SSSS concept art from 2011-2012

Now it's finally time for some SSSS-stuff! Old pictures (ahem, from last year, feels like an eternity ago) from the depth of my archives!

I haven't actually made a lot of concept art for SSSS. Before 2011 my ideas for the story were still so rudimentary that I felt more comfortable just thinking them all through instead of drawing them down. Believe it or not, I actually enjoy planning things in my head more than by doing it through drawings! And by mid-2012 I had started to do the daily aRTD pages and with school work on top of that I had no more time left over to draw...anything else.

And a year is a very long time when it comes to story development, so many of these concept art pieces aren't "accurate" anymore. Things have changed back and forth in the depths of imagination, I've chacnged, erased and added whole story arcs, adjusted the focus of the story and modified the visual language and design aspecst of the whole comic.

But the main cast, main storyline and genres have stayed the same, so these pictures are still representative of what the comic is about. So those of you who haven't seen any of these before in the Gallery/my old blog thing/Deviantart: oh yes, it's a post-apocalyptic story. (But oh no, no zombies.)

The three pictures above were a set of relatively quick paintings I made maybe a year ago as a practice to get accustomed to drawing these kinds of sceneries. Human made sructures are still my greatest challenge, I've spent most of my life drawing nature scenes and living beings only. And below are some slightly older scenery paintings for SSSS, thesewere among the first "speed-paintings" I ever made. (Speed-paintings for me is pretty much anything below 2 hours because I normally spend days on full blown digital paintings).

Then some pictures that aren't just scenery practices! I think this one below is one of the first times (if not the first time that I drew a picture of any of the SSSS characters that wasn't just a sketch of some kind. It was such a struggle!

Two more early-ish drawings of the same sort, this time I dared to draw four out of the six main characters! And some kind of...animal things, hmm. I'm not telling whether those are one of the major things that I've since changed for the comic or not, we'll find out.

Finally a group shot! First picture apart from sketches where I drew all of them. They used to have a military/cargo truck like that, but their task and financial situation has changed a lot since, so now they'll only get a crappy little van-vehicle with barely any cargo or sleeping space. And a leaky roof.

Then a couple of silk screen prints that I made during an introductory serigraphy class at school last year, and you can see my first pass at the SSSS logo in the group shot poster. Pretty different from the one I'm using now, huh?

And then something totally new that I finished yesterday: a group photo! I'm going to use this image for the layout of the main site, and maybe I'll wrangle it into a cool wallpaper too. I'm still not going to reveal any of their names, because the moment I do you'll be able to figure out where each of them is from and I want you to find that out as they're introduced in the comic. But I can tell your their purposes in the crew, I've done that before so it's no secret at this point.

From left to right: explosives "expert" - night scout, engineer/driver - captain/general combat person - cook/maid/nurse/second in charge dude - non-military guy who is totally lost and should not even be there. Hence the lack of uniform on him.

Ahh, so many smiling characters (okay, one smirk) after drawing so much scowling Hannu! They're all pretty nice, none of them has the kind of hostile personality that Hannu does, but they're also not very great at...anything.

And then the other things for today

By the way, I finally made a Tumblr account yesterday! It took hours because I was so confused about everything. Finally I broke down and picked a theme called "minimalist" because I had such a hard time trying to customize some of the more complicted layout themes. It looks pretty nice. And now you can choose to keep tabs on updates via the new Facebook page, my Twitter, the new RSS feed and Tumblr. I think I'll also use tumblr to post quickie-drawings or sketches so that they get collected in one place over time.

->>And here's today's batch of pages for proof-reading<<- only ten this time around. There were only a few typos in the last batch, and I'm trying to be attentive to keeping the dialogue well centered in the speech bubbles. So please leave a comment below the pages if you happen to see a typo or other weird thing. Thank you all, you're being great as usual!

I wasn't going to post a journal update tomorrow, since SSSS isn't going to update on Saturdays and I figured I better get you all used to that, but I think I'll post the old aRTD wallapers that some people have been hoping for. They're just wallpaper-sized versions of some comic panels, nothing spectacular. The next "real" post will be on Monday, I think I'll make that one about old sketches and character design pictures. And bah, I forgot to add the fouth minicomic to the store yesterday... new attempt today!

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