character design

Here’s an image with a few stories behind it.

Story one: the pub date for The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue has been pushed back for a third time. It’s now coming out in Fall 2024.

Story two: I’ve been teaching myself Blender so I can design some 3d model vehicles for upcoming Doctor Baer stories. You can output a Blender file to Clip Studio Paint as 3d material. Within Clip Studio Paint you can manipulate the model to set it in just the position you want, and you can even copy the rulers from that model into a drawing layer.

Here’s the blender file:

The bike I designed myself. The gorilla skull was purchased from Turbosquid.

I demonstrated how this all works on a recent live stream:

But who are these characters, and why should anyone care? I mentioned a while back that I was working on an outline for another Doctor Baer story, and that I wanted to put these mercenaries in it.

The news about my book’s pub date got me thinking of getting something in motion sooner than later on another Doctor Baer story. Between the time of this writing and October 1st, 2024 are approximately 300 workdays, not counting holidays. Given my fall/winter schedule I can comfortably commit an average of 1.5 hours per day towards a new story. That puts me somewhere between 75-100 pages finished by the time Two-Faced Statue comes out.

Rather than have a half-finished graphic novel, I’m thinking of creating a shorter standalone story that I can serialize online leading up to the book’s release. It would certainly be a more compelling way to remind everyone that I have a book coming out next year.

So this image sums up my excitement around making lemonade out of this latest setback. I may not get to see my book in print when I had hoped, but I can use the wait time to come up with an exciting story with a giant thug of a cat, a two-headed cobra, and a little gadgeteer monkey who make life difficult for Doctor Baer.

More to come as I figure out what the story will be! But you can subscribe to the email newsletter or support me on Patreon to get more frequent and in-depth updates.

(special thanks to my buddy Zack Giallongo for the name idea!)

It’s been a packed summer of camp workshops, A2CAF, and events surrounding the Facing Feelings: The Art of Raina Telgemeier exhibition (curated by my wife Anne!). So I’m slowly catching up on correspondence and getting back to drawing.

Most of you know that I love using the utterly mercenary toy marketing of the 1980s as a design constraint. Especially Hasbro toys like the Transformers and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. I was sketching Count Fishravin the other day and thought about those Robot Cuttlefish I drew some months back:

And it occurred to me that I might adapt this design to be one of the smaller vehicle sets you’d find in the G.I. Joe line, like Serpentor and his Air Chariot, Destro and his Despoiler, or Zartan and the Chameleon. Maybe Count Fishravin could drive a similar vehicle based on the cuttlefish designs above?

I took this as an opportunity to try learning Blender a little more. This vehicle was designed on paper, constructed as a 3d model in Blender, then imported into Clip Studio Paint. CSP’s 3d tools allow you to import an .obj file and manipulate it like you would any included 3d materials. So once imported, I was able to position the model in any angle I want–then copy the rulers to a penciling layer.

I penciled more details onto the model and printed them out on watercolor paper. I inked on paper and took the drawings back into Clip Studio Paint for coloring.

I thought it might be neat to include some electric (ELECTRONIC) eels for the tendrils on front of the cuttlefish. Though I’ll admit this does evoke a bit of the design of Sky-Runner, the main villain’s vehicle from SilverHawks.

It was a fun experiment that led to more Blender skill acquisition. I might use this in a future story, I might not. But I know I’ll be building more environmental elements in Blender going forward.