S&F Extra: Comic Corgs, Powered-Up Princesses, Ferris Wheel Dogs, and more!

Hello friends! It's a busy time over here, but I've been making lots of cool stuff! Here's a look at what I've been up to lately.

Ferris Wheel Timelapse
Of all the timeline-bending dog comics I've been drawing lately, I think this one is my favourite. Quite a few people asked how you even make like this. Fortunately, I was able to make this timelapse video to show the process!

Click here to view the full 30-second timelapse video

As you'll see, I started by laying down the structure of the overall wheel. (It took me a while to figure out how to visually style the wheel itself, as I didn't want all the bars to obscure the dogs!) Then, I started playing around with some different options for how the different wheel cars could be interacting with each other. I didn't know going in exactly what all the characters would be doing... I just have to discover it by sketching out different options and seeing what works!

Here's the end result:

A fun thought exercise for you... which direction is the butterfly flying?


San Diego Comic Corg
This year, I wanted to experiment with designing an event-specific exclusive shirt. And thus, the San Diego Comic Corg was born!

I started with an initial sketch:

Then I did a rough colour test. My shirts all generally use a maximum of four colours of ink, so it's important for me to make sure I can do everything I want with just those colours and have it still be readable. In this case, I did two colour tests... first a rough one:


And then a more polished one:


After the second test, I was sure the design would work, so I went ahead and drew the full polished final art!

I also had an alternate design that I also poked at a bit. I did a sketch and a colour test for it, too:

Maybe if this year's shirt does well, I can use these sketches as a springboard for a 2026 shirt!


Princess Daisy Process
I'm glad so many of you enjoyed my recent Princess Daisy piece! Here's a breakdown of the making of it.

The commissioner requested having all the different forms of Daisy leaping out from behind the main Daisy in the center. So to start, I drew two possible layout options:

Once the commissioner approved a layout, I proceeded to do the pencils...

...inks...

...and marker colours!

The finished piece was quite big... 11x14! That's about as large as a drawing can be and still be practical to colour with markers, as markers don't generally lend themselves to filling in large areas. (It helps that the charaters are generally small.)


Magic is Just Science I Made Up
Here's a second new shirt I designed. This one is not a con exclusive, although I did have Gen Con in mind when I was making it.

Once again, I started with a sketch:

Then I did a colour test to figure out how I could make it work in four colours:

And from there, the final design!

This one uses a lot of classic limited palette tricks. The lightest colour "reads" decently as both a white and a yellow, which means it can be used both for gold objects and white teeth. The orange works for both the cat and the flame, and also works as a "shadow" colour on the white/yellow areas. And similarly, the dark green/blue works as both a stand alone colour and as a shadow on the green!


Texts from Bunsen 4
Last but not least, I've started work on a cover for Bunsen's next book! This one has a fall theme, and I think it's going to look really nice when it's all finished.

Like the previous book, I'm designing the art to work in two different aspect rations... one for the ebook, and one for the physical edition.

That's all for now, friends! But I'll be back again soon with more fun stuff.