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Happy Halloween!

Hope everyone is having a great October! This is my absolute favorite season, so here is some new/old art to enjoy. I’ll be out of town for a few weeks, so I won’t be replying to emails for a bit, but I plan to have another fan art post next month + the opening of the online store! Q&As will return in December.

I’ve also heard from some people having a rough time right now in life, and while I can’t always respond, I wanted to wish everyone the best, and to keep going. Life often throws a lot of hard stuff at us, but there’s always better days right around the corner. 🧡

Merch Sneak Peek!

Hi all! Here is a small look at some new merch I’ve made, which will be up for sell in my future online store! My goal is to launch it early November, and have plenty of time to ship for the holidays.

These are some new charms and sticker sheets, though I’m hoping to have a few other small things available. Make sure to subscribe to my newsletter, as they’ll be the first to know when the shop goes live!

Q&A #19 - September Questions

Mandrake….

Misfit Mansion

Q: Would Kel ever help Larkspur cook?

A: I bet Kel would grow food for him! They probably have some system in place since Larkspur would just walk into the greenhouse and grab whatever.

Q: Does Iris have any other human friends? (Other than Mathias and Mr. Halloway!)

A: Iris has a lot of human friends in town! She is the type that can be friends with anyone, and is probably the most popular horror in Dead End Springs. But she spends more time with her family.

Q: What would the Misfit Mansion cast be like on a cruise? I feel like Iris would enjoy it!

A: Oh, she would. I could see it going either really well or really bad… I think it would stress Halloway out a lot either way lol.

Q: What kind of horror is Kyuri?

A: Kyuri is a kappa! They’re a water monster in Japanese folklore that also happen to like cucumbers. I based his design off of the Animal Crossing turtles.

Q: How old is Iris? If she came three years ago to the house and it's two years later then she should be five years old, but she looks so much older.

A: She came into existence as an 8-year-old, which was the same age Mathias was at the time. So while technically she’s only existed for five years, she is 13 in the second book, and 11 in the first!

Q: I noticed “Dreamon” sounded like “dream demon”. What inspired you to create the word along with Iris and Larkspur?

A: I toyed around with a few different names, like “Nightlight Imp” and “Dream Imp”, but the publisher didn’t like the word “imp.” Dreamon is in fact a combination of dream and demon! I talk more about Iris’s design in the “Development of Misfit Mansion” posts.

Q: June guessed that Kel and Agnes were horrors, and she shared a little backstory thing that she used to be friends with a troll. So, does that mean June has some sort of history with horrors like Halloway and Anemone did, or something? In like some way? Like, what was her opinion on horrors?

A: Some horrors lived in town a very long time ago, but eventually left for whatever reason. As time went on, people forgot they existed. June liked the horrors she knew, though they left when she was little.

Baby Kel and his mom.

Q: In the first book when Iris and Agnes got in a little fight, Agnes said Kel's parents were killed by paranormal hunters. What were Kel's parents like?

A: I think they were a lot like him, very quiet and gentle! They would do anything to protect Kel.

Oddity Woods

Q: I have a question for the OW cast, what are their favorite colors?

A: Probably the color of their clothing! I think Marietta wears yellow because Inspector Mysteria’s coat is yellow. Wyatt probably likes blue or green for no particular reason. Milly likes pink and enjoys girly things (sometimes), Lawrence likes red and gold because they’re the colors of royalty or something.

Q: I'm really curious about Owen and Velia. What were their personalities like before all the terribleness that happened? Do they have families in Perdita still missing them? What kind of things did they like to do? I think their story is so sad! I know that they are most likely definitely gone forever (especially Velia because her spirit faded away) but will they ever appear again in flashbacks or something?? I feel like all the stuff that went down at the inn had a pretty big impact on Mary.

A: They were childhood friends, I don’t think either of them really had families, which is why they became close in the first place. Velia wanted to leave Perdita and eventually attend college. I don’t think Owen knew what he wanted to do with his future, but he probably would have just followed Velia and figured it out later. Velia was very ambitious while Owen was more easygoing. Maybe we’ll see them again in some way.

