Interrupted Inks

Pages 1-20 inked! I'll update this post when I have new pages to add

First posted 27 July 2025

I'm going to try adding content to the same post as I complete new pages, but I'll upload in batches of a few at a time so as to not bombard you all with notifications. I'll put the commentary for each batch under a new heading like this ↓

Pages 1-4

Been inking this thing! Takes about a day's drawing effort to ink a page at the moment. I'd like to get faster in order to do a longer-running thing, which I think will require a combination of getting into a rhythm with an ongoing process, as well as aiming for a lower level of detail. Part of what's slowing me down is some of the roughs for these pages have some jank panels I want to partially re-draft.

Anyway, it's looking pretty clean I think. Still not sure how I'll colour this. Thinking about reaching out to some IRL or online art peers for colour palette dev help. I was playing around with some shared canvas sketching which Quetz recently, he's good with colour, mby he will have some thoughts. Do any of you have artists whose colour work you love?

Pages 5-8

I got four more pages done in the last week, which feels like a more reasonable timeframe to take an average across. I had an amazing art day on wednesday; when I got off job in the afternoon, I did some inking and it felt effortless, and I got through heaps even though I was just cramming it in in the time before I needed to leave for life drawing, and then I had a great session there as well. I'm glad the life drawign club I'm in has started up again for the semester, the doughts when they're on break are tough.

Some really good panels here, I think. Some that I really didn't lay good structural groundwork in at the thumb/sketch stage, but I think it's fine as a whole. It's like, standing out to me that the inked pages look just like tighter clearer versions of the sketched ones, which is like, actually a bit unexpected. I feel like sketches usually lose some of the energy when inked, but these inked pages like, trigger exactly the same response in my brain or something.

I somewhat regret that I haven't been making much else to share while grinding out this comic, but at the same time, I don't want to divde my focus too much. I've been sketching some rough stuff, and also playing around with pinksea.art, which is a rly cute thing built on the AT-protocol (the open-source thing that bluesky uses) where you can draw pictures w a cute limited editor and post them and respond to other people's pictures with pictures I think? It's cute.

Pages 9-12

Half way through inking! I inked two or three random pages before I started working my way through from start to finish, and one of them is in this batch. Can you tell which it is? I'm not sure how much it stands out. In animation, episodes are typically worked on out of order, since there are ususally a few issues to work out when you start production, the first couple episodes you make are usually a little lower quality. Usually you'll start w like episode three or five, and do episodes 1 and 2 later on when your team is at the top of their game (so they make a better first impression). SO I was thinking about hiding some of my process of getting used to the style in the middle of the comic!

Pages 13-16

I think page 13 is one of my favourites. Lots of good expressions. I had a lot of trouble with page 16 p6, I still might redraw it a little more. It's very interesting how stuff that doesn't matter in a rough sketch matters a lot more when you ink it. The eye has more tollerance for things being off-model when the lines are thicker and crunchier. Oh also I've reexported the earlier pages with some minor tweaks here and there.

I've been working a little slower this week , but I'll be pleased if I only ink three pages, since I did four last week. I miss having stuff to post publically, so maybe I'll do some sketchy fun stuff. Open to suggestions from you folks, as always, comment or pm if you like.

Pages 17-20

I really like these pages. The last two panels on page 19 especially (the second of which took so many drafts at the sketch stage).

You are maybe not going to believe this, but when I named this comic Interrupted, I was literally only thinking about the instigating interruption when our adorable goat/deer girl enters the picture. The fact that the entire comic has a repeated 'interruption' motif is was subconcious and I only gradually became aware of it. A lot of my artist's journey lately has been becoming more concious and deliberate of choices, but I suppose I'm still a ways back on the learning curve for writing. Anyway, I thought that was pretty funny, but it makes me feel like I have missed the opportunity to structure the ending into some kind of interruption punch-line that ties the whole theme together. Ah well, I guess I just wanted to write some fluff.

My decision right at the start of this comis series to make all the 'people' different humanoid-ish things with no particular rhyme or reason makes crowd/group shots very difficult to work out. It says something narrative to decide what kind of thing a character is, and when that character is supposed to sit in the background and not draw too much attention, it is a very tricky balance to hit. I never really decided what it means for a person to be some kind or another in this setting. It's been a funny thing thinking about how much to 'repeat' a kind— too much and it would seem to carry some meaning, but I haven't got enough cohesive ideas to make every character unique; that collides with the "trying to make non-distracting crowds" problem. It basically all comes down to Vibes. I am probably taking a lot of subconcious inspiration from things like Gumball, and Evan Dahm's works like Riceboy and 3rd Voice.

This week I have only inked one page so far. If I don't do any more over the weekend, that brings my rolling average down to 3/week, but I think I'm happy with that still. I've hit some kind of odd burnout, where I didn't experience any bad feelings about doing art, in fact I was really motivated, but my brain just stopping being able to do it. Thankfully inking is in some ways a lot easier than the design/creation part of art. I did some sketchy warmups today, which I'll post liek tomorrow or something. At this pace, I'll finish inking this thing next week some time, and I'll be back at the problem of working out how to colour it!

Pages 21-24

This comic had been sitting at one inked panel into page 24 for like two weeks over my unplanned break, but tonight I finally had a confluence of back-feels-ok and brain-not-fried-from-work and smashed it out.

I like the montage pages a lot, they were fun to draft, and I'm pleased with how I could tighten up the sketch as I inked. I'm not bigbrain enough to conlang, but I like drawing (writing?) plausibly linguistic looking symbols a lot. Tried to pay attention to making Brooke's speech convey lower language comptetence. Fun depicting energy and cosy vibes. Do you like our unnamed heroine's sleeping horn-covers? I want to try to colour them to resemble chunks of pool noodle.

Our deer girl's gf has gone thru a design update, after I scrawled some incredibly loose sketchy concept stuff for potential future stories in my irl sketchbook. I think she cute.

You might just be able to make out some slightly Unhinged magnetic poetry on the fridge (which I have back-filled into previous pages). I decided to feature some excerpts from my household's magnetic poetry set (which is a combination of a couple normal sets, a sweet bro and hella jeff set, and any words or letters we could cut out of other magnets. Do you have plumbers and electicians drop advertising magnets in your mailbox in your country? We had a bunch, which is why words like ELECT, PLUM, LUMBER, and 24HR are overrepresented in our palette. The combined effect is slightly derranged ransom-letter aesthetic poetry which I really like.

Perhaps this is a weird way to end the story. Bold call as a porn comic artist to ruin the coom climax and transition into just two characters talking about liking each other. But the expressions were fun, and it felt right when I drafted it like months or years ago. Fun expressions to draw. Who knows. In the end you gotta draw what you wanna draw. It's such a sequel-bait ending too, but even tho I have a bunch of concepts or drafts for future stories, I don't know how many more I can do. I really want to pivot into an ongoing comic project, which I will have to target at a lower level of detail or polish than this one to keep it sustainable. Once I get going with that, I won't have space for additional sizable projects.

I dunno, if I can quit my job and live of porn-drawing money maybe I can make more