Cities of the Circle Sea

Hello, heroes!

How was everyone's week? Weeks? It's been a busy, busy few on my end.

In the aftermath of the backerkit campaign we're working to get the pledge manager completely set up and ... it's a bit fiddly I hear ... which has put a bit of a crimp in my comms schedule. You know that picture from the Little Prince?

The one with the lizard eating the cargo package with the phone the extraterrestrial needed to call home? That one.

Anyway.

Over the last few weeks I've done the book equivalent of when you're doing proper™ job on your bicycle. Take the whole of the OGA apart, look at all the pieces, clean them up, sort them, then reassemble to make sure things will fit nicely. So that went well, but disassembled book guts isn't really ... an update.

I'll have a nice big post with the whole of the Green Land ready for you ... mmm ... soon. Next week? I wanted this week, but there you go.

Instead, this post is about ... cities. A really crucial part of the Circle Sea for me have always been the cities and I'll be honest, I'd been dreading illustrating them. With Red End I went a bit too far, and the process — working directly in digital — wasn't super fun for me. Staring at a screen for 20 hours hurts my eyes and because I'm trying not to turn our baby into a screen baby, I can't really work on an iPad next to her. Pen and paper is also a bit difficult, but at least I can distract her with some paper and stubby color pencils. I've even managed to stop her eating too much graphite.

So I was really happy to figure out a nice compromise.

I sketch out the city in pencil (and use a dot grid, haha). Then set to work with a pen (fountain pen here).

It's a pretty soothing process, which is nice.

Then I clean it up in photoshop (mostly adjust curves for the contrast, and straighten if I got some distortion in the scan or photo). After cleanup I lift the lines into their own layer (Select > Color Range > Shadows). You can see in this little png - no white background!

Then it's to procreate for the coloring and labeling. Because I have the lineart as its own layer, I can lock its transparency and recolor the lines to make wavelets or highlights giving an early morning effect to the city (and its weird isometric look).

I'm illustrating (mapping?) each of the cities in a slightly different style. The Emerald City looks like something from my (distorted, old) memories of Sim City 2000, Safranj is closer to the OG Sim City, the Violet City is actually sort-of-kind-of in perspective ... I haven't yet decided exactly what I'll do with the Orange City, but I'm inclining to something a little medieval.

I'm using a similar process to also work on the very big pieces, like the Flying City that is going to loom on the cover of the OGA. I drew that on two A4 pages (because my scanner only does A4) and ... I'll be honest, getting the connections to line up on that is, phew, that's annoying. The other issue is that I didn't have the foreground and background nicely finished.

I tried to just add that in directly in procreate, but see above.

Somehow I am just much, much slower (and more frustrated) when I do lineart digitally. The fact that I can ctrl+Z makes my perfectionism kick in and the digital inks also don't leave the same space for ... happy accidents (or trees? one or the other).

For that I am doing something very similar to the other cities. I use marker paper (very thin and fine) overlaid over the original piece, sketch in pencil where the foreground element should fit ... then just draw in pen (ballpoint here).

Then, scan, extract the lines ...

And hop into procreate.

You can see this one has far fewer layers because the file is so enormous (sized for A2). I think I can only go to 8 layers. That means I've got all the inks on one layer and all the colors on another. It's not really a problem, it makes for much more organic color work, since I'm just painting everything on a single layer. Conveniently, it keeps the perfectionism at bay.

Till Next Week

Ok, I hope you enjoyed that peek behind the digital curtain.

I'm trying very hard to pace myself properly with my work, because wrapping up the books is a huge project. But I also want to share my art with you as I go—and the process and the pieces that don't make it and so on.

I definitely feel the pressure to "draw and write up" to the expectations and, especially when I'm a little tired, I can get quite anxious. Fortunately, I've figured out that if I'm feeling anxious about not working enough or producing enough, that's usually a sign that I need to rest—not work more.

Last night (Friday evening) I felt quite bad. Like I mentioned, some of the setup on the backend is fiddlier than I wanted, the nice update I'm planning for you isn't done yet ... by around 10 pm I was feeling quite the fraud.

Wisdom in small doses and all that, after a night's sleep I feel far better.

So here's a little bonus teaser from the bestiary of humans (the pananthropy):

Take care everyone, listen to yourselfs, don't grind yourselfs down, and if you need to ... take root in a grove for a bit and remember ... you can rest.

Cheers from Korea,

—Luka