I was very satisfied with how my write-up for #comicschallenge 2022 turned out, and the format is simple; adapt posts into an article with the extra commentary I want to include that isn't restricted to a 500-character limit!
This is my second go at this challenge. My first try was in 2020, and this is one of my favorite art challenges I've done because of the opportunities to experiment with different color palettes and styles!
The drawings are posted for the hue they are assigned to since several of them still took more than a day to complete.
I wanted to start the first entry of this first month simply. A new drawing felt too daunting for today, but there was a drawing I made for this year's Sketchtember I wanted to color, and this was a good day for it!
I planned to color it soon after to show a dramatic walk into the sunrise, but it was better to wait for this. The color wheel that's usually used for Huevember prompts starts with yellow and I hadn't colored any sunrises or sunsets with golden skies!
Kept teal as a background color when it was the hue of the sketch, added golden lighting and purple shadows. When the coloring was finished, the purple hues seemed to compete equally with the yellow hues which made the composition feel less clear, so I added the falling leaves to make the yellow hues the main ones in the composition.
A glimpse of a workshop table crafting pocketwatches! I started this drawing on the 2nd, but it took a few tries to get the composition and angles the way I wanted that the coloring couldn't start until the 3rd day.
An Magical Renegades extra story was written with this drawing! It is in The Scattered Archives, first timeline!
A drawing for this day was skipped since the day 2 drawing took more than a day to complete. I colored and finished the day 2 drawing today.
Some days I want to draw something simple for this challenge although I have a lot of ideas. Some of them feel daunting because they'd likely take more than a day to complete. When I don't have any Magical Renegades ideas, or I don't have anything that I could do quickly enough, the #curatorprompts tag on mastodon.art is great to use for ideas!
I used the tree photo from Curator Prompts 99 for more practice drawing trees, and because it fits the hue for this day! Tweaked the colors to make the palette more oranges and yellow-greens. It still took a few hours but I made this from start to finish today!
This challenge is a great opportunity to show the colorful mage outfits worn by the Magical Renegades! I thought about drawing more of them in this style as promotional pieces. I started the line art and base colors today, and finished the shading the next day. The palettes are close to the official ones, but with some adjustments to more closely fit the main hue of the day. The shading is in a hue around the opposite side of the color wheel for more contrast and to make the colors pop out more!
This is Renegade Blazing Supernova, and her first appearance in 2 years!
Her first and previous appearance was a semi-final design from this Huevember 2020 drawing. The context of the other one is that magical transformations don’t always work as they should! XD
A drawing for this day was skipped since the day 6 drawing took more than a day to complete. I finished the base coloring and shading for the day 6 drawing today.
I was inspired to draw a hearth with a fire with a view of a rainy day outside a window because of days with cold and rainy weather! As I started coloring this though, I got frustrated because I drew this based on a medieval hearth in mind, but it was hard to include the main hue in more than just the fire. I considered starting over with a modern-looking hearth, but it would've taken a lot longer to start over and would slow down my progress over the next days. The wall and pot colors might be anachronistic, but this was necessary.
Another Magical Renegades promo piece in the style of the drawing I made for day 5! This one features Renegade Threat Level Red Alert! She's on the series banner, cover image and some art challenge pieces. She's not in any episodes yet (but the previous comic version got far enough for her to appear), but she will be in an upcoming episode!
The colors are stylized with more red hues, but I liked how the colors of her hair and the blue parts of her outfit turned out that I want to adjust them to make those the official hues. I think the lighter blue looks better with that shade of red on her outfit that I plan to go back to update the Tapas cover image and banner for Magical Renegades with these changes!
