Hackberry Hollow

Recently I’ve been researching and experimenting with a bunch of different techniques to help me design the characters of Hackberry Hollow. This week I’ve tried a couple of new things. The first one was sculpting characters to help me understand the 3D form to help me draw them, and the other is using a program called Alchemy which I used to create the above images.

I decided to go ahead and take over the post for this week, mainly so that Glen can have the time he needs to be able to get character design done without going into temporary insanity over the endless tasks that pile up in his to-do lists.

One of the time consuming parts of creating art is figuring out exactly what colors to use. That’s one of the reasons why color keys are important to us. Not only does it help us create a color script for the comic, but once we get into production all we have to do is eye-drop our color keys and just paint away. We can skip the usual color study phase of our process once we get into production because we’ve already done it for all the art in that scene once before.

This is a quick painting of one of the island locals in Hackberry Hollow (Hackberry Hollow as in the name of the story, not the place in the story that lends its title). More info and concept sketches after the jump.

As Glen mentioned earlier, today is the 1 year anniversary of the start of the Hackberry Hollow blog. We’re pretty excited about this, and also about the upcoming release of the comic later this year. So to help us share some of that excitement we decided to give the plushie some party gear, and make all kinds of fun updates by spamming our blog with enthusiasm.

In addition to the social networking bandwagon that we have already jumped on we are now announcing that Lumaglyph has a twitter account. (For those of you who are wondering what Lumaglyph is, that’s the name of our studio.) Check it out and be sure to follow and tweet about us using the #hackberryhollow hashtag.

All of us here at Lumaglyph are very excited about reaching the Hackberry Hollow Blog one year mark. And I, with a stronger dose of my usual jittery excitement, was looking forward with great anticipation to today’s blog post. Then they told me they wanted me to write something for it…

In light of hitting the one year mark on having the blog up, I thought it would be fun to do an update on the status of the project. We started the blog when we were about a year into the project. Now, over two years in the making, the script for volume 1 is written and we’re writing volume 2 (out of 5), Shane is working on layouts for the first chapter, Glen is experimenting with character design, and Austin and I are working on a… super secret project in the background. (insert nerdy smiley face here)

Now that we’ve had a blog for a year (to the day incidentally), we’ve decided we should expand Hackberry Hollow into the realm of social networking because—well, everyone else is doing it. Along with something else that everyone is doing, which we’ll announce later today, Hackberry Hollow now has a Facebook page. So if you have a Facebook account be sure to become a fan.

I’ve been doing some more detailed work for the desert ninja environment, as well as coming up with a style for the art in their culture.

This is a follow-up to a post made late last October about one of the environments in the comic. I finally got around to putting more time into developing the style for the architecture, and this is where we’re at right now.