I AM OK!!!!

I’m starting to feel better and I’m happily working on thumbnails once more, it took me a lot longer than I expected to bring back my joy of creating, among other things. 

I’m not certain of the date of my return, since I have resolved to complete all the thumbnails for this chapter, and begin a buffer (which will start taking place this week) so I don’t get so far down into the sheer fatigue that constantly working, or constantly feeling like I must work and then failing, that had consumed me.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading, which I had lost the joy of for years, and now I’m back being too voracious lmao-- kindle tells me the book will take 11 hours and then it calculates for me and its like ok 5 hours.

Anyway, I’ll be posting an update to the website sometime this week in order to make sure everyone knows what’s going on! But I am in good health for the first time in awhile, and I appreciate everyone’s patience!

Thank you! I’ve passed this onto the tech, I think it could be a busted ad, since I’m not experiencing any issues myself!

Yes, though it’s been fairly rare. Deirdre was late teens when she became a Graver, and adults who come into their powers fairly late, who have high Academic standings, do offer to become Gravers as a way to keep control over their lifestyles-- had Harris been 100% in the Academic camp, this would have been something he would have considered.

Unfortunately, tumblr ate the first one!!! 

The explanation for why those things, in particular, is varied, and mostly boils down to “I thought it was interesting.”

In general, when I’m worldbuilding, I like to fit things together like puzzle pieces, even if you’re starting with varied themes. Blindsprings is a little odd, where even though it’s a straight fantasy, and they’re not on our earth, certain words and ideas persist-- you can absolutely make everything up, but if the explanation of those ideas is also complicated, sometimes using names that people are familiar with pushes your idea forward and is a bit more clear. 

With books, you can absolutely get away with making up both the ideas and the words, as the explanations of these ideas makes up a good chunk of books. But in comics, either the explanation needs to be brief, or you set the comic up in some way that the explanations are part of the story, and are interesting. It also helps if they are visually consistent-- since academic magic is a certain shade of blue, if i had an entirely wordless page of a pan through a city, but the last panel had a blue light coming from a window, that does, in fact, give the viewer information.

So exordior was used rather than a made-up word (and it couldn’t be a normal word, or else you’d be setting off seals willy-nilly) because it’s a simple google search to find out the meaning -- exordior (present infinitive exordīrī, perfect active exorsus sum); fourth conjugation, deponentI begin, commence (originally in weaving) 

I don’t know latin, so I’m pulling a JK Rowling here.

As for the other things:

* why I used seals: my dad’s a draughtsman and has so many tools for drawing geometric shapes, back when he made house plans by hand. I really loved Card Captor Sakura's seals and cards. (surprisingly, I only watched FMA for the first time a year after my comic came out and was a little sheepish about how I put it off for so long)

*Invoking gods like Harpocrates: This is an example of adding too much information without knowing where the heck your story is going, so this Academic god stuff has been hanging over my head for four years-- I finally have an explanation for it that fits in-comic, so that’ll be an annotation once this chapter closes.

*Spirits having such a large role: the spirits are somewhat the amalgamation of Rasputin in regards to their spiritual role and in the downfall of the Llyns. I also just really like stories with powerful beings that have a lot of rules for their power.

*Different rituals/using lodestones: I’ve always been very interested in world religions, ancient and modern, and actually was planning to become an archaeologist/work as a history professor had I not found myself working in the art field. And lodestones and dowsing was always a very interesting topic to me, so I filed all of the information away and added it to the worldbuilding pot if it fit.

Worldbuilding, for me, is more like history building-- you can’t just have things happen just because, the world needs to feel like it had a past. If you know the situation that characters are in, work backwards and think, why would that be the case? What things preceded the current situation? Are tensions high, or is everything hunky-dory, and was that ever different in the past? etc etc etc-- history is full of examples of really intense situations and what critical events led up them. 

A couple things!

https://gumroad.com/l/MESl is a perspective tool I found recently, works exactly how I want it to (JUST a grid, not a snap tool like clip paint has)

https://www.pinterest.ca/search/pins/?q=thomasintokyo&rs=typed&term_meta[]=thomasintokyo%7Ctyped Thomas Remain (french art director in anime) has a bunch of super helpful tips

I personally like drawing my bgs by hand, i feel like I get more out of it that way/looks less digital, my best tip for keeping lines straighter is to scan dense grid paper which just helps your eyes keep lines straight without wobbling as much when drawing digitally.

I’ve also been using the lasso tool to draw shapes in really quickly after doing a quick sketch, to quickly edit the bgs before doing final lines.

In general, your best bets to get better at bgs is just to do them-- and if you aren’t working on a project where having to draw bgs is a must (like a comic, or a development project, etc) the best thing to do is to do master studies from life, to paintings to photographs (try not to use photos as they are a bit warped from reality). Using stills from movies is also great! Composition is more important that how it’s detailed tbh. Hope that helps!!!