This drawing has a similar palette to the day 9 drawing in 2020:
This drawing of her from this year's Sketchtember changed part of her outfit to streamline the design a bit so it'd be easier to draw consistently:
Adding color on the inside of the white skirt layer also ties into a design element on Renegade Midnight Conductor's outfit. When I design the mage outfits for the Magical Renegades, there are some design elements that they share so each of the Magical Renegades look like they're part of a team, but there are also differences in their outfit designs to show off some individual traits. I like to have a balance between these, and I would've loved to have the Magical Renegades' outfits be very fancy, but Threat Level Red Alert's and Midnight Conductors' outfits were especially difficult to draw consistently in the previous comic version.
Catherine wearing a fancier outfit and chilling out with a cup of tea!
This is when I started to need to play catch up again, but I don't regret how this drawing turned out. This was more ambitious and since I knew it'd take more than a day and I didn't want to fall too far behind, I sketched an idea that could be used for day 10, 11 or 12.
This drawing is for an idea that I waited a long time to make! A frustrating thing that can happen when making webcomics or webtoons is that it'll be a long time before some ideas can finally appear in it! Got story arcs and twists you want to put in your comic later on? Better keep your enthusiasm for months or years until you might get to them!
Music is a source of inspiration for me and there are scenes I want to draw in Magical Renegades that are inspired by songs, but it can take a long time for the opportunity to show itself in the webtoon.
An Outrun-inspired piece, but featuring a car model from the 1940's in reference to Red Barchetta and the short story it's based from! Rush is one of my all-time favorite bands, and their music especially inspires a lot of ideas!
For a long time, I had an idea for a story arc and battle between the Renegades and the League that was inspired by this song! It's canon though that The League enforced an equivalent of the Motor Law in the new timeline, but cars might not exist in that timeline unless they're based off of the Model T or an earlier car since those still have some resemblance to the carriages they replaced. I've wanted to write a chase scene where the Renegades drive something that protests the law! I still may not be able to get to this idea in the webtoon any time soon, but I was happy to draw this!
Drawing the car was the most daunting part to start with, but it wasn't terribly difficult. Cars are hard to draw, but the car model in that drawing, the 166 Spyder Corsa, is a good starting point!
The focus in this picture is only on the car so no driver is shown, but the driver defiantly parked the car in front of a sign about the Motor Law!
In Magical Renegades, there are a few characters I could imagine driving vehicles that defy it. If not cars as we know them since the story is in a timeline based in the 1880's, it could be something else. Because of the time constraints again, I didn't draw who that could be, but within the story of Magical Renegades, that could've been Aurora, Susana or Susana's and Claudia's parents!
Another music reference I recently got to fulfill after years is a gag about a sign that references a line from Hardware Store. I had an idea eventually that someone would walk by a hardware store with that reference, but as I was writing the script for episode 30, I found another opportunity because there was another sign gag in a stand-up comedy routine! That was the perfect lead-in!
A Vaporwave-inspired piece! What level of continuity of Magical Renegades does this take place? I don’t know but I thought it’d be fun to throw in a reference to it, and the site for it is in a 90's Web style! As I was making this, I didn't have a specific idea of who's room this could be but then had an idea that it was Lucy's room at her resort. Watching the sunset from the window as by coincidence she sees a commercial about her resort!
The cassette player is a specific model I found when I was looking for references for a cassette player. This multi-colored model in teal, pink and purple fits the aesthetic so well! It was perfect for this!
When I started this piece, I started with a rough sketch as a reference. The 3D modeling was just going to be used as a reference for the finished drawing which I would've made in Inkscape or Krita, but I decided to make the 3D models the finished piece!
This render has a TV in it and continuing to model this piece gave me practice on how to make an image texture glow, and get more practice with using UVs to get the textures as I want them on objects!
There's a story for this in the Travel Logs!
This is a render based on a photo from the Curator Prompts on Mastodon.art.
When I was making this piece, I was struggling to draw so I turned to 3D modeling again to help. I chose this photo from the prompt because it fit this day's hue so well and I thought it'd be good practice for 3D modeling furniture!
It started out smoothly, but near the end it wasn't going so well! It would've taken too long to just start over after I got this far. Although I had the reference in front of me, I realized that the top of the couch was bumpier than I intended for it to be! This happened because I modeled the bumps and dips on the top of the couch early in the process without considering how the later subdivisions of the mesh and the sculpting tools I'd later use would affect them!
