It’s “two-fer” day! Two pages for the price of one. And by “price” I mean “free.”
As if I wasn’t complaining about drawing the yak BEFORE. Ugh. This page was a colossal pain and time suck. But I needed it to really drive home the idea that the yak are quite plentiful on Ciceron, contrary to what Roka was told by Dhama Hes. So I figured a double-spread full of yak would do it.
Two things to note on this page: the guns and the alien designs. I’m a big fan of gun designs that don’t just look like regular real-world guns or typical sci-fi futuristic-but-still-kinda-real-world guns. With the Ulon Dosi, I thought it would be cool if their rifles was really just glorified sticks. They obviously aren’t a race steeped in high tech. And they probably wouldn’t have need for really advanced weapons, so their laser rifles are about as basic as you can get. The idea was inspired by the improvised weapons used on Nimbus III in the movie Star Trek V. I guess I’d say, for the horrible abomination and letdown that that movie was, at least I got that one little thing out of it. And who knows, maybe the Brimia crew will sit around a campfire and sing “Row, row, row your boat” some day. I wouldn’t count on it though.
As for the Ulon Dosi aliens, you can see one of them from the back on this page. I thought it would be cool and pretty different to have them with big “capes” of fur on their backs. I don’t feel like I’ve ever seen that kind of thing before, personally, and it makes sense to me. I figure, evolution-wise, at some point long ago, they were four-legged animals like cows (or yak!). At that time, they might have had a big blanket of fur that hung over the entire back and down both sides, with attachment points on all legs. As they evolved, the blanket remained to cover their backs, with attachments remaining just around the neck and undersides of the arms, so that it hung freely.
For the record, it did present some concepting challenges to design clothing that would work with the fur capes, since nothing could really wrap around the back like most clothes. Everything had to go around the neck, across or down the chest and then around the waist underneath the cape. I think it all works though.
Whoh.
A double-spread of yak is also a hand in Dada Poker, right?
In case anyone reading doesn’t know, you can view the pages larger by right-clicking the image & opening it in a new window or tab (“View Image” in Firefox).
Nice spread.
How much time did it take to complete?
Nice work. I’ve really enjoy the story so far. I plan on lifting elements for my RPG campaign.
I have a feeling that this job is about to take an un-expected turn
Thanks for all the nice comments on this double-page spread!
Feroz, I can’t say for sure how long it took, since I tend to work in fits and spurts in between freelance (IE paying) work, and I’ll usually pencil the entire issue, then ink the whole thing, and then color. So the time is pretty spread out. I will say that it actually didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Even though it’s a lot of stuff to draw, it’s really only 5 panels total. Usually, over two pages, I’d be doing 8-12 panels, so it was actually less work in that regard. It may seem weird to think of it that way, but normally in 8-12 panels, I’d be drawing a lot of the characters multiple times. So in this case, I didn’t have to draw the characters that many times at least.
Obviously, the yak took a bit of time, but they’re all pretty tiny, so I could be a bit loose with them, which helped speed things up.