Sunday, March 25, 2018

World War Occult Post Mortem - PART 1 "War Brews"

Twas the eve of Inktober,
And I was boned.

Well, "boned" is bit much; but sure enough, Inktober was fast approaching and I had no goddamn clue what I was going to do for it.

This was a common occurrence, by the way. Every year Inktober rolls around, every year I scroll through what my favorite artists had done, every year I obsess over how good everyone else is and how they managed to cram an entire narrative or concept a brand new IP over the month, every year I stress over how I can top what I've done before, and every year I wake up one morning and say: "holy shit, holy shit, Inktober is in three days!!!"

So that's where I found myself, 72 hours until it began, scribbling away furiously in an upscale coffee shop with 16 ounces of pitch black espresso coursing through my veins. I had a couple ideas semi-formulated but I eventually settled on expanding on some doodles I had made a while back. At the time they were mostly scribbles, just some haggard looking bastards in gas masks fighting in a faux Great War; a product of too many WW1 history podcasts. However, it was enough to go off of. Next came some more refined sketches, some research into historical military garb, and some additional studies to prepare for whatever I might need to sketch moving forward.

The only problem was I didn't have a theme...

That was the one thing I wanted to do this year. Have a cohesive theme throughout all of the drawings I did and a narrative, if I could swing it (WHICH I DID).

I detailed this in the designer notes for WWO, it was mostly spur-of-the-moment, caffeine fueled decision-making.

So, Inktober came around and unknowingly I began work on World War Occult.