Echoes

I've realised something.

I've changed.

My first real attempt at world building was Broken Falcon, a love story in essence- set in a world where the Bad guys had already won.

Wayward is my upcoming story, one I plan to devote myself to entirely- a demonstration of everything my self discovery in art has taught me and a story I hope will mean something. It's got a spirit of adventure and a warm heart but it deals with ugly emotions and a quest driven by guilt. Above all else- in its darkest moments it is never incapable of shining a light. Because there is always hope.

Broken Falcon by contrast, was an angst filled tragedy about two lovers torn apart by a war, a hero fallen from grace and a life barely worth living. I was a teenager at the time, wouldn't you know.  It was a story I kept adding to for years, a story I kept intending to tell eventually. As such, it changed over time and without noticing it- so was I.

When I began to evolve Wayward from idea to story I realised I had a lot of shelved Broken Falcon lore I was probably never going to explore, so I reworked much of into Wayward- as you can see up top; a Young Zepher(Broken Falcons main character)depicted as a warrior of winds- an idea that would later become the foundation to the characters in Wayward.

It's only very recently that I realised how much I have changed as a person. See, I was toying with doing a Five-page Broken Falcon short comic for FREE COMIC BOOK DAY and started to think about what might make an interesting glimpse into that world ten years on.

I drew up a lot of very crude doodles of Zepher as an old man, an example of his race in their Prime. I was interested in the idea of him being an exiled relic of a by-gone age and so I started to think about the lore that remained and how I could give such a short glimpse into that world and still make it interesting.

As it turns out- I not sure it's ever going to be that interesting.
I had a sudden moment of realising I'm not the same person I was, I no longer have a desire to share such a grim and bleak vision of a world. I'm not sure if this is a reflection of me- of some shift in ideals or perspective- I'm certainly not adverse to enjoying stories with similar themes. It was an odd moment for me.
I find the character compelling but perhaps him being the centre of the story is a mistake- it's hard to relate to a character that vile and bitter. I didn't see any way to reinvent him without distancing the story and the character from each other.

These very quick doodles were some of the exploration I had taken into entertaining a new Broken Falcon story before I realised the issue(I was happy I finally found a way to work White into his design, was a long standing goal for me.)

I feel like I've learnt something about myself now, that maybe it's time to focus on what I truly believe in and not entertain anything I do not. In the struggle to become better it's easy to over-think things or stop yourself from taking the scary steps. I think I can shelve Broken Falcon for good now though, there may come a time when things click into place- or I find myself wanting to explore those darker themes again but for now, the character remains a pillar of my journey so far- a friend who helped me a long the way and whose wisdom is still guiding me all these years later. Now unto brighter, more hopeful places.

-Adam

Ol'Red

A very long time ago I used to play Neverwinter Nights pretty much every weekend, with a regular party of mates. We'd play user made 'modules' which were essentially brand new stories and areas to explore and we'd role-play along the way. One of the party members was an artist, with a wealth of experience in modding the game, including re-writing scripts to allow for new features and injecting his own user-made content like models. He (after a very vast amount of badgering from me) eventually created a model based on my old character at the time; Zepher.

To this day it's still one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me, having my own character in the game was like a dream come true at the time. As I was developing my comic for Zepher; Broken Falcon I was also using this freshly made model in our NeverWinter Party. This led to me creating two separate versions of the character with some overlapping story elements. 'NWN' Zepher was much more hard-edge and world weary and from role-playing the character I was able to craft insane amounts of lore and fiction towards my comic.

As it happens, the artist responsible for the model popped up on my blog here recently, inspiring me to feel a bit nostalgic and design 'NWN' Zepher as he'd exist today, were we still going on those adventures!

-Adam.

Mascot

Broken Falcon was my bigtime comic-project before I created Felicity. It's my oldest story and has seen the most evolution and growth, it's an ongoing project that I'm happy to continue working on. Crimson Feather Studios is a name originating from Broken Falcons Crimson feathered protagonist- Red.

I may repeat some uploads here but largely stuff I've not posted before. All my Broken Falcon stuff is concept, it's rough and ready- I just don't do much with any of it! So I figured I should atleast bunch together the images I'd chose to upload to various spots about my net-haunts.

So- ranging from years to months old, and in no sensible order- art dump away!

Broken Falcon centres around an alien planet and as such sports all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures within. While it has established history and a set number of 'local' species; it houses many bizarre races from all over the unexplored world and presents a different kind of challenge when designing characters. I enjoy concepting for this world so much because it really requires imagination, that is to say the sky is the limit. There's a great freedom in concepting a creature with personality.

Colours and shapes were playing a part for me when I started to define Carrison, the planet the story takes place. I had a big bunch of landscape concept art that brought me to my conclusive palette, this is a real early test, I will have to dig up the many concepts that followed this one.

The latest additions to the story came when I fleshed out the childhood of the hero, previously it had played little part in the eventual cause and effect besides a few key events scattered early in the time line. I found myself able to create reason for many traits, effects, characters and plot lines by almost creating an entirely new story in his earliest years. Young Red allows me to fully explore and explain his tribal upbringing which strengthens the ties his race have to Carrison and going back even further to before his birth- exploring his heritage and folklore was a joy.

