concept art

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!

Misfit Mansion - Development and Concepts #2

Here’s part two of the MM development series! While the last post was about initial concepts, this one goes over the first and second drafts of Misfit Mansion, which was titled “Home for Horrors” at the time. These versions were similar to the final but had different story beats and plot differences. Text-heavy post incoming!

First Draft

Home for Horrors followed Iris, Kel and Agnes and their foster home for monsters, which was hidden outside the town of “Forget-Me-Not Ridge.” The house was sealed by a door demon named Latchkey, who is only weak to silver. When Mathias tried entering the house to prove to his “friends” that monsters are real, his silver pendant repelled Latchkey’s powers, allowing the horrors inside to escape. It was then up to Iris, Kel and Agnes to find the escaped horrors and bring them home. This version of the story had small episodes centering around the escaped horrors, including a three-headed dog, a dullahan (headless horseman), a crow mage, and a living doll. Also, shapeshifting blobs!

Some of the escaped horrors + a group of kids Mathias is trying to befriend.

First character sheet.

Plot Outline:

  • Three-Headed Dog Chapter- Iris runs into the woods to find the escaped horrors, while Mathias runs into a ghost boy looking for his missing three-headed dog. Mathias is then chased by said dog, but Iris manages to save him by uniting the ghost boy and dog, letting them both pass on into the next life.

  • Dullahan Chapter- Iris, Kel and Agnes go into town, finding a dullahan woman terrorizing the mayor. She’s angry he’s been telling fake scary stories about her during the festival. Iris and friends pacify the situation, and the mayor promises to stop painting the dullahan in a bad light. Iris and Mathias also decide to team up to find the escaped horrors using some of Anemone’s equipment, which Mathias secretly takes from her.

  • Crow Mage Chapter- The harvest festival begins, but is threatened when a crow mage and his crow lackeys turn all the vegetables into monsters, angry that humans have never shared with them. They’re only stopped when some of the kids dress up as scarecrows, the crows’ one weakness.

  • Living Doll Chapter- This chapter featured Dahlia, but she had the power to turn fiction into reality. During a scary movie night, Dahlia appears and makes the movie real, causing chaos. Iris and Mathias work together to survive the night, which only ends when Anemone appears and destroys one of Dahlia’s favorite dolls. Iris then invites a distraught Dahlia to live in at the house with her.

The story followed some similar plot lines to Misfit Mansion, like Iris hearing Larkspur’s voice throughout, and his eventual attack on the town, but it was pretty different in how the characters developed.

  • Kel and Agnes didn’t have as much of a role aside from supporting Iris.

  • Mathias worked with Iris early on and wasn’t as antagonistic. His main goal was to befriend a group of town kids by proving monsters exist, since they always thought he was making it up. He eventually decided it wasn’t worth befriending them, as Iris was a better friend anyway.

  • Iris and Halloway have a moment of understanding before Larkspur escapes.

  • Anemone tricks Iris into taking her to the house, where she destroys Latchkey and frees Larkspur. Anemone also later regretted her ways at the end after seeing Mathias in danger.

Ultimately, this draft was way too long and clunky, and needed a lot of editing. I thought longer about it while working on Star Knights, and eventually came back with a new version in mind.

Second Draft

This time, I focused more on the core of the story, and got rid of the episodic format, cutting the dullahan and crow mage parts, and changing Dahlia’s scene to be in a toy store. Agnes and Kel were given more important roles and had their own character arcs, Mathias was more antagonistic, and the story focused more on Iris’s search to find a family instead of the missing horrors. This would be the draft that was sent to the publisher, although it was still slightly different from the final!

Along with the book summary, I needed to provide examples of finished pages. Below are sample pages of the book’s original opening scene, where you can see some of the differences.

I also did thumbnails for the three-headed dog encounter, available to read below!

Next week will be the third and final part, where I’ll talk more about creating the final book.

Misfit Mansion - Development and Concepts #1

Less than a month before Mayhem at Misfit Mansion is out! To celebrate, I’d like to share the creation process behind the first book, and how it developed over time. Misfit Mansion went through quite a few different versions over the years before being pitched as its current self, so this will be a multi-part series!

