Making the Bad Guy

I've spent about a year contemplating the main villian for Sami's Dojo. Since I first conceived of them, I've gone through several character design ideas while her overall concept has remained the same.

It's pretty hard designing a truly scary bad guy, since it's so easy to go clichéd. Spikey teeth, pointy hair, it's just so over done. I'm working on making a character that's scary because they're not clichéd, but almost look like a normal character. Sometimes, it's hard for me to judge if something is scary or not, since I'm very into horror and so fairly immune to a lot.

I think what I've decided on is to make the character more realistic than the other characters. My husband suggested doing a look of abnormal close-ups of the character, which I think I could pull off pretty well.

I've posted some of my early character design sketches for my main bad guy on my Patreon page. Patreon is a site that allows me to offer special rewards and attention to my fans that have decided to monetarily support me. You can contribute $1 or $5 a month, if you so choose. If you don't, that's fine! I still greatly appreciate your support in reading my posts and comic!

Manga in Theory and Practice Helps Me Write Character Sheets!

One of my absolute favorite books on writing is Araki Hirihiko's Manga in Theory and Practice: The Craft of Creating Manga. I've read a lot of books on writing, but this one really speaks to me. I've learned some pretty solid story principles from Araki that I've not learned anywhere else. One of the many neat things in his book is a character sheet template that he provides. I decided to print out 7 of them to fill out for my six main characters and another, secret, seventh character.

I'm looking forward to when you all can read about him! If I even get any readers, haha. :P

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.

First Post!

Well, I'm really creating comics, again. I decided to revitalize a crappy comic I made when I was younger, originally called 'Mini Ninjas'. I decided to change the name to 'Sami's Dojo' to better reflect the content of the comic. Here's my set up, so far!