Daisy x Peach minicomic process

I feel like I haven't shared much for sketches lately as I've been working on finishing up the Daisy Zine so I wanted to make up for that lack. Fortunately I did this comic all in CSP so I have attached a complete timelapse of the process to this post!
(Unfortunately CSP crashes when I try to export the long version so you'll have to settle for the 60 sec version 😅)

Images 1-2: preliminary/unused sketches for this comic
Images 3-6: rough page layouts for the Daisy x Peach minicomic

⚠️This isn't meant as a comic tutorial because plenty of smarter people have already made those! This is more just intended to show how my thought process as I'm working and why I make some of the choices I make along the way.

I'm always happy to clarify or explain things further so definitely ask questions if they occur to you! It helps me get better at clarity in my writing!

Peach Showering from the Peaches Zine

This comic really just bashed together two ideas I like to think about- Daisy as a motorcycle riding babe visiting her friend Peach, who needs to take a shower after working hard in the garden all day. That line of Peach saying "Ahh I feel like a new princess!" after a shower in The Thousand Year Door really lives in my head.

Preliminary comic drawings

I fully thought i was going to include dialog for this comic at first but then I didn't want to give any real estate to speech bubbles so I gave up on that!

This first image in this post is literally what I doodled on my ipad in bed one night. Not coherent, just some key moments I thought would be fun to draw. I love the glimpse or the teasing peek in images almost more than explicit things because it's so tantalizing.

WIP Page 1 layout

I had just finished up some other images for the zine where Daisy has this solid colored orange hair and I thought if I embraced that I might resist the urge to go full color on this-- it kinda worked 😅 I kept it on the canvas the whole time as I was working to remind me of my visual target.

The timelapse is a little disorienting because I was using my template to remind me how to work on the spreads. Page 1 on the right, page 2 on the left, etc.⤵️

View of a 4 page comic in InDesign

It makes flipping between pages disorienting but I liked having two pages open at a time so I could stay a bit more consistent in the art. That was my main challenge, I kept getting more detailed as I went along. At some point I had to go back and simplify drawings of faces because they were just morphing too much into realism.

When composing these pages I like to look for opportunities to have big moments that take up a lot of space, like Peach looking in her dildo drawer and make everything else organized around complimenting and framing it.

Simple easy to follow panel blocks let me do fun things with panel breaks without things being confusing.

I find when I do overlapping panels or panel breaks the composition need to be really rigid overall so the breaks don't feel too confusing.

To put it another way,🍔 It's okay to have the lettuce or cheese hanging out of the burger as long as you can really clearly see each layer. Too much and it's just a distracting pile.

I ended up really down-playing that dark staircase swoop in the green panel above for the final version. It was just a big arrow pointing anywhere but where you're supposed to look next, which is not helpful for clarity.

Final page 1 art with more subdued staircase

For this middle section I wanted to let the panels dissolve so that it could feel less like a linear sequence and more like a montage of things. Daisy cums over and over again after all, but I feel like the absence of panels would suggests time kinda is just going and they're lost in each other for a while.

I will rep RedChamberDream's work until my dying day, their work is a huge inspiration for me because they pick really unique moments to show as well as really emphasize the action and reaction of characters in a way I think is spectacular.

They've also inspired me to try branching out in these more sprawling, layered compositions a lot more, which is great for the aforementioned montage idea.

Page 4 - Page 3 WIP

Especially in the montage format I still try to focus around big primary moments/focal points and a bunch of smaller, secondary moments/actions for the sake of each page having a kind of clear focus.

I had been grabbing drawings from other sketch pages in the zine that could fit into one coherent sequence but I ended up tweaking them to make them fit together better.

This sketch in blue I had made before I ever started on the comic and I thought it would make a nice focal point as long as I showed some tender moments around it, to balance out the energetic pounding.

Once I started fitting in drawings around it, I realized I would have some redundant Daisy heads, but that I could change the expressions across them to show different kinds of reactions.

I think when you show a character once you might as well try to round out their expression in different ways across different panels to show how their experience is changing from moment to moment in intensity or feeling. I don't think I would have obscured Daisy's face in the bottom right unless she was face up with Peach checking in over her shoulder right above it.

I realized also that I didn't have a transitional moment from Daisy riding Peach to Peach riding Daisy between page 3/4 so I changed the top composition around to be about Peach inserting the dildo again from behind, even though I liked the original drawing.

By page 4 I really wanted to show how Peach was getting off from all this either from the friction of the harness, or just from seeing/hearing the obvious enjoyment of her partner.

Page 4 rough sketch

I love how these layered actions and different sized portraits start to feel like a movie poster. And I really love when the direction of one action feels like it reinforces the force of another one. Everything is thrusting right to left across these three sections which I did to try to tie the intensity of motion together.

Page 4 line art, showing overlapping motion of gestures

Maybe I'm getting too esoteric at this point but I think that sandwiching a closeup of Peach between all these actions really drives it home that that everything orbiting around her is both her experience and focus in this moment, it's like an all consuming intensity🥵

Page 4 final art

One of the luxuries of having a printer is being able to do test prints so you can walk away from your computer screen and look at your work in a different context, or to show to your partner to let her draw circles around all the parts where you're getting off-target style wise 😂💗

My partner's lovingly critical, notated WIP print

I was hoping to stay much more limited in the color palette with this but It just feels nicer on the page with a few more colors, especially the blue accent color for their eyes and Peach's earrings because it helps things pop on the page.

Bottom of page 3 screenshot in Indesign with trim and bleed lines

Thanks as always for supporting my work and allowing me to go where inspiration takes me for projects like this, it's such a gift!

🧡Winton