Reds race is that of the Carinians; A bird like-species that are the first known to have lived among Carrison. The story divides at a point into very stark opposites(actually demonstrated quite well below!)and as do the Carinians. Although their history dictates certain restrictions I wanted the heroes species to be as diverse as humans, setting myself only limits of similarity such as feet, eyes, head-tufts and gender-specific traits like tail shape. Trying ultimately to create extremely unique side-characters that are still easily identifiable as Carinians and not any kind of similar race. One aspect I debated 'locking' for all of Carinians was beak-shape, ultimately deciding not to as we humans have extremely diverse nose-shapes, allowing for extremely different looks and I wanted to echo that. Instead I enforced only that Male Carinians would have sharp, often longer beaks while the females had short and smoother beaks.

The first ever established point in the story was that the death of love. Loosing his life 'breaks' him and what follows is the downward spiral of a hero, amoungst the rise of a tyrant and a brutal war. It's the key theme that is shown throughout with decisions and choices affecting how a life can turn out. This particular piece is MIGHTY rough but it demonstrated my ideas of how to best reflect the story, I used a similar theme/tagline in the poster above the last. It's important to the entire story, at the centre of it all. And the story has always been a Love Story.

I did this to demonstrate how I colour, I think! It shows an important late-entry to the story however, Snow! Ironside was originally a very orange/black/steamy/industrial/hot/dry environment. My evolutions brought that to a complete opposite establishing that the enemy race could only thrive in cold conditions, while the heroes race die in cold conditions. It threw up alot of cool possibilities for the story and was an evolution that only came about as I began to think about the limitations of the environment to its locals and about why certain boundries had never been crossed until conflict.

If I recall, this is an early concept for Widow, a slaver town on the outskirts of Ironside;the enemies land.

Tests for in-comic quality. For the longest time I was evolving my style of drawing(I still am)so I have a horrible tendency to have inconsistent work; it is one of the many reasons a comic of Broken Falcon hasn't seen the light of day, during these tests however I was trying to find a balance between time and effort, that would of allowed me to make a comic. It didn't work!

Just an old rough thumbnail for a comic page, there are old elements of the story that still remain in its current state, I tried to not alter too much of my original intentions and instead tried to re-enforce and strengthen the story-reasons why they happen. At this point in the story we see pre-war Red(Two eyes!)and Sunro.

Early ideas for the newer scripts revolved around picking up Reds story much later on into his life, one such idea involved a hanging where he was introduced to the audience as a lawbreaker and considered anything but a Hero.

Broken Falcons debut story is called Crossroads, I had intended to create and release the issue in a collected volume but my focus with the project shifted to different areas and I just put it on the backburner.

The major characters in the first ever story were originally Sonic Fan-characters, hence why they all follow an animal-esque appearance. As I evolved the characters and shifted them into an original universe, where I built my story around them- I tried to maintain my design 'roots' but at the same time try to create something more alien than animal.

Originally the Aragnos character in the story was a just a Spider character and the only one at that- when designing the races of Broken Falcon much later on I wanted to allow myself the room to expand on the character and flesh out the many different looks and builds available to the second largest species in the story. Their expanded role demanded much variation in a very similar way to the heroes species.

-T

See you in August!

Just a final update here before my Lockdown on Issue 3 begins. Basically, Lockdown means, I'll be neglecting all aspects of my internet hotspots (besides vital elements like email) aswell as no longer taking time out to play games or indulge in any of my recreational habits- instead devoting all my freetime to working on Issue 3.

I always find doing this so very tricky at the beginning, especially when I feel I'm not performing so well but it's always a vital part of each issue as it teaches me to better my understanding of constraints and limitations. Ofcourse once I get through the first week- the ball is rolling and the progress I make the following weeks just can't maintain momentum with any distractions coming to play. Issue 3 has been plagued with brand new problems previous Issues haven't suffered from- mainly my lack of confidence as an artist and in the previous work I was producing for it. It's because of that, I feel the August release date may be too optimistic but I'm still shooting for it. I got Issue 2 done in a similar timeframe and that was with even less knowledge that I have now. I know atleast that the problem of confidence is no longer apparent- certainly not to the same degree, I'll be approaching Issue 3 with no such critical eyes on my work.

At any rate! It's go time. I won't be drawing anything other than Felicity content for the next month straight, with my part-time soul-draining job being the only exception. So I thought I'd just throw down some work-

Broken Falcon has been going smoothly behind the scenes as I slowly connect the dots. I have a game-plan for its long overdue debut that will begin strong once Issue 3 is out the door. Broken Falcon debut will be a digital-only comic(Will never be in Print)and as such will be presented in a new way from Felicity.

Well, I'm off to drink tea and be merry, Lockdown officially begins on Saturday!

-T

Silhouette

Just threw blacks over when I was done, Pretty interesting silhouettes here and there!

-T

The Carronian Hero

I have a start and don't stop mentality with alot of my work. I have like, momentum based efforts- I rarely start something that I don't finish and if I do I never go back to complete it. This is one of those pieces. I think I put like 2 or 3 hours into it to get where I was but it's unlikely I'll ever finish it.

Zepher from the 'End War' Chapter of Broken Falcon. Inspired by the thought, 'what's actually under that poncho of his?'. I was reading up on alot of Metal Gear related crap at the time- I can see influence of it here.

It was the last thing I was working on before I took a break from the computer- hence why I think it's unlikely I'll go back. It started as a doodle then I began to play with coloring it up.
Cintiq based piece, this one.

-T