Prestidigitation

For Karen! This is Mia, leader of a pack of ocean-going werewolves:

Her official description says it best: “Mia’s concept is that of the den mother. She has a young son she can’t be with, and so she sublimates that into the desire of taking care of the young of her kind - all of them. She is a den mother as a mother wolf is - dedicated, watchful, tender and caring to her ‘puppies’ and yet frighteningly determined to kill or die for them without yielding.”

This is a bit off-topic, but this project got me thinking: Don’t wolfsong and whalesong sound oddly similar?

So I completely forgot about the event this year, until someone mentioned it on the day before. That wasn’t enough time to prepare for another stand-alone comic, but I did see it as a great excuse to spend the day drawing other things.

I decided to go for 24 new sketches (or, in two cases, significant progress on an existing picture). It started a bit slow, and there was the obligatory hour or so of utter despair and self-loathing, but after that it was good times all day. ♥

Started at 8:00 AM on October 3rd, finished at 7:00 AM on October 4th! The results are:

That’s 12 pages of True Magic (not necessarily the next 12), 6 semi-secret project portraits, and 6 commissions/contest entries/various things people were expecting me to do. They’re all extremely rough and/or in need of revision (or possibly deletion — Self-Loathing Hour didn’t produce great results)… but they’re things that totally didn’t exist yesterday! I am going to have so much fun refining these over the next few days/weeks.

(Apologies for the smallness/blurriness. Must avoid spoilers, you know.)

For Virginia! Here is Gideon Puck, a modern-day mage who hides himself by performing at Renaissance Faires; and Kizzy Baghaii, his partner and audience magnet:

Come for the bellydancing, stay for the fire-spinning!

I really love working on bright and cheerful pictures.