Q: What would the Oddity Woods characters look like if they were in CookieRun Kingdom?

A: As someone who has played a CookieRun game for almost ten years, I felt obliged to draw this.

Q: Who is the woman on the far right in Lucas Candor's photo from the flashback?

A: Tune in for book two!

Q: What was Owen doing in Oddity Woods in between visits to the Labyrinth Inn?

A: Probably like Wyatt, surviving. But I think unlike Wyatt, Owen was more open to speaking with the residents of the woods, which is probably how he came across the Conductor.

Q: I was looking at some of your old Instagram posts and noticed a drawing from a while ago where Lunette is doing Marietta's hair. In some of the things from the second book that you've shared, Marietta has her hair in the same ponytail. Did Lunette do that?

A: I originally wanted this to be the case, but to save time I had Marietta pull it up herself in the book. I think it would have been cute, since Marietta doesn’t have a mom herself! This was the art in question.

Q: If the people who live in the woods feel cold to outsiders, would outsiders feel unusually warm to them?

A: Oh yeah, I guess they would!

Q: I kind of feel bad for the Conductor. He has a thankless job and people just try to stop him from doing it even though it's really important. What does he like to do to relax?

A: He likes drinking tea and being alone in the engine room. He doesn’t get much alone time…

Q: Wyatt called the residents of the woods creepy. Does he still think that now that they have friends from the woods?

A: I think he’s changed his mind a lot!

Q: Are we going to see more depth to Lawrence's character in the next book? He's a very interesting character to me, I want to learn more about what's going on in his head. And what made him decide to join Wyatt and Marietta?

A: :D

Q: What do you think the main Oddity Woods characters' favorite Sonic character(s) would be (if Sonic existed in their world)? I think Wyatt would like Tails (cause they both make science-y stuff), and Marietta would like either Amy or the Chaotix (because detectives!). Lawrence might like Shadow cause he might think Shadow is cool.

A: I got really carried away with drawing this one haha. I think Milly would actually like Blaze the most, but I had to go the Eggman route.

More next time!

Mayhem at Misfit Mansion - Concept Art

Here’s a bunch of character art I made while writing M@MM! I didn’t have any extra pages in the back of the book to share these this time, which I’m a bit sad about, but fortunately I do have plenty of space here!

Designing slightly older characters for a sequel was a lot of fun, since I could take the original designs and add to them. I wanted the characters to still be easily recognizable, so I kept the color palettes for everyone fairly similar. Some were easy to design, while others took a few tries!

Pippa took the longest to design. I wanted to incorporate her ability to change emotions into her feather patterns using an eye motif. I thought her opening her wings to reveal a face was the most visually interesting, so I went with that version!


Misfit Mansion - Development and Concepts #3

With about a week and a day left until Mayhem at Misfit Mansion is out, here is the final part of the MM development series! I hope this has been an interesting read for fans of the book.

Pitching & Final Changes

Once the story outline, sample pages and character designs were completed, it was time to pitch the book to publishers! When Home for Horrors was picked up, there were a few changes I was asked to make. The first was to start the story from Iris’s point of view, and to cut the part with the three-headed dog. I was also asked to make the characters look slightly older. Here’s a first pass at some redraws.

Some of the designs here are still a little different from the finals, like Agnes’s hair clips and Kel’s shirt pattern. I ended up going back and redrawing the cast again a few months later. I think I must have changed Kel and Dahlia’s outfits again when working on the final pages!

Creating the Book

I’ve written a little about how I make pages in another post, but here’s a closer look! I always start with a typed script and “thumbnails”, which are very rough drawings of the page layouts. These are submitted to the publisher first, so they can offer any edits before I move on to the actual drawn pages. I also like coloring the characters in with a solid color so that it’s easier to see who is who!

Example of a script page.

Thumbnailed pages.

Thumbnailed pages.

One requested edit was to change the direction Iris is facing on page 14 within the fifth panel to match the direction she’s moving in the fourth. That also meant flipping her in some of page 15’s panels as well. After edits are applied, I move on to the line art!

