Category: Comics

The Land of Two Moons: Chapter 1 Thoughts

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My webcomic, The Land of Two Moons, has just recently concluded its first chapter!

Okay, there was a prologue first, so it’s not technically the first chapter. But I have been posting pages continually since the prologue started on January 31st. Chapter 1 ended on July 30th. That’s six months of posting two pages per week. I didn’t miss a single update.

And that’s because I managed to keep an 8-10 page buffer the entire time.

When I was drawing the first chapter, I found that I work best when I pencil out the entire chapter, then start inking & shading pages at random. This is extremely beneficial for several reasons, but for these two in particular:

  1. The artwork of the entire chapter is much more consistent than it would be if I was drawing one page at a time.
  2. I get to finish the easiest pages/panels first, and can spend more time on the difficult/more complex pages.

Artwise, I feel like I improved. I didn’t get much better at drawing buildings or furniture or people, but I did get better at drawing faster. It doesn’t take me as long to draw a page as it used to.

Am I satisfied with this chapter? Yes, even though it’s more than twice the length of the rest of the chapters, and there’s only two panels per page (this is changing in chapter 3), and it’s fairly poorly shaded and I’m still figuring things out art-wise. It definitely did what I intended it to do, which is to introduce the two protagonists – Veitlen and Nymue.

I actually don’t have very many more thoughts on chapter 1, mostly because I just finished drawing the entirety of chapter 2. And that chapter starts on August 13th, if you’re curious.

I’ll probably (maybe) do one of these again when chapter 2 ends. Until then!

The Land of Two Moons: now online!

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At the moment, only the cover page of the prologue is posted here on Smackjeeves. I won’t be posting pages here or on Pillowfort, though I do eventually plan on making a separate website for the comic itself. However, that’s years in the future.

Here’s a short summary, which itself is still a WIP:

After not seeing each other for eight years, Veitlen Tyvokala is reunited with his cousin and childhood friend Nymue Rozenbarr after she moves to The Capital to attend the Tsurennupaiva Military Academy. They expect their mandatory military service to be uneventful, and that they will return to civilian life afterward. Their expectations are shattered quickly as they learn that their magic abilities are abnormal and potentially dangerous.

Mid-August Update

Jay ArgallLeave a comment

Hello! How long as it been since my last blog post?

Four months? Oh geez. I totally didn’t intend for that to happen.

I’ve been quite busy these past few months, mostly with scripting and drawing The Gate at the End of the World. I’m a little past halfway through writing the script, and I just finished drawing the 50th page yesterday.

Fifty pages! I drew 40 of those this year, and my original goal was to draw 50 during 2017. Drawing those last 10 pages to reach my goal will only take me until the end of October. Anything after that will be surpassing my original goal.

This is especially awesome since I thought I’d get sick of drawing comics and quit just a few months in. I’ve had a hard time committing to and finishing stories for the past few years.

So since my last update post about The Gate, some things have changed. I’ve changed my posting schedule to one day per week (Tuesday) because:

  1. I’m working five days a week now
  2. My hands and arms were constantly in pain, and I didn’t want to develop tendinitis or worsen my existing carpal tunnel
  3. My buffer ran out

This means it’ll take twice as long to finish drawing the comic, but I’m feeling much better, mentally and physically. Perhaps when I’m in a better situation I can go back to two pages per week, but I don’t see that happening for a while.

So that’s where I am with what I’m currently working on. What about everyone else? How are your projects going?

After one month of posting The Gate…

Jay Argall1 Comment

It’s been exactly a month since my last post! Happy March, everyone.

And during that month, I’ve posted 13 pages of The Gate at the End of the World. How many pages have I completed drawing?

Well…two.

And how many did I managed to draw during all of January? Eight.

I had a schedule of drawing two pages per week that I wanted to stick to, and for the most part, I did. Then things started to get derailed in mid-February, when I realized I had to make some 3D reference models in order to draw future pages. I finished them about a week ago, and promptly started work on the new pages, which I am still not done with.

I really did not expect that some pages would take so much longer than others and completely derail my entire schedule for weeks. Weeks!

In better news, my artwork has been improving! I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. Drawing is becoming much easier, and it takes a lot less time than it used to.

Now on to some future things.

If you’ve seen the progress bar on the sidebar to the right, you can see that the script is projected to end up at around 330 pages. At 2 pages per week, I could draw 104 pages in a year, and it’d take around 3 years to draw and post the whole thing online.

There are several reasons I’m drawing & posting two pages per week. One is that I’m actually drawing spreads instead of individual pages. The other is that I’m scripting on weekdays and only drawing on Fridays and weekends – each page takes around 5-6 hours and I need quite a few breaks to prevent hand cramps & random aches and pains.

But I’ve been thinking about what’s going to happen once I finish scripting (which I honestly don’t even need to think about, since that’s not going to happen for months, but whatever). Since I won’t need the time during the week to script, should I draw even more pages and switch to a 3 day per week updating schedule? If I get to the point where I have a gigantic buffer will I end up doing updates every weekday?  Will I end up being done in two years instead of three?

Who knows!

The Gate at the End of the World: Now online!

Jay Argall1 Comment

Happy February everyone!

I’ve made a few posts mentioning The Gate at the End of the World before, and I’m now happy to say I’ve started posting the first pages online! The entire prologue (5 pages) is up on both Smackjeeves and Tapastic.

Now, in my opinion, I’m not that great of an artist. I basically can’t draw anything that isn’t people just standing around. I wanted to wait until my art skills improved more before I started a comic, but…that’s not going to happen. Sometime last year, I realized that if I kept putting off drawing a comic, I’d never actually improve at drawing comics. Or anything.

So that’s why I’m drawing a comic: to improve my art skills. If I force myself to draw things I don’t normally draw, I’ll end up improving and getting better at drawing new things. I’ve already been experimenting with things from page-to-page, so there isn’t as much of a consistency as I’d like there to be. But hey, I can always go back and redraw things in the end if I’m not happy with them, right?

Well, as long as I don’t get stuck in this endless cycle of redrawing, I suppose it’s okay…

So, now let’s talk about what the comic is actually about.

For as long as anyone can remember, gates to “hell” have always been around, and they disappear and pop up randomly. In the present day, there is only one Hellgate left – the titular Gate at the End of the World. It’s located in a remote part of the southernmost country of the world, Päitlu. Since things occasionally come through the Gate and into the living world, it has to be guarded nonstop.

There are other important things, like most of the country being contaminated with magic and priests having to clean it up. Also, there are spirits, ghosts, and demons.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, since lots of things are spoilers and will be revealed in time. It’s not as serious as it might seem, though.

As for an update schedule: updates will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays, starting on the 7th of February.