This would've worked just fine if I kept the couch a simple, low-poly mesh. I intended to do that, but then I moved towards wanting to use sculpting tools despite the extra time it'd take!
If I had planned from the beginning that I'd sculpt the couch into shape, I should've waited to sculpt the bumps on top of it later.I went from feeling confident about modeling this when I struggled to draw yesterday to being frustrated with modeling mistakes I can't easily go back and fix without starting over! This was taking long enough for a daily challenge so I accepted this piece for what it is so I can move on to the next. If I hadn't been in a hurry to complete this over a day or less, I would've been more willing to start over on the couch.
This can still be a learning experience. Aside from the legs of the couch, the rest of the couch minus the cushions, pillows and trim on the arms were all one piece. I wasn't sure if that was the best option when the couch had enough subdivisions to make use of the sculpting tools.
I'm happy though that despite the issues I had modeling this piece, that it got a lot of likes and someone told me that it reminds them of a stop motion set! :D
Alicia on stage for an outdoor poetry night.
There's a story to go with this in The Scattered Archives! It's in the second timeline soon before the space-time incident that'd lead to the creation of the third:
This story gives some more details about Alicia's backstory involving leaving a corrupt school, and her fears before she went on stage!
Most of this was drawn in Krita but the pose, stage and background other than the trees and clouds were 3D modeled and used as a reference. I recently learned basic character rigging in Blender so I can use it to make some poses!
During the production of episode 30 of Anathema to Commonsense, I had a simple character model that was usable enough to be a reference for the scale of the backgrounds. The model wasn't rigged so I couldn't easily pose it, but I posed it by adjusting the arms and legs into a sitting pose for the scene of a crowd being seated in the auditorium. It was messy, and the changes couldn't be neatly reverted, but it got the job done.
Fast forward and since then, I recently learned basic character rigging in Blender so I can use it to make some poses!
A promo drawing of Renegade Eminence Danger, in the style of the day 5 and 8 drawings. Wielder of a magical rapier, she’s elegant, refined and ambitious with a strong plan laid out! Unlike many time travelers, she trained for melee combat! I have plans for 2 more pieces in this style during this challenge.
Portrait of Aliverti. She first appeared in chapter 12 of Extra! Chronicles! She's Avogadro's and Galvani's younger sister who married into royalty. Their family are nobles, and many served as royal bodyguards. This path in life is expected from everyone in their family.
This portrait shows her in military uniform, and contrasts with Avogadro's portrait that was drawn during the Huevember 2020 challenge:
Avogadro was a cadet, and didn't get promoted very far. He felt burdened by his family's expectations and traditions, and is more of an inventor. Taking it a step further, he is in a faction that his family and many of their allies dislike! He was supposed to marry into the Mallory family (the royals), but he and his suitor declined!
His sister Aliverti is a general who loves her role, fit it well, and eagerly worked her way to the top! She succeeded where Avogadro didn't; she succeeded in the alliance with the Mallory Family when she married Carraway, Mildred's brother. She wants to serve as an example to her children who are looking to follow in her footsteps! Suffice to say, Avogadro and Aliverti aren't on good terms, but Aliverti and Mildred are good friends!
The story to go with this drawing took a lot of extra time because it reveals more lore and character details such as how Aliverti hates the Nova-class mages and can't accept that the Magical Renegades did anything heroic, and feels like the League's "deal" with the royal family is humiliating. She wants to fight both of them, and thinks that their style of magic would make the classical arts obsolete and forgotten. She's also wary of photography because she thinks relying on it too much will make painting portraits obsolete!
Writing these stories during an art challenge inevitably slows down my pace, but they let me get to story ideas and flesh out more a lot sooner. I'd rather show these details in an episode or extra story when possible.
