Escape

Peggy
September 18, 2025

Illustrator, 21.5 hours.

Back in February, Sev asked me for a commission of their weaseltaur character. They wanted two pieces suitable for printing out at A4 or bigger and hanging in their office. Possibly to work as a dyptich. Possibly not. We kicked around a few ideas and ended at “weaseltaurs in libraries, one working, one running wild with hedge clippers”. I finally finished it up earlier this week, and let it sit a couple days before doing the final render – I didn’t want to be re-uploading multiple copies of print-resolution files, each with with one little thing I realized I still needed to fix. But now it’s done.

This is where the sketch ended up after a while. I’d actually drawn most of the main figure and its setting on the left side at this point, as well as a half-done version of the right figure, I didn’t think about how to link them up until after that.

I’ve been following Michael Whelan’s mastodon account, and enjoying the regular appearance in my timeline of great sf/f art with some early sketches and notes on the process, so when I was putting these two parts together I definitely asked myself “what would Mike do here to make this composition work as both a front cover and a wraparound painting”, the big swirl of “DATA CARTS” was definitely a result of that.

There’s a lot more sketch layers in this file but they get pretty incoherent due to the fact that I originally had a lot more space between the two artboards, there’s a lot of overlapping sketches that moved around with that. Especially all the red stuff in the middle.

This is a progress shot from pretty close to done. There’s a lot of stuff going on in here. It all just kinda evolved.

And here’s an outline view from a couple days ago before I did those last few little tweaks.. 7500 paths.That’s a lot. Illustrator was running pretty slow at this point, though I probably could have eked out a lot more performance by working on the laptop screen instead of the 27″ high-dpi screen on my desk. It was at a point where I needed to be able to step back and squint at the whole thing, though.

Something like 80% of paths have really complicated appearance stacks that pile up a bunch of strokes, fills, and effects on them. expand all of that stuff from virtual paths into actual paths and you get 72k paths, plus 6k bitmap images generated by putting some of those virtual paths through effects. Mostly blurs. All those overlapping rectangles are the bitmaps.

As usual I logged my time via hashmarks outside the canvas. When I started painting this I wasn’t sure it was gonna work a one single piece so I tallied things up separately; this is a good way to make sure I don’t spend all my time on one side and half-ass the other. When I decided to make it work as one piece I added the blue marks for things in the middle, and kept on roughly tracking where I was spending my time. I haven’t spent this long on a single piece in a while, even comics pages are usually faster.

A good chunk of the time spent on the middle was the Cat Portal. Shemp is taking a nap and creating a hole between realities for transit purposes, as cats are wont to do.

This was also inspired by Whelan; a while back he posted this piece of a crazy high-tech stoplight hovering in the sky, and I said “hey I like that idea and wanna riff on it”, so I doodled some new shapes over his shapes. Which was his process for this piece too, he regularly sees things in the blobs of paint left on the scraps of board he uses as palettes, and turns them into paintings he calls “palette gremlins”. I needed something besides “more bookshelves” to fill up the middle space, and this came to mind. Maybe I’ll turn this sketch into a final piece sometime too. Dunno. Right now I get to take a break and play some video games.

…but first I have to re-export it because there was a layer on when I exported the final that should have been off, and I only noticed it when writing this post. THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING.

graphic styles for comics production

Peggy
June 15, 2022

So right now I am working on a 13-page comic about a lady magician and her demon sidekick getting into trouble at a rave that 2016 me roughed out. 2022 me found it recently and decided it’s still good, so I’m finishing it.

Today I did an important part of bringing it up to 2022-me’s standards: I’m making Graphic Styles for everything in the model sheet. This took about two hours total; the model sheet contains a generic version of these two characters (seen above), as well as them in Magical Rave gear, and Khebunassvem (the demon) in Combat Mode.

This is no small amount of fiddly bullshit; it takes time to pack all this stuff up into named swatches, and time to think about the most efficient way to make Illustrator draw a bunch of shit for me. This was two hours on top of character designs that were 100% done by the standards of 2016 me. Plus a few design revisions, Chloe used to have straight hair but I decided curly felt better.

Two hours is nothing to sneeze at. But this is the payoff. These are the paths I have to draw, using these various styles. Illustrator then does a bunch of stylistic stuff to it and makes it look cool. I don’t have to fiddle with drawing any of those ragged edges, or even remembering which brush I use. I just say “I’m gonna draw Chloe’s hair”, find the right section in the Graphic Styles, click on the appropriate style, and draw a loose shape that Illustrator noodles a bunch of curls around. Kheb’s tail and its little spade is just one line. All that Kirby Krackle in Combat Kheb’s wings and aura is done by Illustrator around simple shapes. Doing most of the rest of this comic is now gonna be super fast; I just look at my roughs and quickly flesh them out into full drawings, without ever having to fiddle with trying to remember what brush I used at what size and in which color. If I ever draw another story with these two then I can reuse all this work. Probably with a little time to design new costumes for whatever situation they’re in.

If you wanna have a look at the Illustrator source and see what kind of crazy tricks I used, it’s over on Patreon.

desk shot 2016

Peggy
August 3, 2016

The mess I work in when I’m at home. Not shown: stool at an appropriate height for sitting in front of the screen sometimes, coffee table that I used to clear off and sit on the floor to work at before Trina commandeered it for future castle parts.

sketchbooks

Peggy
April 6, 2016

I just cleaned up around the apartment and put the pile of sketchbooks that had been kicking around the studio into the shelves with the other filled sketchbooks. One pocket-sized one has been kicking around since March 2011 or so and still isn’t full.

I really don’t fill sketchbooks up like I used to.

Admittedly I think that one taking forever to fill is a function of its tiny size – it’s not much bigger than my phone, and I like more room than that. I put away filled sketchbooks with later starting dates.

There were actually about 15 books at various places about the apartment, in various stages of fullness. To fit them onto their shelf in the studio closet, I had to do some rearranging – first I pulled off the handful of empty sketchbooks and various notebooks waiting there, then I pulled out the hole punch lurking way in the back of the closet and put some of the empty books back. I just kinda… chew through paper, and turn it into art. These days most of the stuff on paper isn’t even finished images; I mostly do a lot of scrawlings to plan my big projects now.

I am now down to four in-progress sketchbooks. Two of them will take forever to fill since they’re marker paper and I’m reluctant to draw in them with pen and pencil; two of them will probably be ready for the shelf in a couple of months.