Kneesvember 2025 Postmortem

This is the story of how this year’s Kneesvember was sort of a disaster of an experience for me, and how it was all my own fault! 

The trend I’ve been following with my Kneesvember challenges is to put more and more work into each story with every passing year, whether it be improving the artwork, or planning out the plot more carefully, or by just making it longer. With a large, baby-sized change in my life, I knew I was going to have to make major adjustments to my expectations. This year, the goal was simplicity. I would have to come up with something that I could finish to my standard of polish within about 4 hours every day.

1. The Idea

My initial plans were to make a children’s book about the joys of creating art. There would be one simple image on one page and a line or two of simple (potentially rhyming) text on another. It was such a straightforward idea that of course I did not follow through with it. I was worried it would be niche and preachy.

I then embarked on some serious brainstorming where I came up with a few stories I was excited about. The first was just some rhyming nonsense with funny drawings. I convinced myself that this was not 'enough'.

The next was a fantastical journey in search of a mythological giant bird. There is some fun imagery in my mind about that one that I may end up using eventually.

The third idea I had is pretty fleshed out and I think I might use it, so I’m not going to describe it much here, but it had sort of a complicated structure of being a story within a story.

I started telling Mélodie about these ideas and was quickly met with a furrowed brow and a dose of reality. I had made things complicated again. Back to my literal drawing board, I thought up a fairy tale that would be a standard, linear adventure that follows the protagonists encountering one magical beast or difficult situation after another.

Is that a simple idea? I guess it depends on the execution. I was running out of time before the month was to start, so I had to pick something. I was actually just about to fly to Europe for 2 weeks to attend a comics convention in Italy, and I would return November 4th. So I planned to draw a few days in advance as a gift to my future self. I ended up getting about 5 days started before leaving, which gave me a lot of undue confidence. I hadn’t truly finished any of them and wasn't able to get any work done while travelling, so when I returned home, I already felt like I was behind before I even started.

1. The Art

Originally, I was going to stick to 2 triads of complementary colours, which would make figuring out values much easier.

I struggle with colour in my art. I know that if one uses too many colours of similar value, it makes images look very flat. A range of values gives your images a better chance of popping in a nice way.

However, when it came time to buy multiples of the pencil crayons I had chosen, I learned that Prismacolor had stopped selling individual pencils as of a year ago. I was able to find a different art supply store that had some left over units for sale, but not a wide selection. The medium I was set on had suddenly become a scarce resource. There are plenty of Prismacolor pencils for sale, they’re just stuck in sets that cost between $50 and $200, and they all have different mixes of colours. In hindsight, at that moment I should’ve changed brands or media altogether.

What I ended up doing was using EVERY colour out of a large box I had, thinking that I wouldn’t run out of a certain colour if I have so many to choose from. This was stupid. Also, I love pencil crayons, but they are a pain to use exclusively. It takes a lot of time and hand strength to fill area with colour, especially if you want it to be opaque. I can’t recommend Prismacolor as a brand for quality, either. On the positive side the colour is great and high chroma and waxy and thick. But sometimes the entire pencil is broken, so if you go to sharpen it, you will end up with a pile of shavings and broken tip after broken tip right to the end. It is maddening. 

In the beginning, on top of writing everything, I wanted to write my own calligraphy for the text! (see the second image at the top) This was a foolish idea and Mélodie called me out on it. Not only would it be time consuming, it is a skill to be learned as it is difficult to do! And it would be hard to write consistently enough so that the audience could read it easily. I did a little searching for a free text online and found one I liked called 'Black Poser'.

1. The Execution

I found out pretty soon after posting the first parts of the story that the format I had chosen wasn't really working as I had hoped. Looking back now, I think certain aspects made it difficult to read on a screen–and even worse on social media. The art was perhaps too static, too much text that many people had trouble reading... overall I'm happy with how it turned out and I'm proud to have finished it despite the challenges.

However, I have decided that this will be my final Kneesvember/Falsetober/month-long challenge work. It just wasn't as fun (has it ever been fun...) as it was in previous years, and I kept feeling like I was far too rushed in both my professional and personal day. I realize that many people probably live through incredibly hectic schedules for years at a time, but this is all self-imposed. I want to spend more time developing my stories. I want to be proud of every drawing and every line of dialogue.

Near the end of this Kneesvember, I was so tired that I made a huge change to the direction I had intended the story to go just to end it early. Originally, the red knight was going to get eaten by the gull. I'm glad I didn't go that way though, because he was my favourite character to draw.

I'm proud of this story like all the others I've made, and I'm really excited to see what I'm capable of when I give myself more than one day to finalize a page!

Thank you so much for reading and to those who are about to go on holidays, I wish you all the best and a very happy new year!

-Joshua