Roller Coaster

This week had it all

Mar 12, 2023

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

This week was a bit of a roller coaster. From cleaning vomit from the floor to an email the blew my mind and a mountain of work, there wasn’t a dull moment.

Vomit vs. Email

My twin daughters got sick and decided that holding food in their stomachs was not on, so why not puke it all over the floor? And vomit they did, for a couple of not so fun days. Cleaning it, as bad as it is, is a fast procedure (we managed to catch them on time and move them away from couches or beds, so we only had to clean the floor). The main problem is the goddamn smell that refuses to go away.

I could’ve taken a picture of it but I thought another with them post vomit session, feeling much better, was a better sight for you all:

Some work was done in between vomiting and cleaning, but productivity inevitably took a toll. However…

There was also an email. That led to many back and forth emails. It came from someone I have in the highest of esteems, who read Righteous Thirst For Vengeance and liked it so much that decided to reach out. Which transformed this week in a great week, despite all of the puke cleaning.

Back to pencils

Meanwhile, the core of the work was with Phenomena. I’m working on a batch of 15 pages and I can tell you some of these are the most difficult of this entire book. Lots of details in some rather complex and reference heavy pages.

Using lots of references slows things down considerably, so that’s something I keep in mind when conceiving stories/scenes. But if the story asks for it, the story gets it. So these pages go into a different but much needed direction from the rest of the book. Once you read it you’ll understand it all much better, but let me show some of this stuff without spoiling the context:

Don’t ask why am I drawing this because this will be a great sequence of pages for you to discover on book 2.

Not many easy panels so far, except for a few like these:

Plus, an absolute nightmarish page with stairs in perspective. It’s one of those that feels that it’s too much work for what it is, but if you drawing them as the main setting, you need to construct a solid perspective grid and guides to make sure you retain the proportion of the steps. Even for the last image, which is a simple profile.

The good news (for me, at least) is that next week the content of the pages will get much easier (and hopefully less vomit flying around me), which should make things go much smoother and faster. But despite all the hard work, I always enjoy a good challenge. Be it the stairs or the tanks or the space shuttle (seriously, don’t ask).

New Commission

Finally, this week I started laying the first blocks on a new commission. Still to early to show you any pencils (it’s all guidelines to help me with proportions) but I can reveal the sketch approved by the client:

The client asked for Doctor Strange and sent me a bunch of reference material of his liking (which I always appreciate - after all, these drawing are done with them in mind above anything else). I did some research based on it all and came up with this composition of Doctor Stage vs. Shuma-Gorath. I loved it and thankfully, so did the client. This piece will be a lot of fun.

In the next few weeks I’ll be working on it on the side, so you can expect to see the final results pretty soon. Most likely, still this month.