#vdtwof meta

[miapcain]

trying to finish the next vesna today but its a three pager. i apologize for the extreme delay. please accept a muddy whippet vesna

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pet peeve

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Vesna BONUS GET:

The original sketches of the first five strips : ) Under the cut 👇

Wow! Here's to many more.

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NEW VESNA SOON I PROMISE

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temp background for an upcoming Vesna strip that feels worth posting by itself

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Are any puppies more desirable than others?

[miapcain]

Hello everyone, next vesna is a bit late, got waylaid by some urgent family stuff. It'll look good though!

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Resa content will continue until morale improves

[miapcain]

What sort of music taste would Vensa and the gang have? (Modern music, i should specify. I just want to see the gang wear modern outfits, after the cola question)

Hello! Thank you for the question. This one required a lot of thought but I think I have a list of albums each main character would recommend.

Vesna likes music she thinks is "cool" or "funny." She's not very discerning, and will probably enjoy anything you put on around her, unless it's "scary." Her music taste is overall maybe a bit teenaged, with the occasional more cerebral artist. Her favourite song is currently "Ein Kompliment" by Sportfreunde Stiller, which she thinks of as her "Girlfriend Song." Franzesca tolerates this.

Snježana has very particular taste. She likes a lot of shoegaze and dark metal adjacent stuff, and more experimental music in general, mixed in with occasional hip hop. She hates everything Vesna listens to, but is usually too polite to say so directly. Her favourite song is "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima," which she found because of Ljuba- a detail she has since conveniently forgotten.

Franzesca thinks she's discerning, but she's just passively absorbed the musical taste of her rich friends and immediate family. She wouldn't be able to name a Queen album because she only knows specific songs. She likes 80s bangers, Schlager and some music she remembers from being a teenager in, I guess, the 2010s. Her favourite song is a tie between She Wolf by David Guetta and Heroes by David Bowie.

Ljuba enjoys music more than any of the others, and knows exactly what she likes, even if she could never put it into words. As a gamer, she listens to as many anime and game soundtracks as 'proper' music. She wildly oscillates between complicated experimental prog rock and the stupidest electro swing you could imagine. She tries to play music she thinks Vesna might like for her, which is only occasionally successful. Snjezana quietly respects her diverse taste, and appreciates that Ljuba will listen to her shoegaze with an open mind. Franzesca hates most of Ljuba's music, except for Ethel Cain, which she says "sounds nice." Her favourite song is either this cover of the Madoka Magika opening, or this cover of People II: The Reckoning by AJJ.

I hope this answers your question!

[miapcain]

Hello all Vesna fans. Sorry for my absence over the past month! The next comic is sketched but I haven't finished it because I'm working hard finishing the art for Digital Poppy and my upcoming game, Lovely Lady RPG, hopefully releasing very soon now!

In the meantime, please check out some of Poppy's older games here, they're good and on sale:

Or, if you want more of my writing until the next Vesna releases (why?), you could check out my previous game! It's free!

[miapcain]

Hi! I found your blog just recently and I love the Vesnaposting - the art, the comics, the gifs from the game, all of it. I've got so many questions:

How did you got yourself interested in this time period? Why Bohemia? Where exactly could the castle be found? Do you plan to connect your story with some "greater events" from that time? Will your OCs travel a bit?

Please, continue with all of this. It looks great and I would also love to play the game one day!

Thank you very much for the questions! I love getting intricate and thought out things to answer, and I'm humbled you like it!

I've been a sort of amateur medievalist for a while now- I can't point specifically to when it started, but it might have been reading Pillars of the Earth as a teenager, or finding out that the town I grew up in had an important courthouse that was closed in the 1300s- that's a scale of time that overwhelmed me then, and still makes me feel a deal of frisson now. The 1200s specifically sit at an intersection of really cool stuff in central europe- it's right before Franziscanism spreads and shakes up the monastic system, Waldensian heretics were prefiguring how the church would later fracture (I feel they resemble specifically the czech utraquists in some of their stylings and beliefs), and the Pope was in open conflict with the holy roman emperor; On the political side, Friedrich II was nearing the end of his reign, and his death would lead to the interregnum, where the empire is effectively without an emperor for years on end; The Popponer dynasty is about to crumble in Austria, and the Lion of Prague Ottokar II Přemýsl is about to add all of Austria to the Bohemian Kingdom, interrupting the ongoing Ostsiedlung (German Eastern Colonization, for those who don't know), all to the backdrop of endless failing crusades. It's just before the Habsburgs gain greater relevance and europe slides into the rennaissance, in my mind putting an end to the "proper" middle ages.

I've been curious about Czechia for a long time; I was too young to really notice when the country joined the EU, but even years later, I remember grumbling that they were going to "ruin" us, by flooding our country with cheap labour or products or somesuch. It's always struck me as odd. That energy ended up getting redirected towards migrants from the near east in the 2010s, but it's stuck with me; Here's a country Austria has, in some form or another, struggled with for centuries, dominated terribly through to the very end of our wretched pitiful attempt at an 'empire,' tried to keep chunks of as recently as 100 years ago, and yet I didn't learn so much as a single thing about it in school. Austrian schooling is dead set on not mentioning a single thing between about 1500 to 1933 (and even then, we often gloss over just *how* enthusiastic a lot of austria was to participate in the holocaust and become part of germany- or how no real denazification took place after the war), and obviously reading any history at all immediately got me hooked on finding out more. History aside, I love the bohemian massif dearly; the rolling hills, deep shadowy forests, little brooks, misty autumns, distant alps, it's one of my favourite regions on earth; I grew up in southern upper austria, but studied near Freistadt, which is where I gathered a lot of reference material for Vesna.

The castle doesn't have an official location, but there is a general area: "north of Freistadt, east of Rožmberk." Here are some rough indications on a modern Vesna era map, a rennaissance map, and google maps:

4. Not to spoil anything, but yes- Franzesca's father, a Bavarian, is a true believer in the "stupor mundi" Frederick II, and the need to "germanize" the backward slavic populations of Bohemia; He detests Saint Václav and forbids castle servants from speaking czech. The timing of the events of Vesna is chosen very specifically to be ironic in this regard- but you'll see when we get there :P

5. Yes, at the very least you will get to see Vesna and friends in the Machlant, Rožmberk and Linz. Franzesca will travel to her family home of Innsbruck and to Normandy, and it's likely more will happen, depending on where the story goes.

Thank you again for the questions! I hope to be working on Vesna for a long time, if it stays interesting :)

[miapcain]

I'm in awe of your background work! I know you've posted some WIPs before, but I'd love to know more about how you approach it and what your process is like.

Thank you so much! It's lovely that people appreciate it so much.

I work professionally as an environment artist for games, and I've always liked drawing environments a bit more than characters. A big part of Vesna for me is that I want the setting to be strong and well defined. This maybe characterizes a lot of my work; a university game I directed and produced art for, Rhythm of Triverz, had a LOT of work put into making it feel like a cohesive, real place.

For the comic, I want to convey something similar, which is a medieval setting where sunshine and colour are allowed to coexist along drab stormy ruined castles. I want to depict something the reader can understand as being real and lived in, so I based the main castle on an actual ruin I've fallen in love with, Burgruine Ruttenstein in the Austrian Mühlviertel. I've visited it a couple times and taken hundreds of photos, so I have a lot of reference material. To supplement that, I created a rudimentary 3D mesh of the castle, though I haven't used it a ton so far.

For a more specific example, Franzesca's room is based on an actual room in the ruin's Wohnturm (dwelling tower), including her big stone window seat:

(It's a lot bigger irl)

Most of the backgrounds are drawn freehand. I always do a sketch of every page before doing the inking, and sometimes they're almost identical throughout, but sometimes they change dramatically when I realize it needs more detail or a different value distribution:

I've been drawing long enough that I don't really need to thumbnail much for these. I mostly know what the panels will look like before I draw them, though my execution often leaves something to be desired if you ask me :p

Thank you for the ask!

[miapcain]

It confuses me a bit when people tag Vesna stuff as "other's OCs" or similar. Isn't OC a fandom/fanfiction term? They're characters in a story I write... is Mark Renton Irvine Welsh's OC

[miapcain]

that one ask made me wonder, is Vesna a hound? does she have an assigned breed or one she's inspired by, or is she just like, a dog? also what species is Ljuba? I assumed a mouse but now i am unsure for some reason

Hello! There's actually going to be some lore on this in the next update. Vesna and Snježana are both wolves (in this setting, that's a bit of an arbitrary definition, despite Snježa's insistence otherwise), that is to say, mostly wolf with some dog thrown in. Snježa is obviously part samoyed and maybe pomeranian. Vesna is probably part collie or some sort of other shepherd dog, but it ultimately doesn't matter much- socially they're seen as wolves, which comes with certain labels in the setting.

The hound thing is more a literal title: She's Franzesca's dog. That's her job. More on that later!

Ljuba is a house mouse. She has light fur but is so blonde that her hair and eyelashes are even lighter. She can barely see but doesn't have glasses. (Bonus: first ljuba sketch)

Thank you so much for the ask! I love when people have questions about Vesna, and yours are always especially good!

[miapcain]

Hi little Vesna question but since snježana and vesna have to keep their hair really short(to fit better in helmets I assume) what hairstyle would they choose to have if given the freedom to chose their own?

Hello, thank you for the question! I think Snježa would like practical braids/one long braid, and Vesna's brain is too small for her to conceptualize herself as having any cut other than whatever her current one happens to be.

Edit: Also, it's not because of helmets, Hartgar (Franzesca's father's serjeant/bodyguard) wears his long; Medieval european culture had some specific gender politics around women's hair. It gets cut here for a similar reason to why nuns wore short hair.

[miapcain]

Which language(s) do Vesna and the gang speak in canonically?

Thank you for the ask! The main characters all converse in Middle High German. The current story takes place in the 1240s, during the german Ostsiedlung, or "eastern colonisation;" Franzesca's family moved from Merania (between Innsbruck and modern southern Bavaria) to southern Bohemia, where most people would be speaking Old/Medieval Czech. Vesna and Snježana were born further north but raised in the household, and Vesna was never taught much Czech; Franzesca's father holds very serious anti-slavic views and prefers members of the household to speak German (this will become pretty important later on in the story).

Ljuba speaks Czech as her first language, and Franzesca knows French and some Latin.

(Unrelated bonus art)