My love for art - and narrative art in particular - began well before I had ever laid eyes on a comic book. As a child, my parents and my grandparents worked selling books for publishers. Every few weeks we would get a big box of sample books and it would be ...

One evening, during a town gathering centered around a glowing tree of light, a mysterious cloaked stranger shows up and removes all the light from the tree before fleeing. The switch to darkness unleashes grim shadow monsters to chase after the townspeople and sends the blue-skin toned community into distress ...

image by Banes, influenced by lots of things

When I came up with the characters and stories that became my webcomic here on The Duck, I knew it didn't come from a vacuum. But for the most part, it was only after writing and posting stories for several years ...

“Save ALL your work. Never throw your old art in the trash!” was a repeated mantra from all my art teachers over the years. The reasoning behind this idea makes sense: Old art is like a time capsule for fresh ideas and it can be a great addition in a ...

(Colouring Sheets Included @ Bottom of Post)

Did you ever watch Mister Rogers when you were a little kid? My all-time favourite episode was the one where he takes the viewer to the crayon factory and showed us how crayons were made. I thought it was the most mesmerizing thing imaginable ...

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Hello, hello, hello! This is the second part of our hugely long expose on the tricky art of WORLD BUILDING! And it really IS extra loooooooooooog… that's because we take so much time crafting the Quackcast world for you. To recap: world-building is a big part of ALL ...

Summary:
Come and join the carnival of spirits, darkness, twilight, magic and weirdness… Rizmo is a devilish, demonic, clownish creature with a surreal world living inside his head. Young Abbey is new in town and doesn't know anyone, but then she meets the crazy carnie who gives her a ...

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We've talked about formulas before, but mostly in the context of escaping formulas and reinventing them.
NOW however we're talking about using existing formulas to create a story, or creating new formulas and sticking to them to come up with your stories.
Formulas can be a good ...

Four years after the disappearance of his father, Leo, a young boy with celestial dreams an imagination filled with fantasy winds up moving back into the old house that his family had left for the city. The house looks magical from the outside and it also has a mysterious attic ...

Summary:
Set in a coal town in the UK, 1975, Rag and Bone starts off with a couple of young boys wanting to play soccer. But Bernie has to look after his little sister Jenny and Jenny wants to look at the horsies… Things take a very disturbing and strange ...