Author notes

...Forever.

Invasivexotic

on Aug. 16, 2022

Welcome to the End of a World and Forever Itself. This is the opening page of Stingir-LZ [Dangerous Night Adventures]. This page started out as a physical pencil-and-paper sketch that I worked on for about a year, off and on, while I tried to maintain responsibility in the real world. I tried at least five versions of the sketch before I decided to do it on larger paper and execute insane detail.

Huge mistake.

The paper itself was larger than my scanner, so I had to scan it in four sections, piece it together in Photoshop, and then try to make those pieces look like a single image.

The paper was also a really coarse stock, so there were all these grainy holes in areas that were supposed to be solid color, or really smooth-looking. It just looked really messy, really amateurish and not at all like the epic space painting I wanted to hit the reader with during their first taste of Stingir-LZ.

So I spent nearly a year tracing over it on a Samsung tablet in Autodesk Sketchbook, taking out areas that I didn't like, adding in new ones, smoothing over the grain… Essentially redrawing the whole fucking image until I felt like I was looking at a painting.

I started showing it to my friends, who were absolutely blown away… by the fact that I'd spent nearly two years on a single image. The image itself got some excited praise and encouragement from my Love (who is the whole reason I like to draw girls with unrealistically-sized breasts), but seemed mostly "meh" to everyone else.

After all, it was still in greyscale.

I sighed a deeply ghastly, existentially-famished sigh and started coloring over it in Sketchbook, trying a variety of techniques and blending options and then saying "fuck it, I'm done" and then porting it BACK into Photoshop and working on it some more…

Two weeks later, I said "fuck it I'm done" again and called it finished.

It's still not finished.