Some thoughts on my process and the upcoming episode three.

Cosmic trees? Yeah I know, where the hell is this webcomic going!

I’ll be honest with you, I’m not 100% sure. I put these characters on a path and I’ve been seeing what happens as the story unfolds ever since. I find that the story comes on it’s own, but I need to seed the ground for my imagination to do its thing. I’ve found that getting some finished ink down on a page helps to give me fuel to work on the next scene.

The very practical part of myself tells me I should layout the entire story first in thumbnails, blue-line it all out, then refine all the pages it in pencil, then ink, and color them all . Build everything in stages, clear well-defined stages! Thumbnail, pencil art, lettering, inking and finally color. So like some highly efficient, well oiled webcomic production machine I’d basically be doing multiple passes over the entire collection of pages until the finished pages are all completed and ready for upload.

This is about the time I start wishing I could clone myself, so this sort of studio style production would work perfectly. Unfortunately it’s just me having to wear many hats. I know from experience, that what happens when I try to work according to that rigid system of production;  I just lose steam, and working on the story becomes painfully boring.

I need the bells and whistles of some (semi) finished art in order to push me forward.  My way is completely inefficient, cannot be scheduled (except in the loosest of ways!), and reliant on that precious sparkly stuff that is finished inks!  It’s probably not the best way to build a comic I know, but it’s what I’m working with at the moment.

That isn’t to say I won’t completely rework those finished inks, but it helps to see a more fully realized idea on the page to give me the fuel I need to move on to the panel, the next screen, the next episode, et cetera…

So yeah, cosmic space trees; this idea came from an observation I once had about the similarity between a trees roots and its branches.

If you took a tree and removed all the soil that roots it to the earth, the roots and branches kind of mirror each other.I liked the symmetry of that, it evoked images of filter feeding sea creatures or microscopic amoebas catching their food in their little amoeba hairs.

I imagined a tree, floating in space so the full root system could be seen along with its branches. I loved that image, it’s always stuck with me and this episode seemed to be the right place to share it.