What’s not very clever? Attempting to climb down slick concrete steps to the seafront when it’s pitch dark. But if you’ve got a huge crush on the guy you’re with, you might not be thinking straight. Actually, the thought of sitting by the sea with an attractive man in the dark might seem like a very good idea.

Drake and Ludwig are both so shy, I find myself having to write in events that physically push them together. This includes, but is not limited to, fainting from hunger, tripping over a tree root, getting shot by an arrow and needing to be carried, needing to take measurements as a tailor, having to huddle together from a sudden shower, having to hide when friends were looking for them, pretending to joust and de-horse each other, being set against each other at dunking the other in a river. Having to be led in the dark by the other when one was a vampire. Needing to be carried back into the sea by the other when one was a mermaid (and for posterity, Ludwig didn’t need carrying. He’s cheeky).

And the latest – spraining an ankle on the way down to the sea.

Ok, I’ve talked enough. You deserve to hear about some art now.

A really interesting process for this one, experimental, seeing what worked and how I can push stuff further.

I sketched out thumbnails traditionally, creating five or six quick compositions to see if I could get lines of action exciting, highlight where the load was being borne (Drake is taking some of Ludwig’s weight, which is important).

I created a proper sketch digitally, because this gives me a chance to resize proportions and get something looking good that can be reworked quickly.

Once I had this sketch, I worked underneath it very quickly in tone, and then a background. And then I threw a multiply layer on top because it’s dark, and then I remembered that they use their phone torches – a perfect opportunity to get a light source in there and stop it from being completely murky. What do they call this? A tonal key?

I took this sketch as an inspiration and created an ink drawing traditionally. I was proud of this too. Below is the drawing coloured, although it’s crucial that you know that I watercoloured the original after working up the digital illustration.

When I went digital, I tried out slightly tighter colouring alongside the very playful, expressive lines.

The illustration, when coloured fully, was a bit too saturated. You know when it’s dark and you can see fewer colours?

SO I created a gradient map with greeny blues and bluey greens, and shoved the illustration through that. It looked good and more uniform, but it was too green. I looked at my full colour version and my bluey version and thought, “I need somewhere in the middle of these.” Bing! Idea.

I overlaid the bluey version on top of the full colour version and played with layer effects and opacity. This meant that the blue version became a mask layer, but intimately responsive to the tone and colours underneath it – because it was just another version of the illustration. What came of it is this wonderful dreamy green-blue air to the image, but you can still tell what colour things are meant to be.

Ok, you’re allowed to go look at the watercoloured illustration now, because after I finished the digital one, I watercoloured the ink lines traditionally. This was intended less to create that dark, it’s-nighttime feeling. Rather, I just wanted it to capture the connection between the characters. I feel like overusing watercolour can make pieces a little dirty. A lot of Blake’s illustrations are just characters on white backgrounds, but they sing to you because you feel this wonderful energy coming from the characters or their interactions with each other. Just so you know what I was going for.

I think it’s hard to decide which of the two pieces are more successful, because my intentions were different for each (depending at least in part to the limits of the media I was working in). But I love the digital illustration, because you get more information about the story, context, temperature, time of day, etc. And that’s just because I’ve been writing for it.

This is about to be a compilation of work on the same topical thread.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Techo right at the beginning of my plot starting. Techo’s big character streak is that she’s optimistic, positive, sunshiney. But this was hard learned: first, she suffers a particularly bad breakup in February of her third year studying Philosophy.

This leads to her going back on the pull, but how do you talk to girls? Lesbians are infamous for misreading signals as platonic and she’s shy.

She finds out quickly that she’s less shy when she’s drunk, and gets onto the clubbing scene. When she’s not drunk, she’s studying and writing for her dissertation. Her days swing intensely between intense thought and drowning the intense thought.

She has too many big thoughts: about how much she misses her ex, Mist, but also (as per the philosopher’s brain) about life, morality, happiness, death, the point of things. She remembers when a friend told her half-jokingly that people that know that much can’t be happy.

As we see her character grow throughout that summer (and when she meets Ludwig, then Mitzi, then Drake, then Antonia), she pointedly challenges this statement. So this isn’t a sad story, but we have to examine the sad parts.

I begin with an illustration I did of her and Mist… I have to warn you, this is saucy. Like, don’t scroll down if there’s someone looking over your shoulder.

This was one of a few illustrations I did exploring her sexuality, but respectfully, I can’t put the others on a blog. This one is good though because it features Mist.

I then took to the ink and paper. I had an idea that I was going to draw Techo in a drunken stupor, and overlay her thinking about Mist, and have her laptop and dissertation notes in front of her too. Just trying to recreate an illustration that captures her life at the time.

I chose to do it in painted ink to create a slightly more expressive piece, and used a big brush to create a claustrophobic cloud that represents her mood, or drunkenness, however you want to read it. The plan was to overlay the colourful above image to try to drive home how that feels more colourful, vivid and real than what Techo is feeling at the desk, in the murky ink.

As I was making this illustration, Know it All by tv dinner came on shuffle. This is one of the songs I’ve had on Techo’s playlist for a while, and I thought it really suited this image – the bouncy song and absurd lyrics juxtapose the mood of the image. It also helps illustrate the other big reason Techo is drinking – her work is getting on top of her – she is wondering if there is a point to it all – etc.

But here’s the thing. I don’t want it to be read like poetry – the song is integral to how I experienced this illustration. How, said I, can I make the reader experience the song too? I can put the song over it. But how can I keep them there, before they click off after having seen the image? Ah, I can make the lyrics appear alongside the music. Will that be quite enough? I suppose if I animate the background, it might add even more to the claustrophobia and mood of the piece. And so we come to this.

What this journey has been is a marriage of process, taking things further and chance. And the video that came of it – and I will call that the final outcome – I think is successful. I think – hope – that a viewer could read from that image just about what I coded in.