Andi Pasti's Animal Art

More than a year as passed since I uploaded issue #1 of my robot comic Woolly Wonderful. Now I am thinking about plotting Issue #2 - I am showing you which methods I use for story telling and what my next steps are.  My original plan was to work the rest of the story out and jump on issue #2 soon after. In summer '24 I drew an illustration of Woolly on a rabbit to try a new page process to simplify and speed up my drawing. The drawing was uploaded in an earlier blog post . In preparation for the plot creation I've read Lisa Cron's book Wired for Story  which is indeed an excellent book and an inspiration when crafting a story. The book itself is a page-turner, high recommendation from me, though I am not affiliated with that link. But not a lot of progress has been made I have to admit. Woolly is shocked about the slow story progress So where are we with the story? If you have not read issue #1, go ahead and read it first, and then come back. You'll find it when you cli...

To bridge the gap between the published first issue of Woolly Wonderful and creating an engaging story, I used the time to draw some sort of concept that I imagined for a second issue. I tried a slightly different process this time (compared to the one I explained earlier ), to find out if I could save some time in the comic page creation. complete illustration Usually after the pencil stage, the inking will be done, either over very detailed pencils or rougher pencils, depending on the artist’s confidence. But ink will not give you any variance in tone like pencils can give you. Thus, some artists only have a pencil stage and darken the pencils afterwards to make them more stand-out. Any thin or weaker lines will still be visible with a still lighter tone and might give it a bit of a rougher finish to it. This indeed can help to make the art appear less digital.  sketch pencils complete pencils with shadow layer The picture in general has more of a children’s book feeling about it...

People who are not familiar with the artistic process might perceive the creation of art I as some sort of magical act. That we artists just make some confident marks from our imagination and *bam* the masterpiece is done. And even for me, now that I have finished issue 1 of my comic Woolly Wonderful , it seems unbelievably far away and odd when I laid down my first sketches. That notion might even be strengthened when watching artists like Kim Jung Gi who created huge masterworks in ink straight from their mind onto paper. Of course they are not magicians, even if it seems so. They just trained long enough. They have drawn many subjects over and over again until they don’t need references or guiding lines any more. So to reduce the fear of starting a comic page, I will reflect on my process for creating a comic page for Woolly Wonderful. Creating the Layout and Thumbnailing Initial layout and thumbnails Before getting to any pencil work on a comic page it is important to have a rough...

Hey folks, After what seems like an eternity I can finally present you the first issue of my comic Woolly Wonderful . This comic is a start of an idea’s realisation I had some years ago, I will post more about that soon. Let me just say, I gained massive respect for comic creators now that I experienced myself what a journey it is. But it is also a rewarding one. I started this project without a lot of drawing experience or let alone how to do comics. Some pages indeed took me more than 22 hours, with others I got more lucky by just 12 hours. But it does not have to be that way, a simpler style would do it for some people, or maybe even my future self. To make the comic more accessible to new blog visitors, I’ve moved it to  https://andi-pasti-art.blogspot.com/p/woolly-wonderful-issue-1.html . Please enjoy! Enjoy the cover: Stay inspired, Andi Pasti

I haven’t posted about my latest progress on working on my comic yet. The last time was end of 2021 . The good news is: I finally settled on a title! Yeah! It will be called Woolly Wonderful . Woolly will also be the name of the main character, that is one that a child would give its toys, not too complicated and overloaded and quite obvious based on its appearance. Here is Woolly and one of the comic pages: Sample comic page. Copyright: Andi Pasti I have pencilled, inked and coloured 11 out of 16 pages. Although I am sure I have to tweak some of these pages a bit still. I also rearranged the layouts of the last 3 pages last summer and did more pencilling. I condensed the story and brought elements meant for issue 2 into the current issue, which created a more interesting ending and brings the story forward. Some of the last pages need still to be inked as well. Which leads me to think again about my workflow for the next issue. Using pencils and ink pens helped me to refine the final ...