To 'toon or not to 'toon...

When developing "The Wellkeeper", I had a lot of very basice questions that needed to be answered before pen ever hit page. I knew from the beginning that one of the lead characters was going to be a somewhat cartoony raccoon by design, but the real question was how cartoony would the entirety of this world be.

Now, let me just say that I'm a VERY cartoony artist by nature. It's just how I draw and by this point, it's kinda in my DNA I think. I've always leaned towards the more cartoony artists even as a fan and no matter how hard I try as an artist, my stuff just always has a certain amount of cartooniness to it.

Now, for the last 7+ years working on my webcomic, "Dandy & Company", cartoony has been just fine. They're cartoon characters doing cartoon things in a cartoon world. But as an artist, I've always had more stories that I've wanted to tell in more genres than just humor. And while there certainly IS humor in "The Wellkeeper", there's also a lot of drama and even a little horror in the pages to come. This ISN'T taking place in toon town and I needed to decide early on how realistic I wanted to take this.

The early designs for Zoe, our female lead and the titular Wellkeeper herself ranged from semi-realistic to outright cartoonish. (Really, how many times can I type "Cartoony" without changing it up a bit.)


A page from the upcoming "Wellkeeper Sketchbook" showing the earliest drawings of the then-unnamed Zoe.

But in designing the characters, I knew that many of them would have to carry a lot of broad emotions and I had a very specific image in y mind of what Zoe looked like and a realistically designed character wasn't it. With "The Wellkeeper", I decided to embrace a more animated design style to the characters, but balance it with very detailed, realistic rendering and environments. I refrenced a LOT of artists such as the ever-incredible Art Adams and Bernie Wrightson's classic illustrated Frankenstein to solve some of the issues of rendering lush forests and detailed environments in black and white, and Adams in particular was of great assistance in balancing the animated character design with a richly detailed world.

In the end, I suppose all of you reading this will decide if my approach is working or not, but either way, i hope you enjoy the journey.