Sketchbook: A Spot of Scribbling

Pencil on paper

I have an odd split in my creativity - when drawing, I'm much more interested in characters, and when writing, I find it much easier to describe landscapes than people. At the keyboard, I sink easily into lavish descriptions of place, but my drawn characters' surroundings often languish. For a successful graphic story, the two must work together.

A strip set in modern times, in an ordinary city with human characters, might get by with relatively little background detail. If the design on the curtains doesn't say anything about the character, the artist can safely omit it. The reader's brain fills in the details. Fantasy worlds, however, require a commitment to setting. If you want your enchanted castle to have an Arabian Nights feel, you'd better draw some mosaics or your readers might imagine Celtic knotwork instead, based on the hundred other fantasy castles they've seen.

On this sketchbook page, I tried to work some of my favorite Gothic styles into the comic's unique look and feel. I can't draw every single doorknob, but I can establish a series of patterns that repeat themselves throughout the comic and give it a unified look. Castle Whatsitsname is a place of heavy stone and wood, with iron fixtures offset by some delicate features like the Gothic windows. The Undertaker's family orginially comes from Romania, and built the Castle in the 1800s. The table is modeled after one I found in a photo of a Romanian palace-turned-museum, but most of the rest is my own invention. In the end, this story is about imagination and beliefs, not historical accuracy, and the Undertaker's family were iconoclasts to say the least.

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