unsounded

August 2015 Patreon supported

Thank you so much for the support this month!

10_120-127

Ahh, so I miscalculated! I thought the rest of this scene was six pages and it's actually eight. So.

It was great fun finally letting the lads meet up and spit bile at each other, though the more immediate threat of the silver monster keeps them from coming to blows or doing anything too terribly stupid. Quigley unfortunately cannot compete with Toma and Duane so he kind of turns damsel in distress for a minute. Sorry, Quigley, you are a little too frail for this and no kind of hero...

Q&A Questions and drawing ideas!

The crowd spoke and looks like Monday will definitely be a mega-update. During the two weeks after I'll add some more concept art here and also do another, more proper Q&A. A few people suggested just dubbing over a live-drawing video and that sounds like a good idea! So I need two things from you guys here please:

- Questions! Or just things you'd like me to ramble on about. I'll talk about (almost) anything, feel free to pry. If you're too shy, you can anonymously send me a qu...

10_119

Cavalry to the rescue! Although probably not, Toma's construct is outmatched and already has troublemaking ghosts in it.

Cutter doesn't know quite how to feel about Duane, if you can tell. One part hates him, one part is fascinated by him, another part feels quite a lot of kinship with him. Right now he just wants him to scream a lot though.

I'm tempted to do a six page update chunk on Monday and then skip two weeks. What do you guys think? This is about to get real...

10_118

I have a profound weakness for villainous dialogue, especially when the villain is idealistic and overzealous. Especially when they've been curbing their desire to spill the beans for two months by forcing themselves to speak in rhyme.

Cutter's having a blast. I, at least, had fun drawing all those sad ghosties.

10_117

Cutter is a very interesting character to me. I still can't talk about him too much because there's a lot bubbling beneath the surface of his leathery hide that has yet to come out, but one thing that shouldn't be too surprising is his admission that he's an aesthete. He's very hung up on beauty which is why he's spent the story wearing a glamour to hide what are to him, very grotesque scars and a downright execrable brand on his brow. It also explains his compulsion towards rhymes and alliterat...

10_116

I really like Dawn, the turbaned brothel manager. She's pretty understated but I feel like you can read a lot into her by her reaction to all this. There's a lot to be said for a minor character who steps up to the adventurin' plate and shows some competence instead of turning into a flailing screamer.

Although flailing screamers can be nice too...

Starfish knows he's idiotic to follow but his Sette obsession is fierce.

Audio Q&A 1

This is a bit sloppy but hey! Next time we'll try and do it live.

10_115

I like this one, it feels satisfyingly dynamic to me. Also Duane is super handsome!

10_114

I like how Sette's unabashedly covering her eyes here. Who wouldn't be?

It's tricky to keep up a frenetic pace and suggest background fighting. As Sette's memory is sparked about the locks, Duane and the monster are still frolicking and Knock and Toby are trading blows. I didn't want to show every exchange and drag things out needlessly so I tried to show just enough to maintain an aura of violence and chaos around her. Instead of a series of actions in sequential panels, the last p...

10_113

I'll get that audio Q&A up this weekend or maybe Monday? Dog stuff messed up my schedule. Thanks to everyone who asked a question :)

Doodle

Had to take my poor old hound dog to the vet today. He's feeling better now.

10_112

The balance between Duane and Sette's mildly adorable antics and the horror show going on around them was hard to strike. I tried to keep this scene from going wrist-slashingly dismal by dropping in splashes of grim levity here and there but horror show is horror show, and a threat like the silver monster should ah, be pretty threatening!

But it was fun to draw Toby totally infested by ghosts and silver wire. Like some kind of silver anemone.

10_111

In spite of the giant deadly pain monster thing and looming destruction and insanity, Duane's still pretty intent on everything he learned and experienced in the khert overnight. It amuses me that he blurts it out to Sette first chance he gets like an excited kid. He really doesn't want to have to deal with this right now! He wants to focus on birds with boobs and the fact that the khert seems to actually WANT him! Sob.

July 2015 Patreon supported

Thank you so much for the support this month!

10_110

I have a lot of love for that first panel. Duane and Sette spent this whole chapter apart, each engaged in their own nighttime miseries. It was nice to at least have them in shouting distance of each other again finally.

Look at how much detail is in each panel though! The pages this chapter have taken so long to do, it's insane. I think this one reads okay though.

But hey! I promised I'd record some audio Q&As so let's do one! Just leave a comment here or email...

10_109

I enjoy extreme close-ups where I get to lovingly render Duane's gorgeous zombie face. It's especially fun when he's acting like kind of a dickbag. You know what it reminds me of though, when it goes from cartoony medium shots to a more rendered close-up? Those bits from Ren and Stimpy when it would switch from animation to some kind of totally gross painted still of a pimple on Stimpy's nose or something. I think Loony Tunes began that.

10_108

Ooooh, I remember this page taking a dog's age to do.  I really wanted Sette to look overwhelmed by all the begging ghosts, so there was no getting around drawing a crowd of them. 

Lady Ilganyag concepts

Though Lady Ilganyag is a very old character of mine, I almost never drew her before Unsounded and never really had more than a vague idea of her looks. Part of the reason for this was she largely existed only inside the minds of characters and could look however she pleased. This is too confusing in a visual medium like comics though, so I needed to hammer out a consistent design.

Here are a few very rough sketches that happened along the way. The first attempts (up top) looked way...

10_107

One of my favourite pages this chapter. I liked getting to draw Sette doing things again after so long tied up in that chair. It was also a lot of fun to come up with all those grotesquely swirling monster baby eels. I think the colouring came out well too. The trick with all that red turned out to be just a hint of reflected blue light to make it pop.

10_106

Textless pages are always a joy. I swear though, Sette has so little page time throughout most of this chapter that I forgot how to draw her a few times!

But it was nice to get away from all the red pixels here, if only briefly. Sette gets one good gasp of dawn air and so do we before we're back into the fray.

Request: Highres khert pages

Tumblr anon requested these pages at a higher res!

10_105

Always super tricky to compose pages where a tiny figure interacts with a giant. You don't want to lose a sense of the size of either, or a sense of the space they're in, and most importantly you want the actions to all read well. I found all these difficulties compounded more than usual by the fact Duane's spellcasting, which really begs for as much clarity as you can muster. There are a few shortcuts I have programmed into pymary though, the most useful in this scene being the uniform greennes...

10_104

Duane's definitely seen that critter before, though in a slightly different, more gargantuan form.

I had huuuge problems with colours clashing as I began this action scene here. It'll get better as we go along, but I hadn't yet struck a balance between Duane's green and the Eel's red, which is too cool here. Eventually I figured out I needed to push it more orange for a...

Exquisite Corpse.

I love when he makes this face.

10_103

Here's the newest page an hour or so early because my love is boundless. Going forward though, I think my routine will be to upload the higher res version immediately after updating the site. I like the pages better on the site, nestled in their thorny frame :3

If you'll recall, Dawn, the brothel mistress, instructed her employees to head down the service lift since the First Silver and eels were blocking the street exit. This probably wasn't great advice! But Duane isn't one to let...

10_98 through 10_102 HD pages

Well, hello there, generous patrons :)

I thought I'd start us off with HD uploads of the past five pages. I worked very hard on this particular sequence, as I saw it as the pay-off for the last nine chapters, ever since the Red Berry Boys and the kidnapped, disembowelled folks were introduced way back in the second chapter. This is the reality-breaking culmination of Starfish's smuggling operation, and the unfortunate end of Stockyard's ambition.

More immediately, a...