So I've finally shared my latest Adastra comic, and it's basically the longest / hardest I've ever worked on a single furry art project, so I figured I'd make a rare journal post of reflections/tips that I picked up in the process.

I started this comic basically right after finishing the game back in February. I immediately knew it was my favorite scene out of the entire game, I knew that drawing it would take forever, and I had very little confidence in what I was throwing myself into. So unlike most work I do, where I just power through one piece at a time, I decided this would be more of a long-form thing, and this was absolutely the way to go. I hadn't drawn humans in basically years, Amicus's body build wasn't coming easily, and I had a real fear I was going to burn myself out on Adastra long before finishing it. So I scripted it out, laid out an initial set of pages (only six, later expanded to eight) and then just sat on it as I started working on all the other smaller fanart pieces I've now put out.

First major lesson was that I needed to warm up on drawing the characters before sketching things out. I've got character rotations for Amicus/Marco I've never shared, including multiple designs / later redesigns for Marco. I dug up every piece of fan art I could find for Marco, and tried to average out to something commonly understood to be him (mostly leaning on Haps' later drawings of him.) I didn't hold back on changing things later in the process, once I decided my 1.0 marco design was just too bland. More than anything though, I figured out how to draw them through all the smaller, one-off comics I put out over time. Drawing all these moments I hadn't personally written but loved reading, it was pushing outside my comfort zone in the most enjoyable sense. Porn was basically all I drew before that, and a very non-serious brand of it too. I was petrified of how to draw some scenes in this recent comic, I had no confidence in how to get across some of these emotions, Marco crying in particular I was definitely not gonna land if I tried to do it all in one go. So I worked my way up to it with all the smaller stuff, experimented with more dramatic compositions and moods, and gradually pieced together all the sketches one at a time, just sort of jumping around to whatever interested me the most at the time.

Second thing was to reference other comic artists for composition, and to do it a lot. I knew I wanted this to be formatted a little more professionally, so with the page count in mind, I tried experimenting with different panel structures. In particular, I tried to focus on how to make things dynamic, so every page isn't the same few combinations, but also lay the upper limits of how crazy I wanted to get. I thought a lot about when to keep things within the margins vs going all the way to the edge for better effect. Breaking the frame of panels is an effect I still don't think I quite landed, but I'm happy with the couple instances where I decided to do it. The biggest struggle was choosing to expand it from 6 pages to 8, which had to be suggested by someone else, but I absolutely think it helped out with the pacing and gave certain panels the breathing room they needed to really set the mood.

Third, after really solidifying the sketch over several months and just needing to set aside the time to crank out the lineart, colors, and finishing touches, I had a lot of learning to do about the software I use and what shortcuts I can make there. I use a combination of Clip Studio Pro on my PC and Procreate on my iPad for lineart (though lately it's just all clip studio) and for how cheap it is, it surprises me how much Clip Studio can take care of. The Lasso-Fill tool is how i handle basically all my flat / cell shading, a lesser known feature that just makes silhouette coloring ridiculously comfy and saves a significant amount of cleanup time. Clip studio has a sizable suite of comic-formatting tools, but I actually prefer just using a group with a black-outline effect for Panels / speech bubles / sound FX, and add of bit of variation through mesh transform for the latter two. The one comic-tool I do use a lot is all their action-line tools that let you set the intensity / amount of lines, and then transform them after to get just the right position. I also learned with this comic in particular that 1001 fonts user blambot has a huge collection of decent comic fonts, which I used not just for the speech bubbles, but plenty of sound FX as well, and those paired with some font-formatting adjustments before rasterizing the type can give you a terrific starting point as opposed to just straight up hand lettering.

It has to be said that at the end of the day, this isn't the best structure for a comic, following a visual novel script nearly to the letter. There's a lot of enjoyment to be had to illustrating a visual novel, as I hope my fanart's shown, and I think it's a fun thing more people should try if they're feeling art blocked. But, there's a lot of things that get thrown off by omitting all the internal monologing that goes on with Marco, which wouldn't translate well to comic form very well. (As is shown in the very last panel, it's kind of confusing and unclear.) The pacing gets all off, and I think the final product ends up packing way too much into too few pages, where you get this shift from comedic relief to heart break in only two pages. I'm no expert on comics, I don't read very many of them at all outside of the furry sphere, and that's the kind of thing that if I really wanted to be good at comic making, I'd have a massive, diverse collection of. Still, braeburned, purplebirdman, anhes, and chinpow's comics (chinpow in particular is basically my furry-comic idol and I think it shows) all blow me away with their structure and formatting, and go a long way to being a really professional reference point for all those wanting to up the quality of their comics.

Ultimately though, it just really has to be stressed how important it is to draw what you're passionate about drawing. The post-adastra depression hit and, for whatever reason, made me decide furry art was what I wanted all my free time to be spent doing, and I can't express enough just how happy I am that me drawing gay-shit that isn't just porn still appeals to much of the people that follow me. I've always had a passion for shoujo manga, so a lot of my recent output feels like expressing a creative urge I've had since I was about 12 and pulling out issues of Fruit's Basket at the library. I've always got way too many things I want to draw, but I feel driven to work through as much of the pile as is possible, and I'm just glad it's not a feeling that's waned once the Adastra depression wore off.

I'm already starting on the next comic that'll be slightly smaller in scale, a scene from the start of Interea. I've got several other Adastra mini comics planned in the meantime, less canon stuff and more jokey, romancy stuff, I've got things from other VNs I've liked playing that I wanna draw, and of course I've got much more planned with the Obstagoon crew and other OCs. I wanna try to keep it at like a 50/50 sfw / nsfw split, but it will absolutely all be gay as hell one way or another.