This newsletter is for those craving art talks, daily life philosophers, and the bored. Every two weeks (kind of)!
Today I want to share with you a big artistic milestone - I’m creating a (short) web comic! It’ called The Princess’s Knights.
✦ art
The beginning
In 2022 I visited a castle ruin with my partner, which made me feel like sketching us as princess and knight, just for fun. It was so fun, however, that I came up with a story for those characters, and here we are! I started the script for this story in 2022 right after the castle trip, but wrote the last third of the story only 2 months ago when I decided to draw this story.
The trigger for this decision was Webtoons (a platform for vertical comics) announcing another contest. I had already participated in a previous contest of theirs with a short story, and felt confident to try something bigger with this one. Since I already had this almost-finished script, and my mind kept coming back to this little princess story, I thought it’s the perfect occasion to dive into it.
When I started writing the script 3 years ago, I didn’t know it would become a comic - I didn’t know how to visually manifest that story at all, I just felt like writing the story. That’s why I recommend everyone who likes creating stories to just write them, who knows what it will become in the future!
Playing
The process of writing this story was very different for me. Usually, I am a plot person - I have worked with outlines before, or a minimal plan of where the story is going. If we compare it to animation techniques, I usually am a key-framer. For this story, however, I went straight-ahead. Literally! I just wrote the script as it came to me, no planning. I decided to do it this way because of how the story was born - out of fun. It felt lighter and more casual and free to just write it, without plans. Plans are for adults. I just wanted to play princess.
And the 3 years between starting and finishing helped! I call this quiet time frame in a project the “fermentation phase”. In 2022, I didn’t know how to finish the story, nor did I have all the worldbuilding ideas in it. In 2023 and 2024, little ideas came randomly but naturally that fit perfectly. If you are stuck with a story or world, maybe just let it sit in your subconscious for a while.
After playing princess I had to plan though, as a contest involves a deadline. I started in February, which already was a month too late for me, and now I believe my schedule will be pushed behind a little, but only a little. We need to submit 3 episodes by May, and until then people need to engage with the posts on their platform. (Here is the link, if you want to do some engaging). Chapter 1 and 2 are fully finished, 3 is partly thumbnailed.
Staying engaged
I found a great working rhythm, and what surprises me most is that I am having a lot of fun doing the repetitive drawings. This story is in a style different from my usual - it’s a bit more minimal and stylized. I’m loving it! Having fun throughout the production is an important insight for me, because on previous projects I got bored by repetitive tasks faster. This means this project has something different, something important for my practice - I believe it might be that it was born from fun and that it is somewhat self-indulgent. I have usually shied away from indulgence, but I’ll write more about that some other day.
Something else that is helping me stay interested in my own drawings is something CosmicSpectrumArt said in one of her recent videos. She is making a graphic novel herself (it’s beautiful), and said that her strategy to stay involved is to make every single panel have something interesting to her. It sounds obvious, but when creating many many small panels to just move the story forward, it’s easy to make them simple and straight-forward. This might be efficient but long-term boring. I’m trying to think of that advice constantly and I think it’s effective.
If you saw my comic, it is obvious that I got inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts. I wrote a bit more about that in my last post. The whole story book style came naturally from the concept of the story being a fairy tale, like so many of the princess stories we know. It starts as a romance, but like those fairy tales, get’s darker later.
I will soon make a video about the actual creation process, a little bit more tutorial-ish if you are interested in that. I’ll let you know when it’s up.
If you read the first chapter, please let me know what you thought! Since this story was written more intuitively than, idk, professionally, I’m really curious how it feels to others, if there is flow and curiosity or if the self-indulgence went too far. Thank you everyone for taking your time to reading my posts here! Talk to you soon about the other chapters :) (and Severance, the post is coming).
✦ Watching
Severance.
✦ Reading
Véspera, Storyboarding for Wim Wenders: Visions of Wenders, Der Zauberberg
Have a magical week!
