Bored in Space origins (Part 1)

About a year ago I started a new comic with characters I had been working on for a few years. I'd been working up to writing a story with these characters, by exploring situations through one-panel comics. I was walking a delicate balance of carefully developing these characters and being too precious with them, scared to actually develop them further.

After the single panel experiments, I tried a mini-comic with the characters of about 12 pages. At this stage, I was still unsure who these characters were aimed at. Was it going to be an all-ages wholesome adventure or perhaps adult orientated with swearing and the use of mind-altering substances? I decided on the latter for the mini-comic. The mini was meant to be part of the mini-comic of the month, however, I missed my deadline by a long shot and it never came to fruition. The comic itself worked out OK, but still didn't feel up to the high standard I wanted out of these characters.

Then in late 2019, I picked up an iPad pro. I'd been using procreate already on a regular iPad, but I was limited by how many layers I could have in a high-resolution file. The iPad Pro allowed me to have 15 layers on an 800 dpi file. This sounds like a lot but was just enough to work with separate layers for things like panels, letting, pencils, inks, colour shading etc. It took me around 4-6 months to start feeling comfortable with a drawing process on the iPad. A process where I could say the end result actually matched what I was capable of doing with physical media. Seeing what was possible I decided to try and draw a comic page using the Bored in Space characters. Not only that this was going to be full colour...

More in Part 2 tomorrow.