I alluded in a previous post that I was fumbling through the idea of starting another web comic as a kind of spiritual sequel to the comic I stopped drawing about two years ago now.
I think it would make a great addition to a daily blog like this and allow me to supplement the wordy nature of daily blogging with something unique and more visual.
It’s not much to look at yet, but it blossomed out of an idea to take an art style I’m comfortable with and a legacy of drawing comics about parenting and then extrapolating it into a story about a guy and his dog and their adventures through the backcountry.
I fussed through some concept work over the last couple days and did some loose sketching on my iPad:
I roughed that out in my go-to vector editing program, Inkscape, first playing around with a character design and getting the models where I liked them. What resulted was some basic art and recycling of the some of the assets from my former comic to rough out the scene:
I did another hour or so of work to build some updated custom scenery, specifically looking at how I can do “nature” better if that’s going to be the primary setting for a future strip. I sketched some trees, I cleaned up my backgrounds and worked on some shadowing.
I’m also keeping to my custom cartooning font that I created and tweaked for use in that aforementioned web comic project.
The final result was a masthead that I’m reasonably happy sharing as a kick-off to this sub-project:
Where this goes next is probably going to take me a few weeks or more to get rolling properly. Stories & jokes. Some settings. More art assets. And a schedule for designing and publishing these on this blog.
Stay tuned.
The Adventures of Gaige and Crick has taken it’s first step out the front door.