Drawing practice for the future webcomic: The Whistling Fart!

It's time to babble a lot and do some more work on The Whistling Fart! ~ a twisted slice-of-life webcomic for the immature adult.

The Whistling Fart begins in current-day Australia — well, minus Covid 🤪 — and follows the lives of Joey and Jenny. Mainly Jenny as she navigates life with her bizarre housemate and tries to find suitable employment in a time where six year olds are making more money on Youtube than she ever will. As the story progresses, a non-viral disaster transforms the world into chaos and nothing will ever be the same again. Spoiler alert: it's not the Kung Flu. 🙄

I'm planning for the story progression to actually feel like a progression. Disaster will not strike instantly. We will witness Jenny's streak of bad luck as she hops from job to job, observe her interactions with her housemate and their intertwining lives, then one day it'll all go to hell. 🤣 And that's when the real fun begins!

It could take a whole year to get to that point for all I know. 🤷‍♀ It's going to be a full, continuing story. 🙂

Today I thought that I'd work on my characters some more. My main goal today was to draw the characters several times and have them look recognisable each time.

I started with Jenny. For the most part I'm happy with this design — and I know from reading other webcomics that the drawing style can only improve over time, so I'm not trying to be as perfect as possible otherwise I'll be here all year and I'm trying not to beat myself up over her face being too wide for her head.

This is her default expression. Semi-annoyed. 🤣

Then I tried to get her into other positions — happily waving, and fresh out of the shower before work in mid-sentence.

I think I did okay in keeping her recognisable. 😅 Obviously colour would help even more with that.

_{LOL HANDS}

Jenny's story is pretty average. Mentally and emotionally, she's somewhat my alter-ego which helps a bit in keeping her relatable. Especially when compared to Joey who might as well be from another planet.

She's had a giant streak of bad luck. The company she's worked at for years went bankrupt, sending her penniless and unable to pay her rent. After getting evicted, her old friend since school — Joey — invited her to stay at his house until she gets back on her feet... unfortunately, she never manages to get back on her feet.

...not that it will matter when disaster strikes! But she doesn't know that. 😆

When it came to trying to draw Joey, I fell into a bit of a slump. I just couldn't draw a male face! It took ages to just get the above, and I didn't really like it. It's so much easier to draw a female face.

After a lot of trial and error, I finally came up with something. Something not exactly "true" to my original vision.

In my head and in the five minute freewrites in which Joey is present, he's always been a larrikin with a great mop of ginger curls. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get that right. So I decided to give him somewhat normal hair, and perhaps as his character progress, it gets more wild.

It's funny, after spending so long on Joey, I actually prefer his drawing over Jenny's. I think you can tell that I actually tried a lot more to get him looking like a person. His first image anyway, not the second one with his eyes closed and mouth open which was my attempt at him looking smug mid-sentence.

And now I can't stop looking at the two images and hating Jenny's. 🤣 Her chin is gigantic! Good grief. I'm never happy.

I definitely need a lot more practice. But this is basically how I want my two characters to look. I'm sure with a lot more practice I'll be able to get them looking like themselves every time I draw them as well as get them into proper scenes.

It's all a process! I'm getting there. 😅

As for Joey's story... it's a lot more interesting than Jenny's, but Jenny is our character grounded in reality. Joey had the ill luck of being abandoned by his parents as a baby, but was adopted by his great aunt. After she died in an unfortunate wine brewing accident, Joey inherited her house and all of her money and has been set for life ever since.

He's happy-go-lucky, does whatever he wants, and in the past has ordered hippos off Amazon, nearly burnt down the house due to an indoor campfire, and regularly eats prawns and ice cream for breakfast.

 

Thank you for taking the time to look at my terrible drawings 🤣

Until next time ❤️

 

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_{All images in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci}