Chapter 9 - The Dark Minions

Enjoy the latest installment of the Wormworld Saga:

Chapter 9 - The Dark Minion

Now available for free on wormworldsaga.com

Chapter 9, Milestone 3 reached!

I'm getting hot in my seat! Now 60% of the illustrations for Chapter 9 are done and somewhere out there I can already see the finish line. I'm really happy with my work so far and that makes it double hard to NOT share too much with you before the release because I really want you to experience the artwork in the story and especially in the completed layout.

Without further ado on to the next milestone!

Chapter 9, Milestone 2 reached!

It's time for another milestone update! Today I've finished panel No. 52, which sets the progress mark at 40%. I'll try my best to come as close to the 50% mark as possible by the end of the week which marks the half time point of my production schedule. So far, production goes smoothly and I'm still optimistic that I can finish production by the end of August.

Chapter 9, Milestone 1 Reached!

Today I've reached the first milestone of the Chapter 9 artwork production! A little bit over 20% is done now and it took me pretty much the time I expected it to take. If I'm able to keep up the pace, I will reach a new milestone every 12 workdays.

I'm still trying to figure out how the handle preview images of this chapter. I really don't want to spoil anything to anyone so I will have to be very careful with that.

Chapter 9 Production Kickoff

Today I've finished the preliminary version of Chapter 9 of The Wormworld Saga. That's right, this time there's no kickstarter campaign or Christmas Special eating up my time. Production of Chapter 9 will begin on Monday! And I set myself an ambitious goal: I want to finish the production before the end of August. So, if everything goas according to my plan, you'll be reading Chapter 9 in less than 4 months. And the title of the new chapter is going to be:

Chapter 9 - The Dark Minions 

Now you've got something to look forward to in the late Summer. If you're curious about the production, you'll get weekly production previews on The Wormworld Saga Patreon Page. From 1st June on you can also win original artwork when you become a patron of The Wormworld Saga!

  

Chapter 8 - Ambush in the Mushroom Forest

I proudly present Chapter 8 of the Wormworld Saga Digital Graphic Novel!

Go read it on wormworldsaga.com!

I really enjoyed creating this chapter. Finally we're traveling again, right? And finally we've got what starts to feel like a decent party of adventurers. The story is moving towards the central climax, the turning point, everything gets shaken up. I don't want to say more about it, only that I hope you'll enjoy this latest installment of the Wormworld Saga!

You'll also notice some changes on the website. I've created a shiny new header but the more fundamental changes happened in the background. I've completely updated the website code which now makes it a LOT easier for me to manage the content although you will see nothing of this on the surface. What you WILL see though is that I have now moved the special content from the retired Wormworld Saga App, which later was featured in "The Attic" subscription area, right onto wormworldsaga.com. If you are a supporter on Patreon.com, you'll be able to login with your Patreon account and access everything.

I'll now leave you with the poster version of the new website header.

Chapter 8 Launches on Sunday, May 1st!

Getting ready for the launch of Chapter 8 took me a bit longer this time, especially because the new chapter will be released on a completely revamped version of the website. But now I'm ready to do the final layout work and next Sunday it's finally going to happen:

Chapter 8 will be launched on May 1st, at 9pm German time. 

As always I've activated a countdown on the website so that you can easily find out at what time the release will happen in your timezone. I'm really looking forward to the release and I hope to see you around on Sunday!

Chapter 8, Final Artwork Completed!

Once again it's done - another chapter of the Wormworld Saga is completely illustrated!

As always, it feels weird to reach this point. But this time I don't have much time to think about the production that lies behind me because the production of Chapter 9 will start as soon as possible. The production budget is secured and I want to provide you Chapter 9 as soon as possible. When you read Chapter 8, you'll know why. :)

As for the release date, I can't commit to a fixed date just yet because the translations are still edited AND Chapter 8 will launch on a completely revamped website. I'm still working on it although the majority of tasks is already accomplished. Most of the adjustments won't be directly visible to the visitors of the website as they are "under the hood" and simply make my life easier when it comes to updating and maintaining the content. However, there's one major new feature of the upcoming website update that will add a whole new layer of content to wormworldsaga.com.

In my next update I'll announce the launch date of Chapter 8. Until then I'll leave you with the final preview image of this production:

Chapter 8, Milestone 4 reached!

The finish line is getting into sight! Today I've got 80% of Chapter 8 illustrated. Without further ado I'm presenting you the preview image of this milestone and go right back to painting. There's a chapter to finish! :)

Chapter 8, Milestone 3 reached!

This was a fast one! Milestone 3 took me exactly 3 weeks or 15 days to complete. The next two milestones should more or less fall into the same category so we should begin to mentally prepare for an April release of Chapter 8. Here's the preview image of milestone 3:

In other news: we've reached 100 patrons on Patreon and as a little gift I've created an original gouache painting that was given to one randomly picked patron:

A 25 minutes long commented timelapse recording of the creation of this painting is available to all my patron on Patreon.com!

And now I'm going to start work on the next milestone!

Chapter 8, Milestone 2 reached!

It feels good to finally be on track again! Today I've finished the second milestone of Chapter 8 and it was about time to reach that point. The last milestone had been reached 3 months ago and I was beginning to feel nervous about the progress of Chapter 8 although I knew exactly what caused this delay.

In November the fulfillment of the last kickstarter campaign took much too much time from my production schedule and when I had finished the main bulk of that work, I had already decided that I wanted to produce the Christmas Special. The last third of December was eaten up by the Holidays and I was able to start my work on the second milestone not earlier than January. And I still wasn't going full steam.

An important part of my kickstarter fulfillment hadn't been finished yet. I had to paint 4 original gouache paintings, a task I originally had planned for the evenings. But it turned out that I wasn't able to do the paintings in the evenings, there just wasn't enough creative juice left after a long production day. So I decided to take a day off from production for each painting, and although I lost 4 production days (which is nearly a week) doing that, it was a good decision. For 4 weeks, every Monday was "Gouache Monday" and I really enjoyed these days. It was hard work for me to paint those paintings and I felt like a complete newbie. Mixing real colors is such a hard challenge when all you know is the Color Picker in Photoshop. I became better with every painting and in the last one I was actually able to mix and put down exactly the colors I was looking for. Here are the results:

  

My original plan was to finish the milestone in January but it turned out that this milestone contained a lot of complicated artwork. The protagonists are leaving the big city and I want it to be a proper farewell with lots of majestic vistas. I worked nearly 140 hours on this milestone which comes close to the 160-hours-monster-milestone of Chapter 6. However, the rest of the chapter is promising to be finished much faster. There's still plenty of ambitious imagery ahead but it's going to be nature scenes  (and some of them quite dark) which will take much less time then the detailed cityscapes I commited to in my depiction of Kingspeak. I'm really relieved that the story moves on to new sceneries now. Painting architecture is exhausting. Everything has to be in perspective and you can't be as sloppy in the details as you can be in nature scenes. Still I'm going to miss the narrow alleys of Kingspeak. Of course we will see more of it in later chapters but this will be more like short spotlights. The big exploration of the city is over. I guess it will be fun to return to the chapters 6, 7 and, 8 now and then to dive back into this place.

Here are the preview images from this milestone:

As always I'd like to remind you that I'm posting weekly updates on my Patreon page so if you are interested in much more preview images for this milestone, and other behind the scenes info, have a look!

I hope to finish the third milestone before the end of this month. See you then!