“Lily of the Dead Valley”

Back when I was working on Oddity Woods as a webcomic, I was brainstorming ideas for potential book pitches. The main two were A. a story based on “Journey to Stars,” which became Star Knights, and B. a story about a monster hunter that wound up in a world of monsters, titled “Lily of the Dead Valley.” I ended up moving forward with Star Knights instead, since I ran into a few roadblocks with the second idea, but I’d come back around to it while working on SK.

The monster world was called Dead Valley, and had a wide array of monster inhabitants. The monster hunter was a hooded girl named Ava that somehow fell into Dead Valley, and had to team up with “Lily” (Iris’s original name) to return home, learning that monsters were actually good in the process. These are sketches from around 2018.

The earliest version of Iris was a vampire.

Less vampire and more monster. She was friends with a werewolf girl.

Hoodie with a pattern— I didn’t want to draw this in every panel, so the pattern got scrapped!

Ava’s face was hidden by a hood for most of the story.

Early Iris with a devil tail. I think the guy on the top right was her brother?

I wasn’t sure what this monster world should look like, so to make it a little easier on myself, I ultimately decided to change the setting to the real world. The story then became about a human summer camp at odds with a monster one.

A moth girl named Juniper, she was a little snooty, and didn’t like Lily.

A ghost and kelpie camper! I liked the kelpie, so I reused them later.

Ava is accidentally signed up for the wrong summer camp— one for monsters instead of monster hunters. Hiding her identity, she eventually befriends Lily, and ultimately comes to learn that hunting monsters is wrong. This idea didn’t go anywhere as I never went to summer camp as a kid, and so I had no idea how to write a summer camp story… I decided to channel the experiences I did have as a kid in order to figure out what Misfit Mansion would actually be about— found family and belonging.

“Home for Horrors”

In 2019, the story became about a foster home hidden in the woods. When conceptualizing the house, I originally wrote the caretaker as a woman, but I wanted to write a father/daughter bond between Iris and the caretaker, so they became Halloway instead. “Lily” was changed to Iris, as it matched her color scheme more. Instead of a random monster, I wanted her species to have an effect on the story, so she became a dreamon, or a “dream imp” back then.

Very quick concept sketches to figure out the new characters, including a female Halloway.

This version was a lot closer to the final Misfit Mansion, but there were still many differences plot-wise! I’ll save it for part two, but I did want to briefly mention another story I was working on at the time.

“Doll House”

This was a very small and undeveloped idea I was writing in 2018, but I couldn’t figure out the story, so it ultimately got scrapped. It followed a mage who was trapped in a haunted house of living dolls, and had to help himself and a trapped soul escape, which lived in a small cage he carried. This idea doesn’t have much to do with Misfit Mansion, but I liked the designs and ended up recycling them to create Mathias and Dahlia. This version of Dahlia also had a giant stuffed bear butler, which I still kind of like.

Beta versions of Dahlia and Mathias. They didn’t have names at this point.

Beta Dahlia and her bear butler. She was more antagonistic in this story.

Random side character, I liked the beanie and gave it to Kel later.

Next part, more story notes and pitch pages!

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!

10 Years + Original Oddity Woods Prologue

Today officially marks the 10th anniversary of posting Oddity Woods online! While the first book has only been out for half a year, the series technically started ten years ago. Which is insane! I can’t believe it’s been that long!

I wanted to take the chance to sincerely thank everyone who has picked up a copy, and also those who have been following OW since its webcomic days. I’m always so shocked and honored people have stuck around for this long. I hope the continuation is worth the wait!

Speaking of, I’m currently hard at work on book 2, which is entirely new content. I didn’t think I’d ever have the opportunity to finish this series, and it’s so surreal to be able to have the chance to finally do just that. From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for supporting my work!

Today I’m posting what was the original prologue from the webcomic. This ended up being cut in order to better focus on the main story, but I do still like this little mystery! Maybe in some alternate universe of Oddity Woods, these events still take place.