Greeting friends, how are we doing today?
Well firstly I would like to say my progress this past weekend on the pages of Brewgatory have been going really well so far. The power of good brushes on Procreate, it really does feel like a game changer. And while yes, if you look at this book page by page you will be able to tell the difference in a lot of them, I am learning as I am creating. So while I would love to have more constructed kind of flow across all the pages, I do need to keep in mind this is my first comic book, a lot of things are not going to work. And that’s okay. Done, not perfect. Besides that, I am really more excited to continue the story on the next issues and eventually be able to look back at all the issues as a collection, now that is exciting.
One thing I did want to share on this space here are some of the behind the scenes look at Brewgatory. From extremely early concept art and ideas, to page layouts and all that cool extra features that might end up being in the collectors edition or something like that later on down the line if all goes well, here is hoping. So I’ve tried and kept a lot of my concept roughs of Brewgatory, fun fact here, this started out as a project in one of my college courses. The idea at the time was super simplified, with Santos just being an unlucky barista who died and ended up stuck on Brewgatory, just cause. And while this idea is cute at best, it didn’t really have legs. I could only tell an extremely limited story, and that would only be able do some much for me as a storyteller. I wanted and I knew I could do way more here, so after reading the Dante trilogy (Inferno, Pugatorio & Paradiso) and a whole lot of philosophy, I reworked a lot of what I had. The relationship that we have with life and death is a strange one and distant at best, we don’t talk about it until we have to. I wanted to intersect this idea with the grind and life of a worker at the bottom of the food chain of economy and wealth, the barista. In a way the barista was the perfect job, because it is usually the artist, the actor, the musician who is also the server of the dark roast and lattes. The dreamer. And I feel like for anyone with a dream, this moment in their lives can basically seem like the in between, their own personal Purgatory if you will. In many ways, this is my own relationship with work, dreams, life, death and the little things in between, it is a very personal story for me. The closer you look at the pages, the more of me you will find.
So without needing to say let’s take a look at some of the early concept art for Brewgatory and more specifically of our protagonist, Benito Santos.
This is quite a blast from the past.
And even just a few years really from his original creation, Santos has come pretty far in terms of design. But this just goes to show really, when you have an idea, draw it out. You will fix it, you will change it, but you can only do that if you get the idea out of your head and onto some paper and really start to build him from there. I think in some ways me and Santos were pretty disconnected when I first came up with the character, and as the years passed the more of Santos I began to see in myself, and vice versa. In a way I didn’t want to do that, I always felt pretty unimportant but I mean that is just my mental health at it’s lowest point. Through the love of my friends and family I have learned to really fall in love with the journey that I am on, and I can’t wait to share with as many who want to hear it as possible.
But that is all for today, I am going to try to be better at writing more of these every single day, so maybe they won’t be as long but they will have little pieces and secrets on the creative process of this book. This really is a life journey for me, and something I would love to keep doing for the rest of my life.
Until next one my friends.
