The Art of Doktor No

My webcomic project, that I aforementioned before, is now in quite bumpy phase of development. There few reasons for tat. First is my inexperience with such project, basically everything I do is experimentation and learning by trial and error. Secondly, recent horrific events in Ukraine, so uncomfortably close to home, had made me emotionally dry and paralysed my creativity (now I feel better and more motivated). Thirdly I was was waiting for delivery of few books (more on that later) plus I was collecting resources online and in local library, and studying them.

Research and literature

I think the candid photos of books I bought recently or acquired from my family collection says more than thousands words:

The bibliography is increasing each month, and includes online articles from archaeology publications and digital copies of ancient codices. While “historically accurate fantasy” is an oxymoron, I found out that learning and researching real history is a very good source of inspiration for fantasy.

Concept art

In the meantime I made some rushed and preliminary concept art, that is intended for conveying mood and feeling of the setting:

3D assets

My choice is to use 3D CGI as much as possible for architecture landscapes etc. because I am not skilled enough in drawing architectural stuff and interiors, plus perspective could be very tricky… So far I managed to make procedurally generated pyramidal structures in Blender 3D:

Character design

The most sophisticated kind of concept art so far. Below, I present you eponymous protagonist: 7-Reed Cuauthli (Eagle), a young warrior of the Empire, turned into travelling mercenary, who in first chapter meets a warrior-girl this is very eager for adventuring, and his old mercenary friend.
In case you asked: yes, I took inspiration for title header from “Thorgal”.

More to come soon, I need to design two more characters for the main cast.

Writing

Here things comes tricky. I wrote 90% of first chapter (where we meet our main heroes), but I also wrote a 6-page intermission that introduces reader to the supernatural side of the world. I decided, because of my inexperience with making comics, to write, draft and draw this short intermission, in order to gain experience. In the meantime, below is a sneak preview of storyboards for first chapter:

Long haul ahead, but I think I can do it. Stay tuned for more announcements.