Chihiro and No Face from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Studio Ghibli

I was driving home from work this evening and an unusual, rather old fashioned looking car with bright high beams began following me on my route. When I made a turn, I looked in the side mirror ...

So you have your kick ass story ready, you’ve researched your world well and feel comfortable in it, and you have an awesome set of personalities to equip your characters that will propagate your story (or complement it if the plot is story driven).

The only thing left to ...

They say that the best and most important elements in visual arts, from movies to comics, are done well when the audience doesn’t quite notice them. And that is definitely true- research and plot development and world building are some of them about which I’ve already talked about ...

LISTEN!

This week we interview the artist and creator of the comic Kings Club, AmeliaP! Her comic was featured and Gunwallace also gave it a theme tune that was featured in Quackcast 335. AmeliaP is a talented professional comic creator and game designer. We couldn't interview her directly because ...

The other day I read a very interesting post by our very own Vickie of Used Books where she was talking about Romance. And what caught my eye the most was her description of the driving force behind romance stories as “relationship-driven conflict”- a very succinct way to put it ...

Having decided that shock value is needed in your comic and you must scare, disgust or generally traumatize your audience in some way in order to get the emotional reaction to serve your theme and your subject matter, how do you decide when and where to draw the line? (note ...

We’ve heard it and experienced it many times: For a creator to make an impact, to truly etch his/her message in the brains of his/her audience when it comes to art, from novels to films to comics, imagery with a high shock value is employed or simulations ...

When you're just starting out, coming up with good designs is pretty simple, but when you've been doing it for a while or it's your job, you run out of easy ideas- you've picked all the low hanging fruit. What do you do then?
This applies ...

image by me

There are many ways to create a fantasy world. Sometimes you need something very elaborate and thought out in the minutest detail and sometimes you need just enough to sketch out a minimal stage for your story to work.

So the first thing to do when deciding ...

art by yours truly

It is no secret that as an artist, it is prose that I’m professional at rather than painting/drawing. And historical fiction aside, what I’m told I write quite well is fantasy. So, for a long time I have wanted to talk about writing ...