frankenfossil

[frankenfossil]

Sometimes, ya just gotta make do with what you have

I decided I wanted to give bobbin lace a try but didn't want to invest a ton of money in case I didn't like it so here has been my solution. I've drawn all the patterns by hand on regular notebook paper, and am pinning into my laptop case. The only money I've spent was on one pack of pencils for $1 (which I'll use anyway), an enormous spool of yarn $5 (bought at a thrift shop), and one pack of pins $6 (which I'll also use anyway).

I'm enjoying it so far, but still undecided if I want to spend more money on it. Real bobbins and a pillow would be soooo helpful though. But its been encouraging how much I've been able to learn already with just these materials!

[frankenfossil]

[KINGS OF SORTS UPDATE, 1 PG]

bonding over over-bearing mothers.. i'm posting this a day late? idk what you're talking about.

update: kingsofsorts.com

Kings of Sorts is a fantasy/sci-fi comic that follows Hana, an optimistic village outcast, whose knowledge of magitech puts him at the center of royal court conspiracies! patreon: bit.ly/support_KOS discord: bit.ly/kos_discord

[frankenfossil]

Good morning! Wait why's everyone in dark cloaks...?

PROPHET OF THE SUN is a dark fantasy webcomic about a selfish loser trying to dodge the consequences of making a deal with a devil.

☀ On the website ☀ on Patreon (8 pages early!) ☀

[frankenfossil]

head explosion girl

[frankenfossil]

Chapter 55 of The Bright Side begins!

[frankenfossil]

I actually had this idea for a strip LAST year, but by the time it occurred to me, it was already well into the season, so I wrote it down and waited. YESTERDAY, we were driving to Erie and noticed that, indeed, the leaves were starting to change a smidge early this year. That, and it's gotten cold pretty quick up here in western PA, so I figured the time was right. :)

[frankenfossil]

[frankenfossil]

TCM 10th Anniversary

I haven't been very online and posting much art as of late, due to a surprising number of OBLIGATIONS (teaching gigs, job-hunting and catching up with lots of other comics work, which includes what I am gonna talk about in this post) and some disillusionment about posting art on platforms.

Some of you are gonna be shocked by this but 2026 is going to mark 10 years since I posted the first page of The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya on my webcomic's website. This is a pretty big meaningful event to me -- TCM is my first ever completed graphic novel and the reason why I am able to have a comics career now. So obviously I want to celebrate it big and wrap my journey with TCM with a nice fancy extravagant bow.

I've been wanting to do a full FINAL remaster of all of 600 pages of the comic. Not so much revamping the art because I already did a lot of art fixes for the hardcover print editions, and I am still pretty chill about how everything looks! More like updating the lettering (again), correcting colours, fixing the dialogue and strengthening the themes between books, and presenting the entire two-book series at the best it could be. I learned a lot about the realities/logistics of publishing and making comics since I finished TCM, so I'm excited to be redeeming the webcomic sins of my naive past self and update TCM to the current standard of the rest of my author catalogue.

Right now I'm about 3/4 of the way of remastering the 600 pages. So close!! But I want to talk about the stuff I've already done for it!

Everything's under the cut if you are keen to hear me yap.

First thing I did for the remaster is a complete revamp of the title design. I designed the original in late 2015 - early 2016 when the webcomic began to form and never changed it. But the 10th anniversary means I can pull all the stops and go wild, especially now that I have improved in terms of design and all the skills needed to make a historical comic.

The old title was meant to evoke Ottoman calligraphic brushscript without being too cheesy. I carried this over in the new one - I still don't want it to be cheesy and I'd prefer to evoke the feel rather than the look of Ottoman/Arabic calligraphy, since the Eastern calligraphic arts (by this I mean non-Latin script. i.e China and Japan are also equally sophisticated) is no joke and I'd prefer not to attempt replicating linguistic brushstokes and patterns for Aesthetique. Not to mention Latin letters don't lend themselves to Eastern calligraphy very well.

Luckily, Latin calligraphy already exists. I wanted to include more of the 18th century English stylings of the comic into the title, and for this I looked at English Roundhand/Copperplate and the French Ronde. Lots of curlicues and flourish. The outcome is this more condensed almost stamp-like design.

The second thing I did is the book cover. I am not really sure what the final cover will look like as it's dependent on whether I get a publisher for this edition of TCM - but I've made a mockup for now!

The 10th anniversary cover has more of the Ottoman carpet influence compared to the previous covers for TCM. I'm thinking of weaving in the Rococo S-and-C leaf scrolls and other motifs into the cover too. We will see!

The third thing I did is update as many of the Turkish marbled pages as possible.

So Volume I has a fair number of marbled backgrounds - but I didn't have a lot of resources back then, so I drew all of those pages digitally. It's not authentic, per se, but it worked.

As part of the remastering, I want to emphasise the imperfect, hand-drawn, there's-a-person-behind-this feel of TCM. Not to say the personnage wasn't there before, but I wanted MORE of that, especially given the AI nonsense that's happening for the past 2 years.

So this time I went to a Turkish marbled pages workshop, taught by an ebru master (shoutout to Eslem at Anatolia Art Studio), to make my own pages ... the traditional way!

I made 6 prints, and they will be appearing in some shape or form in the final remaster. The first image at the top of this post - which is the title page - is one of those prints! The marbled pages aren't perfect - there is so much technical skill involved in transferring the prints from plastic container to paper, and I bunged that part up too much lol - but that fits the point of TCM as a project? It's all me, it's all the artist's handiwork, and it's imperfect, but that's what allows the love to show.

The fourth and final thing I will be yapping about is the actual remastering work.

Top is the 10th anniversary 2025 remaster. Bottom is 2016 version.

The differences are not that extravagant - any tweaks I am doing, including the relettering, is for consistency and clarity.

Mainly I just wanted to fix the colour sins I committed in the past. In 2016 I didn't have any idea what printing a comic entails and would require - so I naively coloured everything in RGB... and failed to consider how dark colours will print in a CMYK space and on paper... and there are a lot of DARK COLOUR SCENES!!!

Top is the 2025 fix. Bottom is the original.

You can imagine how poorly the original printed on paper. :)

It took me a month and a half to work on Volume I, as I had to reletter everything and implement so many colour fixes. Luckily Volume II has been easy, and with any luck I will be done with this project in March.

I am considering rerunning the webcomic at some point! Sound off if you want to reread TCM again. :3c

[frankenfossil]

UPDATE || Thursday February 27th || 2025

--Current readers, click *here* for the update--

* NEW READERS || PATREON || BLUESKY || INSTAGRAM *

Special thank you to @barbelzoa for making every update so much more beautiful!!

[frankenfossil]

[frankenfossil]

the death of 8tracks made you all so bad at making playlists i fear. good ship or character playlist is max 16 songs and devastatingly perfectly crushingly curated. it should make sense musically, if not across the playlist, then at least from song to song. GRADIENTS of genre. think about this before you make a 200 song ship playlist that includes both maroon 5 and mitski. Think on it

[frankenfossil]

Dancing in front of Matisse in the Hermitage

Photo by Sergei Podgorkov, 1970

[frankenfossil]

this can only be a good thing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

how's your supernatural situationship going

Dee and Em meet Borvyn and The Sun from @prophetofthesun

[frankenfossil]

[frankenfossil]

how's your supernatural situationship going

Dee and Em meet Borvyn and The Sun from @prophetofthesun

[frankenfossil]

hello OOTS fandom on tumblr (all three of you)

[frankenfossil]

Drawing some ferns (this one is Hymenophyllum nephrophyllum/Kidney fern)