Introducing Arcadia!

Last month I hinted at a project that will allow me to push my art and continuously iterate and improve my skills. Well, after several weeks of planning, drawing, building, and nervously biting my nails, I’m finally ready to unveil that project.

Allow me to introduce my mistress these past few weeks, ARCADIA.

Arcadia is my new weekly webcomic. It’s the story of a young boy who finally gets to journey off of the only world he knows, only to be swept up into an adventure to (of course) save the entire universe. The plan right now is to create and release at least one new page every week (two if I can manage it) and if I keep that schedule, the full story should be completely told by, oh, let’s say, 2027 (give or take a decade).

Arcadia is dear to me because it was originally intended to be a novel written together with my son Caleb. We collaborated on it for several months, until I (as is often the case) became bored with the project and shelved it. But eventually, I took the idea back down, dusted off all the notes, and reconfigured it as a weekly webcomic project. And Caleb is, of course, still on staff assisting me with fleshing out the remaining story.

The goals I have in mind while working on Arcadia are many, and easily represented through handy bullet points:

  • Storytelling: of course, that’s the main goal. Caleb and I have an interesting story we want told. This is our way of doing it.
  • Improving my artwork: another big one, part of my desire to do this project is to force myself to draw things all the time. And not just things I like, and things that are easy, but sometimes things I may NOT like, and characters I actually hate, and facial expressions and positions that are difficult to visualize, and scenery, and all the remaining unsightly trappings of a webcomic. In this exercise, I hope to continually improve my ability to draw.
  • Maintaining a schedule: can I do something weekly? I’d like to think so. And post updates on time? Perhaps. We will see….
  • Just plain seeing if I can even do this: yeah.

So, in short, bookmark the site, add it to your favorite RSS feed reader, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, and I’ll try to keep you up-to-date on the webcomic as we progress through this experiment together. Share it with your friends, because if I don’t have an audience of at least some magnitude, it’s going to be even harder to force myself to commit to this project.

But most of all, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I hope I enjoy creating it for you.