Wonder page 10!
Wonder page 10 is here! This one is all about getting lost in your own head. something I do sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. Day dreaming is at the heart of most of the things I make even if the dream moves into the realm of nightmares. Thank you so much for reading and looking. This page marks the final of my initial 10 pages I intended to release weekly. I decided to release this post in ints entirety to everyone. Please do consider becoming a paid subscriber to help me continue to make this project come to life (only $6 a month). I very much appertain the support.
Original Intent
My initial goal for releasing this project was to start by putting out 1 page a week for 10 weeks. Once I hit that benchmark, my plan was to reevaluate how I wanted to move forward. I have really enjoyed making a record of this comic's creation. This project is still endlessly fascinating to me, and I intend to make many more pages in the future. That being said, these pages take time to make; each is roughly 30-35 hours of work. I might be able to pull off a weekly release if I dedicated all my working hours to this project, something I would love to do but am currently unable to. In addition, each of these posts takes a chunk of time and energy, and releasing a page with a post every week is somewhat impossible.
Moving Forward
So what does this mean for the future of this project? I plan on continuing this blog with each page I finish, but I am just changing the timeframe of each release. I seem to be able to do a full page in roughly every 3-4 weeks. My intention is to release a page every 3 (ish) weeks, and this blog will help me accomplish that. Having a set goal and expectation, even for a few people, really helps me stay on track with projects. When it's just me, it can be hard to keep forging ahead. So thank you so much for being a member of my audience. I hope our numbers grow, and without further ado, here is a look into the process of this page.
Before "Wonder" Began
I drew this page in my sketchbook at least a year before completing the first page of this comic. The idea of a speech bubble doing a sort of maze that words would wander through and, in some ways, diverge and meander has been in my thoughts since then.
sketchbook excerpt, double headed human, weaponizing agony, just good wholesome fun.
The Things in the Clouds
The idea for this page came to me as I was working on the first few pages of this comic. Creating a landscape that is both a thing in the clouds and also a character's thought bubble was too good of an idea to pass up. The page below was my way of working out what a cloud creature might look like.
I love to look at abstract patterns—clouds, wood grain, stucco ceilings—and find things in them. As a kid, one of my best friends and I would lie on my bed and point out things we saw in my ceiling. This, to me, is a cornerstone of creativity: looking at what appears to be one thing and finding something new within it. In a way, this is the function of art. At its most innocent, art is just someone saying, "Hey, look what I found! Isn't it cool?" We all start out being artists as kids; some of us just can’t stop.
Sketchbook page, faces and cloud monsters, also a few ideas that may appear in future pages of this comic.
Digestion
After further digesting some of these ideas, I made a few thumbnails to begin the process of wrapping my head around the layout of this page. There seems to be an elusive tipping point when I feel like I've gathered enough inner visual resources, and then I start on my final page.
Thumbnail page layouts
Ink
This page may seem a little less fleshed out than many of my inked pages. However, if you look closely, you'll see that I have carved out all the pathways where I intended my text to appear within. Balancing a maze of text, a landscape of thoughts, that could also appear as multiple creatures was a lot to juggle, and although it appears simplistic here, this was one of the pages I had the most trouble bringing to reality.
finial inked page
Video
Here is a video of me narrating most of the process of this page.
Thanks again for looking and stay tuned for future Wonder releases! I deeply appreciate the support and am excited to bing more pages to life, just in a more reasonable time frame.
-Zonka