Project Description

This is the first piece of concept art I have done for Revery in a very long time. About a decade, actually. This story has been in my head for a lot longer than that. The dreams that served as the foundation and opening for the story I had back in high school. I started building the world, drawing the concept art, thumbnailed the whole story, and penciled the first 15 or so pages 10 years ago-right around the time my kids were finally all in school during the day. As I’ve gotten older, theoretically wiser, have experienced more, and read more, there are changes I want to go back and make. When the idea first hit me, I wanted Revery to be a training exercise for a bigger, more epic story I had in mind that, at the time, wasn’t related. It was going to be a way for me to work out storytelling and workflow problems, something I didn’t need to take as seriously. It’s so much not that now. I have loose ideas for further adventures in this world as well as a bigger idea for how it ties all my other ideas together.

As far as the initial goal of this piece-trying to work out the kinks of my new work flow and continue to experiment with rendering/art style-…I don’t know? I like the look and the direction I’m headed. I definitely did a lot of two steps forward, one step back trying to get the hang of this process, which caused this to take WAY too long (89 hours and 13 minutes, to be precise). I think I can make the process significantly faster now that a lot of trial and error is out of the way, and I’ve started setting up shortcuts to the process (like creating and saving the color palette and gradient maps). I’m starting to identify some custom brushes I could make to help things out, as well. There are definitely things I wish I had handled differently, some things I should have worked out earlier in the process (like the lighting…), and overall it just took too long. So, I have mixed feelings about the end result, but I think I’m happy with it. Happy enough to move on to what’s next, at least.