#professor pollinator

during those two years, dr. charlotte b. wigglebottom finally got her name, so i don't have to call her "the entomologist character" in my head anymore. i think twig and holly came into development just before the first piece was made, originally named jesse and juniper. i decided to give ollie a lackadaisical brother and sister, and just to torture him further, make them significantly taller than him. there may be another sibling who left farm life behind, i'm not sure yet, but these three serve as just a glimpse at the long and winding branches of the pollinator family tree.

i had a hard time with the first piece because i struggled with capturing light dappling in through the tree branches. i used a technique i learned in painting, to add the shadows in first and then to build the light after. i got around this by adding a dark color filter over the flat colors and then erasing where i wanted light. i definitely like the new one better but i still have a lot of work to do to better capture these effects. i also decided to scrap the little mushroom critters, which was unfortunate but i felt like i had a lot of tiny details already in a very busy composition.

cake tragedy. should have made the new one as violent

i'm pretty happy with the improvements in the new background, in particular the shape of the tree. i referenced upa and revival style outdoor backgrounds (blessed be pinterest dot com). i've been very drawn to these backgrounds as the kind of feel i want to give this world, i really like the use of abstract and exaggerated shapes and giving color the authority to determine the mood of the scene and shapes of objects (ex from camp lazlo and powerpuff girls).

i really enjoy using black and white in comics. i had the chance to speak with an industry professional recently about my work and he recommended using more values to distinguish space since i'd only used two grays in the work i shared with him, so i pushed it here and i'm pretty jazzed about the result. i want to get better at working with color but i really like how grayscale looks too, not to mention it's a timesaver.

i probably made this backwards, i drew the comic and sort of wrote the dialogue around the action with the scant ideas i had going in. i usually like making stuff up on the fly like that, but i struggled making it sound natural and not awkwardly shoving words in to fill the space, which was compounded by his thick southern drawl and trying to come up with just the right phrase or pronunciation he would use (this probably could have stood a quick google).

this was received well during crit, which i was surprised about because i was sure i did the assignment wrong. it was agreed that the part between panels 3 and 4 where he awakens the plant monster needed to be clearer; my professor pointed out that it's hard to see that he's still holding the flower so i should have made it stand out more, maybe by keeping it white, which i had considered while working on it and then just. didn't

i gotta draw professor pollinator more often, he's so much fun! i made him a few years ago when i wanted to make characters themed to specific scientific fields and he's very dear to me. i wanted him to look like a plant so he's round and bulb-shaped with short wavy hair like sprouting leaves (bulbs for reference below). i struggled a bit with placing and sizing his finn from adventure time teeth so they're a little inconsistent but maybe i could work that into part of his charm.