This was a prompt I was wanting to use because it looked simple and fun. I waited to draw it because the hue of the purple mushrooms closely matched the hue for day 16, and good timing because I needed something simple after how much time it took to complete the day 15 drawing!
I tweaked the background and soil colors to more closely match the hue and to give the scene a magical look since those purple mushrooms looked magical!
A promo piece of Renegade Liberty. The mage alter-ego of Susana, who was introduced as being an ordinary human from the 1880's who would become a historical legend across timelines! Becoming a mage seemed out of reach for her, but that’d change.
It started when she crossed paths with a rogue time traveler! Changing the past changes the future. The time traveler had a history book, warned Susana about a takeover that’d happen soon but advised that that Susana had the knowledge needed to stop it from happening! Because so many mages have scammed humans, who have shorter lifespans and are more prone to illness, she was skeptical. It also seemed too good to be true to be initiated without going through the magical bureaucracy, but she agreed to the time traveler's offer to become a mage for the chance at stopping the takeover and changing the future for the better!
As I wrote this description it became a lead-in to introduce new readers to the first episodes since the first episodes of Anathema to Commonsense are about this, and I managed within a 500 character limit on my Mastodon post! :D
This drawing is based on a photo from one of the prompts on Mastodon.art.
A fairly quick watercolor-style piece. I wanted to paint this from the Curator Prompts, and for this day for the Huevember challenge was a good opportunity for that! This is pretty close to the reference photo, but I tweaked the colors of the tree, rocks and algae to fit the blue hue and make it the main hue. In the reference photo, blue and orange seem to be the main hues equally.
This drawing builds on an idea I had for a mermaid AU for Magical Renegades during the Mermay challenge of 2019. I only ever completed two drawings for it but I still thought about the potential there was for an AU!
The fish designs that are chosen reflect something about the characters. Camelia’s is a Butterfly fish, which is one of the most photographed and she’s a photographer.
This piece was partly made with Blender and Krita. Camelia's pose is from a model I posed in Blender. The treasure chest and the rocks were also modeled in Blender but the lineart, watercolor effects, lighting and some of the coloring were done in Krita.
The idea for this branched off from others. When I was stuck on what to draw for day 19, I then had the idea to draw an underwater scene, which led me to draw something new for that potential mermaid AU idea! Since I drew a character in the sea, I thought to draw someone in the sky operating a steampunk airship or going skydiving!
The steampunk airships would definitely be in the early second and third timelines of Magical Renegades, but the story idea I have for this airship drawing is in the second timeline soon before the space-time incident. This led me to a detail where in that world, airships continued to be popular! The design elements are inspired by the car designs of the 1950's that had round windows, chrome trim and large fins. The fins looked *futuristic*! On the side of the balloon is a diamond pattern that's based on a 1950's poster design element, and of course there's a flame paint job on another part!
The flat style I used for this is also inspired by 1950's poster designs.
Although this November has come to an end, I'm not finished trying the Huevember challenge just yet! Most of these ideas took more than a day to complete, but I tried not to let that make me lose steam on this challenge. I may have to skip some days again since I might lose steam on this, but I have plans for a few more drawings that reach into the blue and green hues so I can get through most of the color wheel!
This drawing is related to the one from the previous day and they both tie into a Magical Renegades story for The Scattered Archives! In the second timeline just before the space-time incident that created the third, this event happened. Camelia didn't know what was ahead when she thought filming herself skydiving was the most extreme thing she'd film!
The airship part of the background was first modeled in Blender as a reference and then vectored over in Inkscape. This is the first technique I used to blend 3D backgrounds into the art style. It's seamless but the trade-off is that this is often quite tedious so I save it for simpler backgrounds like this. It was still pretty simple compared to the interior backgrounds I modeled in the webtoon!
Although I had a clear idea for the story to go with these drawings, it got more difficult to write as I got closer to the end when I was trying to write a punchline or a cliffhanger moment. One of the ideas was a punchline based on the 1920's slang term "take the air", and another was a tempting fate moment in the narration where Camelia didn't think she'd soon catch anything on film more extreme than her skydiving, when in episodes 8 and 9 which took place soon after, she filmed the space-time incident!
