November Q and A!

Thank you all for the questions!
They are answered here in chronological order, and I've done my best with both the serious and silly ones. This was fun, and I might do it again - hopefully at a point where I'm no longer feeling like garbage, and maybe social media isn't burning like a giant straw effigy of a goat.

Without further ado:

What were some of your mental breakthroughs with lineart?

A lot of it is just lots of little habits acquired over time, really. Drawing comics for as long as I have means not just endless repetition, but also looking for ways to do things easily and quickly - so what you're seeing is the result of nearly two decades of shortcuts, skipped steps, and miles and miles of lines drawn while zoning out.

I still need to work on doing it more, but I think the most valuable breakthrough I've had was when I finally got my brain to understand that it's okay to just NOT ink something? I can leave it as a suggestion - or figure it out in the colouring stage.

.... My present self is frequently annoyed at my past self for leaving bits of comic-pages blank but for a big "IDK trees go here or something". We're working on it.

What's your favourite comfort food and why?

Roast potatoes. I love the cronch. But honestly, the answer to this is probably "pretty much anything my mom cooks". She's an excellent cook, even though she has never met a recipe whose authority she respects.

Who is your current favourite garbage character in anime/manga/games? (each?)

In this house, we love and respect the man, the myth, the legend, Arataka Reigen. Who is like what if you took a heart of gold, wrapped it up in garbage, and stuffed the garbage in a ratty suit, and then it tried to scam you out of your life's savings selling you fake spiritual goods. The genuinely good life advice is free. Watch Mob Psycho 100. 

Runner-up: my darling disaster-boy, Mo Guan Shan, from the manhua 19 Days - who has probably never encountered a problem he didn't try to solve by punching it. I want him to have a hug, a nap, and to catch a break for once in his life.

Why have you denied me a buff catboy?

Because we still live in a democracy somehow, and 'buff catboy' has never won the character design poll.

But once my hand is better, I promise I'll draw one.

When considering character design, what's your process? Do you silhouette or moodboard it?

I usually start with a general idea or vibe I want to achieve - and then I open my reference folders and just start flipping through images. It's not so much moodboarding as it is kind of... rifling through my mental drawers with both hands to see if anything sticks? It gets the gears turning.

Once I've done that, I open a canvas and scribble stick-figure poses. For character-design, I try for a somewhat neutral pose - so that as much as possible of their costume/general look is visible at a glance - that still in some way communicates character. Lazy, irreverent characters will slouch, strict characters will probably stand straighter, etc.

If it's a brand new character, I'll also likely doodle a set of portraits on a separate canvas, so I can figure out their face/hair situation.

Then, I'll draw a fullbody figure of them - in their underwear, usually. Once that's done, I'll copy that a couple of times and place them side by side, and on a separate layer, start scribbling outfit ideas - starting with a silhouette, and then details scribbled on top. Most of my characters go through a bunch of different costume-iterations before I find the one that fits.

When I've settled on one final outfit, I'll reverse engineer it - by drawing them in the complete outfit, and then with their outer layer stripped off, and then the next layer, and so on, until they're down to their underwear again. Doing that helps me figure out their outfit layers and how each part fits together - which will make it easier for me to draw them in poses and situations where their outfit might change or shift in some way.

When THAT's done, I clean up a version with the full outfit, put some proper linework on it, and colour.

It's a pretty time-consuming process, but it also gives me a more complete understanding of how the character and their outfit works - which is helpful in the long run.

What's your biggest artist inspirations

Shaun Tan. Shirahama Kamome. Moebius. Matt Rhodes. Paul Kidby. Nicholas Kole. Really, the list is endless.

Special shoutout to the horse-themed comics by Lena Furberg, which I read growing up and which are 100% responsible for the fact that I actually like drawing horses.

What do you consider to be the piece that challenged you the most

I don't know that I have an individual piece that challenged me most? I learn something from every piece I make, and run into different challenges with each one. I do think I managed to rewire something in my art process when I made the fake-mecha-anime-artbook, SAINT//Gestalt, because not only did I manage to draw robots properly, I also stumbled into a more sculptural, silhouette-first-details-later approach to sketching that I'd been struggling to achieve before.

In general, I think that my two artbook projects - SAINT//Gestalt, and Hallow, have been some of the more interesting stuff I've done in the past few years? I love drawing comics, and making ttrpgs have been its own kind of challenge and fun, but the artbook-for-a-piece-of-fiction-that-doesn't-exist thing I did with both of them allowed me to challenge myself not just in terms of visual art, but also in writing and in creating a context/framework for the things I made.

I'd love to do something like them again - but it'll have to wait till my hand heals up.

What's your favorite thing to draw

Characters taking a cozy nap. Characters doing common, every-day things. Costume/character design.

Favorite medium/ digital brush

While I'm almost entirely digital now, when I work traditionally, I tend to do mixed media stuff. I can't pick just one thing, so anything I do on paper tends to end up being a mix of watercolours, acrylics, coloured pencils, ink, etc.

My favourite digital brush is Manga Studio 5's Darker Pencil, which is what I use for all my sketching. Yes I should just update to CSP. No, it's not likely to happen any time soon. I hiss like a furious cat at change.

As for questions, please do tell about your tea stash! (I still adore your Tea Witch collection!) Also, are there any popular/common tea flavors/types that you personally cannot stand?

I keep my tea-stash in its own dedicated cabinet! In it, I keep a whole bunch of tea caddies, along with my tea pot collection. At last count, I think I had 70+ varieties of tea? Some in big tea caddies, others in small sample jars or packets acquired over the years. I mainly drink black tea, and favour chai and other spiced blends, but I have a fondness for Tie Kuan Yin/Tieguanyin oolong, which is mild and sweet and - if you get ahold of the real, authentic stufff - one of the most expensive teas in the world.

The version I've had is most likely a lower-grade version, and therefore a bit cheaper, but still delicious.

As for tea I can't stand - I can't drink rooibos. I would love to, but I simply can't. I think I'm mildly allergic, since I get kind of nauseous and my throat itches a bit when I drink it.

As for tea blends I can't stand because I just don't LIKE them: rhubarb-flavoured black tea. I love rhubarb, I adore rhubarb-strawberry pie - but rhubarb-flavoured black tea tastes like a headache mixed with cough medicine, I'm sorry.

How often have you found that your definition of things--creepy, wholesome, weird, etc--don't match up with other people's definitions?

Quite often, I'd say. Our experience of the world is always subjective; ours are the only eyes we will ever get to see the world through. And because we're different people, obviously our interpretation of it differs too. When you add the layers of specific differences on top of that - queerness, racialisation, personal phobias, memories or experiences unique to us as individuals, etc. - it's not often that our definitions align fully with other people's.

To be less philosophical about it: as a romantic asexual with moderate anxiety, intense vertigo and equally intense left-leaning political views - no, my definitions of things don't always match up with others. Different hats for different people, you know?

Anyway, people who say my skull collection is "weird and unsettling" are clearly wrong, and need to stumble on more animal skulls in ditches in their daily lives.



And that's all for this time! Thank you for taking the time to ask me questions - and if you've got more, I'm always up for answering them. Take care, and if Twitter really does eat dirt in the next week or so, you know where to find me.