The final part is to drop in flat colors, and then add shading and highlights. This step usually takes me the longest. Once it’s complete, I resubmit everything back to the publisher, and make any further edits until both sides are happy.

Cover Design

This step happens about half way into drawing pages. I always design 6 small ideas to show my publisher, who then decide which idea they’d like to go with. Here are the covers I pitched!

The publisher went with #3! We also ended up having to change the title from “Home for Horrors” to “Misfit Mansion” as requested by the marketing team. Sometimes this happens!

After the pages were done and the cover was finalized, Misfit Mansion would go on to be in bookstores about a year later, in 2023! In total, it took about 6 years from the earliest concepts to the final book. I’ve come to love this book a lot, and I’m grateful for all the love it's received! I truly hope readers will enjoy the sequel when it releases next week.

To end, here’s a bunch of art I made throughout the years of working on MM! Thanks everyone for supporting my work!

Oddity Woods - Concept Art #1

Today I’m posting a little bit of concept art from book 1 of Oddity Woods! These were from around 2014-2016, when I was working on OW as a webcomic. I wanted each chapter to be an individual mystery, like a mini Agatha Christie story. When writing the Labyrinth Inn chapter, I knew I wanted to do a “whodunnit” type story, though I had some other ideas at the beginning.

The first one wasn’t about an inn, but a town where the people were cursed to become wendigos when the clock struck midnight.

Marietta and Wyatt would figure out how to free the town of their curse and find the first Grave Key. I ended up scrapping this idea because I didn’t find the story very interesting, and moved more into a murder mystery direction instead.

Early concept art of Silvia/Velia. The inn chapter went through a lot of different versions, but it was always about a character getting revenge for their murder. Funny enough, I think Velia was once originally a part of the werewolf family too, along with different workers like maids, until her character was finalized as an outsider.

Early Owen had a skeleton cat and the two would have been reoccurring characters. Sorry bud. Ultimately I didn't like having so many extras working at the inn when I could have more unique guests be a part of the mystery instead, so the extra werewolves got cut!

Designing the side characters for this chapter was a lot of fun, though it took some time to figure them out. I kept drawing them over and over until a design felt right. I think I liked designing Leo and Capella the most. I also wanted them all to have distinguishable silhouettes.

Everyone was finalized in 2017! The original script had a lot more going on, but needed to be condensed last minute (partially because it was too long and partially because I was hitting burn out while working on it as a webcomic). My mindset was to create something similar to a point & click mystery game, which I realized didn't quite translate perfectly into a comic. I still like it overall though! I'd love to try and write another campy murder mystery again someday.

This will be part one to a series of OW concept art posts. There’s a lot of stuff I can’t really talk about until the series is finished, but I’ll share what I can in the meantime!

Misfit Mansion Art - May 2026

A few random MM drawings from the past few months! As a note, I’ll be trying to post a Q&A every month as long as there are questions to answer, so feel free to send them in for later this month!

Also a crossover with the video game Animal Crossing!

Getting Stuck on "Art Style"

I've gotten a few emails from young artists asking me how I developed my art style, what they can do to improve their own art styles, and their frustrations with their own work. I really do sympathize with young artists who get wrapped up in art style woes, since the same thing happened to me (and probably everyone who's ever picked up a pencil!). I used to get really frustrated when my art wasn't perfect. I'd compare my work to others, thinking I should be at a certain level at a certain age ("because that one 18-year-old's work is so amazing, why can't that be me?!"), and most of all, always trying to find that "perfect art style."

So now that I'm a 30-something-year-old professional comic artist that hasn't thought about art style in a while, I thought I'd share my own "art style journey," what I was thinking at every stage, and hopefully stress that a perfect art style should never be the goal of art, as it's impossible to achieve perfection! It also isn't a race. Art style is just a reflection of how you currently draw-- as you draw more and improve and become influenced by new things, that style inevitably changes over time. How you draw at 15 will be vastly different than how you draw at 25, or 35, or 80.

