It's lucky for us that Long John decided to chill out right in front of this helpful wall.
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Chapter 6 Update – Done Flatting

Jun06
by on 6 June 2025
Technically, the first completed panel of Long John, Chapter 6.

It’s been awhile since a post titled “Chapter 6 Update” has dropped, though we had an unofficial (though obvious) update when it was made public that all the pages had been drawn and inked.

Since then, another major milestone has been hit: color flatting is complete.

Again, flatting is probably the most mind-numbing stage of the entire process because it’s not very interesting, creative, or exciting. It’s just where you go through the pages and drop flat colors (hence “flatting”) to separate the elements of a panel to make the eventual shading and highlighting a bit easier and go faster.

While it is rather boring work, I found the flatting on this final chapter a bit reflective, too. I found I was focusing specific pieces of the pages rather than on the pages as a whole, which allowed me to appreciate (as silly as this sounds) myself as an artist. There were times when I saw a hand drawn particularly well and thought, “wow, that looks great!” nearly disassociating enough to wonder what choices past me made to make it look so good (which you’d think would be something I could be able to remember).

This was a face/hand/pose I ended up being quite proud of.

What’s also nice is that walking through each page slowly allowed another pass on story and scripting, finding more poignant themes or points to hit during the scenes to make the progress of the story even stronger.

So, I stepped into the flatting process with trepidation and a fair bit of whining, but took much more out of it than I had expected.

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D. Bethel Draws… Madmartigan

Jun02
by on 2 June 2025

I finally got around to editing the time lapse video (and recording commentary for) the Madmartigan Sketch Friday from April. Whereas I went into detail about what the character means to me in that post on the website, I focused much more on the actual drawing and thought process I went through to come up with the final drawing.

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Sketch Fridays #104 – Corner Box Challenge 2

May30
by on 30 May 2025
Sketch Fridays #104 – Corner Box Challenge: Magik

I had so much fun drawing the Corner Box Challenge that I couldn’t stop thinking about others I could have drawn. So, instead of pining for what could have been, I just went ahead and did one.

While drawing another character from the X-Men universe was not accidental, drawing another character in the original X-costume was. This character is Illyana Rasputin, also known as Magik, who is a character most well-known from her time in the very first X-Men spinoff book, The New Mutants, which hoped to bring back the idea of superhero teens that the flagship book had left behind. In that book the characters were wearing versions of the original costumes the X-Men wore when the book started in the early ’60s.

I actually have not read much New Mutants, but those characters have become deep threads in the lore of the X-Men, so becoming familiar with them was inevitable. I know that Illyana’s story is a bit of a tragic one, often serving as a foil or plot point for her more famous brother, Piotr Rasputin aka Colossus, but has since become a beloved and unique character.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Illyana with the rest of the cast in the woefully underrated film, The New Mutants.

I was most impressed with the interpretation of the character in the woefully underappreciated film, The New Mutants, where she was expertly played by the now ridiculously famous Anya Taylor-Joy, where they caught her manic and tragic nature admirably.

Also, as a matter of detail, canonically, when Magik summons her soulsword she also manifested a demonically armored left arm. Even with that knowledge, I made her right arm armored because I wanted to prominently feature it in the image without flipping it horizontally. I was able to further justify the choice–aside from the obvious point that none of this is real–was that in the movie they armored her right arm instead of her left, as well.

I don’t know how many more of these I have in me (there’s at least one more corner box that I find intriguing), but it is a rare art challenge that I have quite enjoyed tackling (this and the 6 Fan Arts have been the only premises I’ve found inspiring enough to participate in).

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