Jerzy Drozd

As I said the other day, I’ve been working towards making Doctor Baer figurines using Blender, Forger, and a 3D printer. I managed to put together a decent T-Pose of the Doctor:

And a friend of mine, who has been helping me out a lot with this work, pointed me at Mixamo, an Adobe product that will automatically rig your model and let you download some basic animations:

After drawing this character for over 20 years, it is wild to see him moving around like this.

His staff is done, and I’ve started posing the rigged model:

Once he’s off to the 3D printer I’ll share the results!

Last weekend I blogged about my excitement having made Doctor Baer’s house with my new 3D printer:

Which got a friend of mine to point me at the iOS app Forger, an iPad version of Blender. Over the last few days I’ve been working on a model of the good Doctor.

Next I need to sculpt his staff, then I’m going to try posing him and making some figurines!

I’m continuing to practice digital watercolors in Procreate while developing ideas for another Doctor Baer book.

For those in Team Pickles who have been following along with the process materials for the next book, this is the scene where our heroes follow the anxious monk into a secret chamber wherein the Hoary Harpoon is kept. Naturally, Pickles is more interested in the opportunity for music-making.

I might go so far as to say that the watercolor brushes (at least, the ones I’ve found), feel even more natural than the ones I’ve used in Clip Studio Paint. But that comes with its own trade-off in that their realistic color mixing pulls the transparent pixels into the edges of my selections. I’ve tried to adapt to that in my approach.

But one big plus I wish someone told me about a while ago is that, unlike CSP, Procreate lets me paint in CMYK. That’s reason enough to keep practicing.

The environment was made in Blender, imported into CSP for penciling, inked on watercolor paper, and colored in Procreate. And big thanks for the color production assistance from Cailea Williams!

Back in September I shared my excitement over learning Blender well enough to create a 3d model of Doctor Baer’s house:

Blender models can easily be imported into Clip Studio Paint, which will make drawing the next book much easier. Here’s a piece I’m working on supported by the model:

But having recently purchased a Flashforge Adventurer 3, I was ready to see if I could also make a print of the model.

It worked out pretty well! I’m excited about what this means for future Doctor Baer support materials. As I design models to support the comic’s production, I’ll also have an eye on how they might make for fun little tchotchkes to include in a convention table display.

I’ll be at Genghis Con Sunday, November 26 with students from my recent residency in Cleveland Heights (funded by a generous grant from the Ohio Arts Council!). And as always with these public events, I’ll be hiding art drops around the place:

I’ll have free Doctor Baer stuff, too! I hope to see some of you there.