Waffle

First: by 2000, Krakatoa was developing towards her current appearance:

And I was doing more extra art for the website, such as cast drawings: One of the big influences on my decision to get back into webcomicking and take it more seriously again was Carson Fire of what is now the comic formerly known as Elf Life. Below are several characters from that comic: my interpretations of Glynhial, Baughb, the Sprite and even Filis in a tiny little doodle: The character at bottom left in the image above is one of my own though: that one and the ones below are the first appearances of a character I finally inserted into the comic almost four years later: an elven Death Goddess called the Sower. In her first sketches, she looked pretty human. When she finally appeared in the comic, she had changed quite a bit! Carson's style affected me so much at the time that I actually dreamed of a "Fire Elf" one night. I managed to get the sketchbook out and get the character down: Two years later, I did in fact feature a race of Fire Elves in the comic, but by then they were a very different kind of creature. Finally, this little sketch isn't all that remarkable by itself: But it does remind me that as early as 2000, I was getting dissatisfied with the art I'd done two years earlier for When We Had Tails, the Genesis-based story Geir sent me one day to draw. I considered redrawing it, but never got around to it. These days, I don't feel that urge anymore: I'm happy with the story as it is, even with the faults in the art. Let's not mess with it.

I've gone through my sketchbooks over the past week to pick what all I was going to keep and what was going to get thrown out. Pickings from the year 1998 have been slim: unless I find another sketchbook from that year that I haven't torn up yet, the images below are all that I want to keep at all. All are early sketches for White House in Orbit and what's noticeable is how little character art I did. It was pretty much one or two drawings per character, no turnarounds, no height charts, not even many repeat drawings to hone and stylize the characters. Just one or two, and then I got on with drawing the actual comic. Things have changed a lot since then.

Trust me, it will get better as I zoom through the years.