Blood Magic: Creating a Hard Magic System

I've been doing some sketchy Google searches, recently. I'm worried that the FBI might have me on a watch list, now. As you may or may not know, depending on whether you've been watching my streams on Twitch or not, I'm developing a magic system for my comic. I'm developing what is known as a "hard magic" system. Think Full Metal Alchemist magic: there are strict boundaries and limits on what the alchemist/caster can do. A "soft magic" system would be more like The Force, where you can do pretty much anything with it and the limits aren't particularly clear.

So... The magic system I'm developing uses blood as the main component for spells. Because of this and because I want fairly strict limits, I've been researching how much blood the human body has, what different levels of blood loss will do to a human, and how quickly a human can lose blood. In case you're wondering, a human can bleed to death in as little as 20 seconds. Pretty terrifying... But my research isn't purely for morbid curiosity! I've decided that, to cast a spell with "Blood Magic," one cup of blood must be expended, limiting a caster to 10 spells before they pass out/die. One big spell that I've settled on is a Blood Sword spell, where the caster uses their own blood to create a sword. The sword must continually get 1/2 a cup of blood every second to sustain it, meaning that you have 10 seconds of safe use time, 20 seconds if you're desperate.

The feature of my magic system that'll separate the good guys from the bad guys is where they get the blood from. Obviously (probably), a good guy isn't going to want to use someone else's blood to cast a spell. Bad guys, however, will probably avoid using their own blood and use blood that they've collected. I intend to depict this later on in the comic, but I'm going avoid being Berserk gory with it. Leave it up to your imagination more. I'm working to create a truly terrifying set of bad guys that'll make everyone super uncomfortable.

Well, wish me luck and thanks for reading!

Drawing the Panels Faster

Now that I'm employed again (I was unemployed for 12 weeks until now), I have less time to work on Sami's Dojo. Fortunately, though, drawing episodes with over 20 panels has taught me to work fast. I was drawing something like 2-3 panels in a hour before. Now, I'm able to sketch and ink 6 panels in an hour, while eating lunch. Making the decision to switch from graphite pencil for sketching to photo blue has taken away the erasing time that was eating up my time before. I think that was a good call.

I'm hoping that I can still create longer updates for my comic, even though I have a full-time job, now. This week's episode is something like 30+ panels long, so we'll see how I'll do. I might switch update days from Fridays to Saturdays. And although I can draw maybe 8 panels in a day over lunch time and my breaks, that still leaves the coloring time. After I finish The Lantern, I should be able to color faster, since I won't have to add shadows on top of the color.

Creating this comic, with an actual plot, has been a great learning and growing experience. Now that I'm getting used to sketching again, after the long break I took after graduating, I'm getting better at creating interesting and more dynamic poses for my characters in each panel. I won't claim that I'm excellent at it, but I've got Araki Hirohiko as my inspiration, so maybe soon.

Thanks for reading!

Assembling Comic 1

I recently discovered that I actually have a lot of applications available to me through my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom and Bridge being among them. So I tried to figure out how to use Bridge to get the scans of my first comic panel of of one computer on to my other computer into Photoshop.
Sadly, I couldn't figured it out. Fortunately, though, that didn't stop me from assembling the panels into pages and getting the shading added! I've decided to draw and ink the panels on paper, then scan them into Photoshop to do the page assembly and textures.
Here's a glimpse of one of my inked panels! I'm hoping to get the comic up and published by the end of next week.

Sneak Peek at Chapter 1

I'm still working on chapter 1 of Sami's Dojo, but until I finish it, here's a sneak peek of my script sketches:

Creating the comic...

It's been a while since I've created a comic and this is the first time I'm creating a story-based comic, rather than gag-based. I am learning that drawing comics takes a lot more time that I anticipated. I think this is partly because I'm trying to make a quality comic, with shading and nicely drawn characters.
So far, I've spent 3-4 hours drawing 4 or 5 panels. Obviously, I need to speed things up.