“Canach and Akoni” | GW2 “comics-style” commission
A Guild Wars 2commission for Kyris finished earlier this month! This was an especially fun one, as Kyris asked me to try a commission in the style I’ve been drawing for The Harbinger’s Path webcomic. I’ve grown to love drawing in this style over this past year, but hadn’t thought too much about potentially doing it on commission. I’m grateful to Kyris for suggesting it, as I’m pretty pleased with how this style turned out in her drawing!
“Akoni Wolfsbane” | Detail close-up
I’m especially happy with how Akoni’s face turned out. I think it is one of my favorite feminine faces I’ve ever drawn!
A few process images below:
Initial sketches.One of the sketch rounds with revisions after feedback!Work-in-progress lineart after the composition was decided on through the sketch revisions.The final piece once more!
I’m not sure if I prefer the earlier version to these. I started painting over in the earlier version, and in this version, I tried tinkering with the lineart layer more. I’m leaning toward this version because the drafting has a better foundation here.
Original post below:
Small sketch of my Guild Wars 2 reaper/necromancer.
I can’t believe it’s December already! A month or two ago, I was expecting December to be on the more relaxing side. But what’s tended to happen every year now, is it inevitably becomes filled up with various events as the year draws to a close. I’m hoping I can still finish the progress on the personal projects I wanted to do – which is mainly the page updates for The Harbinger’s Path comic.
I was out of town for about a week in November, and I was originally sightly concerned I’d have to put the comic updates on a hiatus for about 3 updates’ worth. I learned I’d be heading out of town a little on the later side, and I scrambled to finish about 3 pages a week earlier than I had originally scheduled. These were pages 15 – 17.
Once I learned of this trip, I drafted a schedule for how much time I had and how many pages I’d have to finish to be able to still continue with page updates while out of town. I was leaning toward announcing a hiatus for that week/those pages, but to my surprise, I was able to finish the pages early. This makes me think I’m probably too lenient on myself when it comes to project management for my personal projects when I haven’t hard deadlines, haha.
Anyway, with all the new events that are now planned for December (mostly holiday-related irl ones), I am hoping I will be able to still keep my intended schedule for this chapter’s updates. But December has a good deal more going on than November did – which isn’t surprising, and something I should have anticipated earlier than now. I am slightly wary that I might have to actually do a small hiatus this month. It’s still too early to say, but I don’t want the quality of the pages to suffer if time truly becomes an issue.
“Trahearne in Orr” | Unfinished painting from 2015
Yesterday’s page of The Harbinger’s Path shares similarities with the earliest Trahearne art I ever painted – which made me want to scrounge them up and post here! I probably never posted them on their own to this blog, though they are in the Trahearne & Malyck compilation archive (which as of this post, is a bit out of date/hasn’t been updated for a while).
These were both painted in 2015 – the top one started in August, and the one below November 2. I only know this because I usually include the creation date in the filename, which I’m glad I did here, because otherwise I would have misremembered the bottom drawing as older than the top drawing. They were also both initially WIP’s, but I ended up starting new projects with him instead of finishing these particular ideas (which you can see in that compilation archive – as well as this year’s comic project!).
One of my favorite ways to imagine Trahearne is how his travels and studies in Orr might have gone. This is one of the most interesting aspects of his character, for me, and I think it’s partially because those adventures of his weren’t explored in-depth in the story. Which makes it great fun for us to think about what experiences he might have had!
“Friend and Mentor” | Unfinished painting from 2015
These earlier paintings leaned heavily into his “scholar” background, as from what I remember, this was emphasized more during the sylvari personal story – I started playing the game in 2014, and didn’t play the sylvari personal story for several months afterward – so these drawings are heavily influenced by playing the Zhaitan arc relatively recently.
Additionally, if you recall, Heart of Thorns released October 23, 2015. Which means the first painting was painted before and in anticipation of its launch, and the second after I played the Heart of Thorns story. In the full composition for this second one, Malyck is sitting next to him. They’re also meant to be back in the Grove. I am pretty sure I remember starting this painting as a sort of way to cope with how Heart of Thorns concluded for Trahearne, which is likely why I added the “friend and mentor” title in the filename. :p And likely also how I wished there had been development time to include Malyck in the narrative.
Detail crop from the final page of Chapter 1 from The Harbinger’s Path | Retouched Version
Detail crop of Trahearne from the finale page for Chapter 1 of The Harbinger’s Path. Always meant to post this at some point, and why not today!
It’s curious for me looking at this again. At the time of this page’s completion, I was quite pleased with this portion of the page, in particular. Though they’re very loose, it was much more line-focused than I’d done before attempting chapter 1, and this panel was probably the most heavily line-focused drawing in the entire chapter. (And if it is not, it felt this way to me.)
Before this chapter, I was never very happy with my line drawings – it’s why I almost always added color to drawings before showing them. I didn’t think they looked presentable on their own without some color or value to back up the lines. This drawing was the first one I made in years where I thought it turned out decent even without color or value – I didn’t have to shade this one as much as I normally would for the drawings I was doing at the time.
Even so, as it tends to happen when doing a longer project like a comic, I can see the way I draw Trahearne now is a little different compared to how I was drawing him in Chapter 1. I’ve been aware that the style in the comic shifts a bit – mostly from chapter to chapter, but even within pages of the same chapter. Some if it is intentional experimentation (I’ve been drawing several expressions for Trahearne on page 15 this week, where he looks a little more “seinen” or older – and I might need to tone this down to not make him look too different from earlier pages), while other times it’s been a natural progression from how I’ve grown to enjoy drawing him.
But there are a few different stylistic ways I like to draw him – mostly between a little more youthful or “bishounen” and slightly more mature or more “seinen,” let’s be honest, haha. I enjoy drawing him both ways, but I hope it doesn’t look too inconsistent in the comic. At least, not in a way that is distracting while reading.
Oddly, I think I am more consistent when it comes to Malyck – but I haven’t done a full read-through of the entire comic from page 1 to the current page in a while. I might change my mind if I give that a go sometime.
Edit: Ironically (or predictably?), right after making this post, it made me want to retouch this drawing. I’ve done so above (and to the live page) – the original will be below in the full post, preserved for comparison!
In addition to the Trahearne and Malyck practice animation I made for Heart of Thorns’ 10th anniversary last month, a much smaller thing I also finished by that day was adding a bit of animation to chapter 2’s finale page. This version of the page has been live since the, and you can view it here!
It’s likely obvious, but this page was not drawn with the intention of animating it from the start. I tend to save several steps of the process in the comic page files, as I have the habit of duplicating layers and working on the duplicate when I want to make a larger change or know I will be progressing the page more. This makes my file files larger than they need to be, but on the plus side, I like being able to go back into the file and see how the page progressed over time.
My first attempt to animate this page was all the way back in August – which I just remembered, I even posted that test panel here. This test is what lead to the practice animation from last month. Even though this page’s animation is both much simpler and rougher than last month’s animation, I still have a little sentimental feelings over it, since dabbling with this page was what really lead to all the animation practices afterward (and I have more I want to do in the future!).
So! That’s why I wanted to have a version of this page up, even if it is rough around the edges. It is cleaned up from the August test – the page now is rebuilt completely from scratch from the August version, using 3 layers from the comic file itself. While it is not intended to be super-smooth (which I hope is clear – it is keyframed and not tweened), I hope the cadence feels intentional.
Does it add a little flavor to the page, or does it distract? Feel free to let me know anywhere, as I’m biased toward it, but I would definitely like to know if anyone preferred the previous static page instead of this animated version!