I would've really liked to draw pieces for the day 22 and 23 hues but I can feel myself running out of steam with this challenge so I'm trying to complete just a few more pieces for it before I return to regular updates on the webtoon. The hues for these days would've been great for 1950's aesthetic pieces or another vaporwave piece. Those are ideas I hope I could get back to.
This drawing was originally from the Sketchtember challenge; it looked rougher than the other drawings because I had to sketch it in Notes since Sidecar wasn't working the day I was sketching it! That was frustrating and I had plans to fix up this drawing and color it in Krita at a later time. When Huevember started, I planned to color it for day 24.
I drew in more details when I remastered the sketch to give more fantasy elements to the scene. The airship was added as an element from the day 20 and 21 drawings. The colors of the grass and the herbs are also chosen to invoke more of a fantasy feel as I became more fine with the idea of the world of Magical Renegades diverging more from our world. The grass being purple was just the beginning!
Day 25 could've also worked for this drawing but I chose the hue for day 24 since it's a bit more blue and the blue of some of the grass and herbs wouldn't clash as much.
I added more details on Melody's outfit too which show something about the classical mage arts; her climbing gear has crystals with just a bit of fire magic in them to provide heat when on a cold mountain top!
This is the last drawing I'm doing for this challenge, and it's an ambitious wrap-up! This is an Art Noveau-inspired drawing showing Avogadro the first time his experiments to create a magical device that can transform the user was successful! This would lead would lead to a new class of mages and the founding of the Magical Renegades the next year!
The drawing shows off part of his outfit and what he looked like as a mage for the Magical Renegades! The other part of his outfit is his military cadet uniform, which he didn't like wearing because he thinks it doesn't represent who he is as a person; he was pushed into this role because of his family's expectations.
I sketched this early in the month and planned to color this to be the drawing for day 25, but I'd fall behind as I've been busy and kept making Huevember pieces that are complex! ^^; The story to go with this drawing is the longest for a Scattered Archives story, and is one of the most serious with a lot of lore details. It delves more into the repressive dynamics within Avogadro's original family and more details about a historical event that shaped the timelines. Success was as fraught with peril as another failure was if he got caught! After a failed experiment that led him to be hospitalized, he had to continue his project in secrecy from them!
The end of the story shows his observations that he wrote about what would become the Nova-Class mages and delve into the revolution that put an end to mages taking advantage of the human villages that suffered during droughts and floods a few years prior! This would also tie into how Susana was willing to join the Magical Renegades; she met Avogadro when she visited their headquarters and her older relatives fought in that revolution!
Although I didn't make drawings for every day in the challenge, I'm happy to say that I got further than I did on my previous try in 2020. With both years I participated, I'm happy for what I completed. Both challenges led to the creation of new drawings and extra stories to expand on the lore. This year's challenge was a bit different in that some of the drawings weren't for Magical Renegades, but they still provided valuable practice in working with constrained color palettes, drawing landscapes, and drawing or modeling things I usually wouldn't. Creating an account on Mastodon let me feel more free to draw other things, which helped me through some days I didn't have any lore ideas or wanted to draw something quicker. There were still other prompts to use!
Around the middle of November I started feeling demoralized since I fell behind again and many of my drawings for it took more than a day or two to complete. There was no hope of getting back on track without skipping any more days, but it wasn't good to think this way. I think this was one of the reasons that I ended the challenge about halfway through in 2020; I didn't run out of ideas, but ran out of steam by the end of the month and getting only to day 14.
This time as I participated more on Mastodon, I looked at other artists' Huevember challenge entries and I saw several other users post drawings that didn't match up with the day. I didn't think they were failing the challenge so I realized I shouldn't think I was. This isn't a competition with strict deadlines and I still had fun throughout the challenge!