For me, when I was a kid, I mostly drew Pokemon, Sonic, and random anime. Here's some stuff I drew on our now long dead dial-up computer, when I was around 14-16.

This was back in the golden age of DeviantArt, where early 2000s anime styles were king. But by 17-18, I felt my art was starting to look too similar. I wanted to branch out more, so I tried taking influence from western art as well (this is also when I first started conceptualizing ideas that would become Oddity Woods!).

There was still an anime influence, but it also had that 2012 Tumblr style seep in. Also Marietta and Wyatt were adults! And were completely different characters! When OW became more of a mystery/puzzle game-inspired work, I wanted the art to reflect those things. I ended up studying the background characters in the Professor Layton games (old Nintendo DS games I played as a kid), because I really liked the weird shapes they had. I tried incorporating more shapes into my work.

I was really trying to push motion more, while also taking influence from early 2000's western cartoons, which were more angular and had very distinct silhouettes for every character.

Eventually the chibi-er art style came around, influenced by the rounder-looking western cartoons that were popular at the time like Steven Universe.

This was the point where I felt I had the final designs nailed down, but I remember still being so nit-picky and frustrated about my work. I thought "Okay, I want to make Oddity Woods a comic, but I don't want to start until I'm at THIS level," or "Once I'm THIS good, I'll do it!" The thing is... there was no way I was going to start that comic with that mindset. If it wasn't for my college art class pushing me to finally do it, OW probably wouldn't have been made.

I started making pages of the webcomic in 2015 (I was around 21). The art style wasn't perfect (at least not like the perfect image in my head), and there were a lot of mistakes. But throughout the three years I posted pages, the style continued to change in subtle ways. These pages range from 2015-2018.

Making comics has the really cool effect of forcing you to keep drawing no matter what, flaws and all, and doesn't care about where your art style is at, because it WILL change, like... twenty pages later! As I got progressively burnt out on Oddity Woods due to other circumstances around this time, I swapped tracks to work on Star Knights, which was based on a one-shot comic I made in 2017. Here's some of those old pages...

... versus the later pages of the 2022 graphic novel, 200+ pages in.

Even Misfit Mansion changed slightly from the original sample pages (pages used to pitch to publishers and are not final versions), versus the pages in the actual book.

Some people may look at all these examples and not really see a huge difference (and maybe that's something to recognize-- we see our mistakes much more easily than others!). But as the artist, the one who was once so bogged down by "achieving the best art style before I start making work!!!", the differences to me are HUGE. My work would not have evolved at all if I was still just focused on art style. Having done hundreds of comic pages, I'm now only focused on drawing fast, and I don't care as much about mistakes.

I still think the art style differences between old OW pages and the updated book pages are pretty noticeable! I wish I could have redrawn all of OW book 1, but again, that would be wasting time I can use to make more comics!!! And I'll probably go back in another ten years and think "I could draw that better now."

Anyway, all of this is to say, just keep drawing and have fun. I personally stopped caring about art style after getting into comics. The more I draw the characters, the easier it all becomes. It's a practice that becomes second nature as you continue doing it.

Q&A #10- Misfit Mansion Random Questions

Q: In Misfit Mansion I saw that Kel gains a fish tail when he goes to sleep in his pool of water, so how does that work?

A: When Kelpies get wet/ go into water, their legs turn into fish tails!

Q: How long have Agnes, Kel, and Dahlia been at the house?

A: I think Agnes was fairly young when she was found, so she was probably around 7? I’ve always thought Agnes was the first of the three main characters to arrive, while Kel arrived a little later, after Iris. That’s why Agnes took on an older sister role with them. Dahlia’s been there a bit longer than all three of them.

Q: At the time of the first book, how many horrors are living in the house?

A: Maybe a little under 100. More move in before the second book!

Q: Is there a third book planned, or is it just gonna be the two?

A: There’s only two planned. I do have an idea for a third one, but that’s up to the publisher!

Q: What would the Misfit Mansion cast’s favorite Pokemon be?

A: