ElfQuest Fan Art

HAHA Great!! xD *tuhmbs up*

I love it! The colors, the gritty texture, the unusual idea and its outworking. Although she´s crying, she still stays the tough lady she is, almost puzzled by her own tears. Very good job! *thumbs up*

Thanks a lot! When the calendar theme was announced, this was the first thing that came to my mind.

Thanks a lot! I wanted to draw Moonshade for a whole while, the calendar theme was a great opportunity. Unfortunately, the colors aren´t shown quite right. The colors are less popping in my original. That´s probably due to converting from CMYK to RBG.
@Tah-Marien: the aim was a wistful look, so you´re on spot.

I´m all Photoshop. ^^

Nice! It´s a quite interesting mash-up of characters, reserved Venka wouldn´t come to my mind at once when I think of crazy Cruella. The style definitely suits her. It makes Venka look even more ladylike and Cruella much less of the puppy killing shark she is (which makes her probably the worst Disney villain in Wolfrider eyes). xD

Night scenes are always tricky, but you didn well with this. The sky is filled with stars and the long shadows of the trees tell about bright moons in the elf´s back that give enough light to show a fair amount of details. I really like the texture of the bark (I have a fable for briches) and the simple but effective way you did the bushes in the background. It all gives a nice sense of a rolling enviroment that is much more interesting (and common to forests) than plane ground.

The vivid color-palette of this piece immediately caught my eye. Their outfits really match into the autumn forest (like they should), yet stand out enough, even if the background was outlined as well. I also like the details in the Background a lot. I really wanna explore that father-tree with its many levels.
Also, nice work on the expressions. Chicory looks quite happy and also like daddy´s proud little girl, which matches Blacksnakes expression quite well. He does look happy as well, but also quite sentimental the way he gazes into space. Rainpace looks quite uncertain. You can tell he doesn´t quite know how to handle the hug and where to put his hands.
I think the proportions are alright. There are only tiny things, mostly Chicory´s right leg is short, but her pose distracts enough not to catch attention if it wasn´t for you to mention it at all.

Very nice idea indeed! The toon style looks so cute on the preservers and bings out their different personalities even more. Good work, looking forward to the next part!

You´re right about the 'smile', I don´t even know anymore why I put it there. Maybe I should´ve put a 'jolt' or 'jerk' instead of the 'ugh' in the middle panel. Foxtrail´s exaggerated reaction is mostly meant to underline the sudden change of mood when Softfur becomes snappish and calls him acorn-brain.
I´ve heard the same thing about the 'at least three times' comment from other sides as well. It does refer to the numerous pranks and was meant as an additional tease, but I see how you find it confusing. (btw, Badger is chief at the time the story takes place. He´s a rather grumpy and serious fellow who tends to get annoyed by Foxtrail´s antics easily and pulled his ear for them quite some times before)

Animal generally are a pain to me, cuz I´m just not used to draw them. References for the rescue! I was rather thankful that Fang is such a dark furred wolf, exactly cuz she doesn´t draw the attention away from the characters too much that way (and I can pay less attention to her details). I mostly put her in to show that these are indeed Wolfriders in this story and to indicate that Foxtrail is a bachelor (and also kind of a loner) who rather keeps his wolf around for company (who is quite clingy in return). I think we rarely see wolves in dens (tree-den at that) in canon, but Foxtrail´s den is rather low located for several reasons (his wolf and lame sister are only two).

Fun fact and little explanation to the dialogue of this (and the previous) page: ALL of Foxtrail´s close friends (which really aren´t that many) happen to be in the bird image.
Hawk, as you know
Fletcher, another troll refugee who is lovemated to his sister and became part of his family
Night Arrow, his long-term crush and heartbreaker who he even calls by the petname "Birdie"
The conflict of the free flying bird vs. the ground bound fox became kind of a red thread in Foxtrail´s history and also plays into this short-story of course.

You´re totally right about the copies, Eregyrn, but I was a lazybone that day and so I excused my cheating by telling myself that it´s okay on this page, since it´s meant to be a general calm-down after all this action and excitement of the previous pages. >__>
The leaf, btw, is meant to catch that much attention. You´ll see later on why that is.

Hehehe... yeah, Hawk is a tease like that and he knows quite well how to rile Foxtrail up. xD

Actually, I used the same brush all over, I just varied the size (and yes, it´s all digital). It´s a quite nice brush and doesn´t only have this nice pencil-ish look, but also quite the same feeling when drawing which makes it very pleasant to me to work with (and also guaranteed to generally become my standard brush).

The sharp yell-bubbles are another thing I picked up from manga. In western comics we rather see the font varied to indicate yelling, but it sometimes makes it harder to read. Also, I use so many different fonts already and since there is quite a lot of yelling in this story (thanks to Foxtrail´s temper) I didn´t wanna overdo, so I kept the same font and just made it bigger here and there or went with outlines.

Yes, it is a different font. I got myself a whole collection of fonts with different characters to use for this project just to avoid to actually draw the sound-words (and save time). I found that not all work the way I planned, especially if combined in one panel, but the ones that do are still enough to work with.

The font used for the general dialogues is a free source font called "Digital Strip". I like the looks of it, but unfortunately it does need some fine-tuning here and there when it comes to spaces between some characters.

That font-size problem was indeed my biggest issue on this page for the reasons you´ve mentioned. It IS dialogue heavy and I didn´t wanna plaster huge speech bubbles all over the drawings. I´m kind of glad I ran into this problem at this early point so I learned for the later pages to keep the dialogues short for each panel and go with a bigger font-size. ^^

Since I´m not quite used to sequences, finding a good balance of cartoony style to my usual expressions wasn´t quite easy at the beginning, but I found myself into it rather quickly (thankfully). I took a 30 expressions challenge for Foxtrail some time ago (never finished it) which helped a lot there. Also dug through lots of comics and manga again for inspiration.

Well, I´ve mentioned this is my first actual comic, and I went quite with what any comics-for-dummies book tells for the first page: establish time and place, introduce main characters in a detailed full-body shot. Popping them out of the box was the best choice for several reasons, cuz it prevents the need of another panel, losenes up the tight panel grit as well as draw even more attention to the characters in their first appearance.
*hugs her comic-for-dummies books* Looks like they´re worth their pennies after all. x3

Yep, everything on this comic is digital. I have a huge fable for screentones and would totally do traditional works with them as well... if it didn´t mean to sell my soul. Fortunately they work just as well digitally and are much less steep that way. I´ve used them in several of my digital works and for some I´ve even created my own digital screentones before (which is quite easy and looks so good), since the choice of background screentone scans is quite limited.

I made this introduction mostly because these are no canon characters and people out of Oakleaf Holt are not familiar with them and their story, but I still wanted that audience to be able to follow everything. I´ve seen introductions like this in most Doujinshi (japanese fan-comics) and found it makes perfect sense to tell the time, setting premises, selection of characters as well as getting the reader into the right mood for the following short-story.

Well, actually this cover was made as provisory. I wanted to share my first pages online and needed some eyecatcher to 'sell' it and to put my credits on. The picture I used for it I´ve already made some time before even starting this project, but when it was done I liked the cover enough to keep it, since I too think that the pic really suits it, cuz I eventhough it´s not exactly the key-scene, it still tells the key-theme of the story without spoiling the climax.
So since this was rather made in a hurry, I just let it be when it started giving me issues about details, telling myself it looked okay for that time being.
Like my dad, my teachers at design school were quite old-schoolers in terms of design and they´ve left their footprint on me in random quirks like this logo editing thing. xD

I´m glad you like it that much. Ruska isn´t deaf, she´s mute. She uses the handsigns since sending isn´t the strongest skill of Go-Backs. Many of her tribe (including herself) are even considerably bad at sending. The tribe found the handsigns useful not only to communicate with her but also as a way to communicate silently in general.

Funny you say this. I´ve just talked this cover with my designer dad the other day and he said the logo gets way too few attention. xD
I had my issues with the colors of the logo too, but when I was about to change them I heard my teacher´s voice yelling at me that any logos MUST NOT BE CHANGED, so I couldn´t help it. I didn´t wanna make it smaller either, after all it´s all thanks to that page that these characters and thus the whole project came to be.