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2025 (and some WIPs) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-12-31 22:00:14
Imported:
2026-09

Content

I don’t so much as want to ‘wrap up the year’ as just set it aside and keep going. My 2025 was a very mixed bag; lots of highlights but I also hit some personal lows. I doubt I’m alone in that. But, look at us, we’re all still in one piece and that’s the important bit. Tomorrow is a new day and it’s always a gift to see it.

Thank you for being here, for however long or short the stay is. Thank you for having faith in the story I am telling. Thank you for asking interesting questions or wondering out loud in the comments things I hadn’t even considered myself. Thank you for making me feel like my work is worth something. Thank you for your help in letting me continue it.

I hope you all have a satisfying end to 2025 and that 2026 treats you well!

PG 351 WIPS

Someone requested some WIPs from the battle scenes on page 351. I didn’t take screen grabs of that page while I was working, unfortunately, so I can’t do a proper step-by-step. Those big, complex panels develop some funky layer flattening/hierarchy as I work, and I can’t ‘pull it apart’ anymore. (I think this page has around 430 layers which is honestly kind of silly. A regular page is more like 100 to 200.)

Here’s the completed panel, without any text:

The starting point for big complicated panels is figuring what is the important visual message in the chaos. Here, I wanted to emphasize a few things - wolves and bison working together, and that bison were absolute units.

I started out doodling some rampaging bison, just to get a sense of how they could fill the composition. Here's some I managed to find hidden away (I usually delete these exploratory sketchy layers.)

Composition is key. There are a billion and one great guides for composition, either in art or photography, so I’m just linking to the first one I found that didn’t blow up my screen with pop-ups. Personally, I do a lot of ‘rule of thirds’ and ‘rule of odds’ (which is that if you have an odd number of subjects in a composition, your brain subconsciously tries to group them in pairs and ends up making a viewers eye rove around the canvas more.)

I also often like to use a framing device in the foreground to provide a sense of depth or scale. I like to block out the ‘zones’ of action and how the eye moves through a piece, then fill in the space with characters.

If you're ever looking for compositional inspiration, my high-brow recommendation is Caravaggio and my fun recommendation is the Accidental Renaissance subreddit.

Here’s the initial sketch and a slightly more cleaned up sketch as I worked my way through the composition. It looks like a mess because it is!

It only starts to come together when I am able to separate background/middle ground and foreground with shading and elements like kicked dust to push somethings back.

Here’s the panel with less distinction between the background levels and you can see its much harder to parse. (If you're ever working on a piece and you're like, ugh, why doesn't this look good/it isn't reading right-- two things that might help are 1, increasing contrast and 2, delineating your back/middle/foreground either more OR less.)

Also, bonus, here’s the next panel without text and it’s sketch!

Files

Comments

JeffMakesGames

You are telling a great story and I can't wait to see where it goes in 2026. One thing I am trying to grasp is, what the speech sounds like between characters. Like when Sprig commented on Rask catching a fish. His speech bubble is green and to Rask, it sounds like nonsense, but Egg tells them to speak sloooooooower so I assume anything in green is like, super fast speak. Same language but like, much faster. So what does red bubbles sound like? I assume white bubbles is just when everyone/mostly everyone understands.

Christopher Cook

Great planning insight. No wonder the results are so beautifully done.

BC

Happy new year, it's been a long time now, and I'm so happy you're continuing to make this story happen. It's a privilege to have something this great.

treefiddy

Best we can tell is it's all the same language just different dialects/accents. Not necessarily just faster and slower (although that's probably a component too). To predators like Swift or Rask, prey speak just sounds like chittering and squeeks. And to prey species, Rask and Swift talking just sounds like growling. As for communication across these lines, both groups probably would need to deliberately slow down and speak more clearly to give the other party a chance to 'parse' the accent. But it's not difficult, just takes active effort from everyone. For speech bubbles, white means everyone within the sphere of communication fully understands what's being said. Red means that prey species don't understand, and Green means that predator species don't understand. So the difference is likely more how they're pronouncing words and which words they're using. For instance, prey may fully enunciate all of the syllables and use more words, where's predators may combine some of them. We do that a bunch in english as well, with words such as 'you're' which is one syllable vs 'you are' which is two. In humans there's some fun things like how fast each language speaks (measured in syllables per second) and how much information is actually being transmitted. Different languages sound faster and slower than others, Spanish and Japanese are some of the fastest at around 8 syllables per second, while English is typically about 6. But all languages tend to be very close to each other in terms of how much information is actually being transmitted per second.

Felidae

Thanks for breaking down your approach to these stunning epic panels! Happy New Year!

Microgrampup

Question about Swift’s sisters if you don’t mind. Did they really leave because of Swift taking in Red or was it something else?

teagangavet

Swift just has the one sister, Tracker, and Nettle was her mate. They left because of food shortages, not specifically because Red was saved after his injury. I'd say it was more pragmatic than anything-- they were willing to leave first of all the grassland wolves, perhaps to start their own pack/family. I imagine that kind of breaking apart becomes inevitable for most 'wild' wolves.

Microgrampup

Thanks, I probably should’ve looked at the family tree sheet while typing this lol.

Sheatherius

Hi Teagan, I don't comment much but I really enjoy your story. I just had a question related to the worldbuilding: where exactly are the boundaries within a single "race" in the setting? A wolf, a marten, and a bison are obviously completely distinct categories. However, we now know that a wolf and a coyote are cross-fertile in the setting as in real life. I was mostly curious what the lines are between similar-looking species groups depicted like the different types of tree squirrels which appear in small roles. I remember you wrote that Spring was an Abert's squirrel while Cedar is an american red squirrel. Are these different species in the context of the Oren's forge setting because they don't cross in the real world, or would they be treated more like ethnic groups in a broader, generic squirrel population in this world? What about rabbits and hares; it seems like both of those in this world are rather generalized representations rather than exact species (mostly my impression because the rabbits are depicted as burrowing but the native rabbits in this part of the real world are cottontails and do not actually live this way.) This is all very inconsequential to the story, but I was just curious how you would consider it all to work!