SIRArtwork

The Tournament of Power: Round 1

Added 2019-11-15 21:07:32 +0000 UTC

It was a wild and wacky time, but it's long past time to summarize my run and give you, the Patrons, a little look behind the scenes.

For those in the dark thanks to my complete lack of promotion, I recently participated in an Original Character Tournament hosted by the author of one of my favorite webcomics: Kill Six Billion Demons. Artists would design and submit an original character to be pitted against one another in a fighting tournament to have their hearts desire granted by the in-cannon demiurge Solomon. It was quite an experience, even though I came up woefully short of the grand prize.

Round 1 began simply enough: My character, Ris Zakti, versus the enthralled historian Aroalzi. At that point I barely had any idea how to write Ris, but I settled on a central conflict pretty quickly after deciding that Ris was the sort who prefers an honest fight. From then on, it was a matter of visualizing the key plot moments and then thumbing them out. This is where the lions share of the "creative" work happens, in that the ideas are workshopped, crystallized, and then roughed out.

From that point on, I simply screencapped the thumbs and enlarged them on a low opacity to serve as the guide on the final pages. All of the thumbs, drawings and effects were done in photoshop. As you might've been able to guess, the specificity of the thumbs varied wildly, but blank spaces were generally for parts that I'd already figured out in my head and had no need to thumb. These were done on a time-constraint, after all.

When all was said and done, I found Aroalzi's comic to be giving my comic a run for my money. It turned out that I had completely miswrote the relationship between Aroalzi and his Possessor, AND his comic was in full, glorious color (regrettably one of my many weak areas). It was the first time, but certainly not the last, that I would be fearing my imminent elimination. Somehow, I pulled through to the next round.