Mythology

Here’s another development piece for an upcoming Doctor Baer story. Practicing drawing new characters and new vehicles!

I’ve been consuming a lot of media around the Slavic witch Baba Yaga. One of the many fascinating features of the character is she flies around in a mortar. I thought it’d be fun to try to put my own spin on the vehicle.

It started in my sketchbook:

Once I got somewhere interesting I moved to Blender and built a crude 3d model:

Which I was able to import into Clip Studio Paint and position in the perspective I wanted:

And from there I penciled overtop:

And then inking, coloring, and etc.

I’m excited to be playing with new ideas for the characters, but anxiety is starting to build. If I want to create and serialize a brand-new Doctor Baer story next year, I need to get most of the writing done before the school year starts. Come late August, I’m working full-time as a teaching artist, which means I’ll have 1.5-2 hours per day to work on this at maximum. I’ll need every one of those hours to pencil, ink, and color the pages, even with these handy 3d models.

My hope is that the deadline will force me to commit to some ideas and get some momentum going. I’ve found that’s my only ally when it comes to writing/thumbnailing. It just takes so much to get it going.

But little pieces like these give me a promise of what could be if I just put in the time to work on it!