illustration work… but I almost always stopped short of making actual sequential pages.

As I said above, this is dumb. As illustrated beautifully in this great quote by Ira Glass, if you want to GET good enough, “the most important possible thing you can do is make a lot of work.” Fine, Ira Glass! You’re right.

With Fantasy Story, I am explicitly giving myself permission to experiment, to try different approaches and techniques, and to grow as an artist and storyteller over the course of the work. If you stick around to read more of Fantasy Story as it’s released you might notice a major theme of the work is identity. This is no coincidence: as Elinore, Tav, Max and David (you’ll meet them all soon don’t worry) discover who they are and how they relate to their world, I’m right there with them on a mission of creative self-discovery.

page 2 (below)

Whew, That Was Easy!

I learned so much throughout the execution of these first few pages, especially inking, colouring, and lettering them.

I’ve almost always used Pigma Micron pens for inking in the past, but have been perennially dissatisfied with the lack of line width variation and character they give, so I decided to ink these pages using a dip pen and a Hunt #102 nib. If I was smart I would have practiced on other things before using a totally new tool on my final art but hey, I said this project was a learning process, right?

I’ve definitely still got kinks to work out with getting the ink to flow smoothly, not gouging the bristol, and just generally getting a facility with the pen, but page 2 went much more smoothly than page 1, and page 3 was… almost starting to feel comfortable.

page 3

I could go on for pages about the time I had drawing and troubleshooting these initial pages, but I think that’s enough for now.  If you haven’t yet read all three pages together without the chatter here’s your last chance (just kidding).

Thanks for reading. I hope you liked it, and your curiosity is piqued enough to come back for more.

Below are a coupla progress shots. I plan on basically alternating between posting new pages and doing process posts… Work stuff and my little mini me at home keep me from being able to keep a tight production schedule, but I’m tryin’!

WIP Shots

part-way through inking page #3

art selfie!

getting to this point was cause for celebration

sure, I’ll learn hand lettering too because why not

If you’ve read all the way to this point you get an extra-special thank you. Shhh don’t tell the others! ❤

Jess