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.

I know, I know. I said no more fuzzy camera phone pices, but this one doesn't exactly fit on a scanner. It's a pic of a hand painted character cut out I just made for the upcoming Orlando Megacon next weekend. (Feb 27-Mar 1) True, it hasn't actually been cut OUT yet, but I just was pretty happy with how this came out and wanted to share. It's a big 'ol, poster sized sheet of foam core and hopefully will attract some fresh eyes my way and get folks excited for the book.

Here's an advanced look at what will be the cover for the first issue of "The Wellkeeper". As I tend to, I tried channeling the great Drew Struzan with this layout while also trying to do something unique (at least for ME) with the coloring. As a rule, I usually tend to be very representational as a colorist, where blue is blue and if a character is green, then I color him GREEN, dagnabbit! In this case, I decided to try and be a little bit more abstract and moody, and I hope it work.s

That said, I'm pretty happy with it overall.

Production of new art for "The Wellkeeper" is really booking along now as I just finished the first 15 pages of the first issue. (Issue #1 will be 32 pages, fyi) I feel like I've really got a feel for both the artistic style and the craracters, as is shown in this quiet conversation page between Zoe and Sebastian, as our heroine nurses a bloody nose. (Nothing sinister. If you remember from the earlier posted pages, he's something of a klutz.)

This project has really challenged me to solve visual problems without my trusty photoshop as I have been doing the last few years, such as the darkening sky in this scene representing both the impending danger our heroes will face, and... uh, the fact that the sun has been setting during this scene. Solving with lines what I used to do with gradients and computer effects is a lot of fun and I hope to get even better as the story progresses.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this page preview.

In Scott McCloud's most recent exploration of the art of comics, "MAKING COMICS", there was a chapter that really struck home for me focusing on what he called World Building.

In my comic strip, Dandy and Company,I rarely have the space or the time to devote to the backgrounds. I'll use a stock few establishing shots and put in the least amount of linework possible to indicate the rest, and that's worked okay for me... at least in a comic strip. But for "The Wellkeeper", I really wanted to make a book that felt like it was set in a very real, lived in world and so I took McCloud's advice to think of Backgrounds NOT as just a backdrop like a stage play or a green screen "psudo-set" but as a real environment that my characters are really in.

It's led me to stage shots like the one above, which is considerably more time consuming than I would ever spend on a similar scene in "Dandy and Company", but I feel does a much better job of capturing the sense of the world Sebastian is in. It's a lot more work, but I'm hoping that you all will agree that it's worth it in the end.

Here's a new panel (Notice I finally have a scanner... no more cel phone pics for me.)from "The Wellkeeper" showing Sebastian encountering a raccoon while taking out the trash for the pizza shop he works at. I purposely designed this panel to be a mirror of the panel shown in my last post where Sebastian first encounters Zoe.

I'm keeping busy busting out pages, but am struggling with what to show and what to keep secret at this stage of production.

An In-Process page shows the first, awkward meeting of Sebastian and Zoe in an alley behind the Pizza stand where Sebastian works.


Inking a panel of Sebastian's mother at dinner talking to her distracted son who is still fixated on the mysterious girl he encountered in the alley.


A close up of our heroine, Zoe.