Ayame

This is Ayame, the last character design to post from the commissioned project I'm a part of. I'm currently working on full colored pages for this project too, I may be able to post 1 if I'm really lucky but we'll see.

I think Ayame was my favourite she's a stylish and smart lady, it's too bad all the pages I'm working on for this project don't include her :( but they are still fun.

In case any of you were wondering I am available for commission there's a final profile post at the top by my other links. The truth is I've been doing commissions off and on for years but I recently realized I haven't been pimping that out as much as I could be, so here it is!

Transpose Operator Guest Art

It's that time again! To celebrate the end of Chapter 3, we will be having guest art. It's absolutely awesome stuff and I'm so happy about all the stunning artwork you get to look at! So enjoy! All the artists will have links to their various places online, be it blogs, twitters, webcomics, portfolio sites and such, I highly recommend checking them all out. Below is a preview of each artist and the date they'll be appearing, this will be updated with links as the weeks go by, so be on the look-out for this part of the post to be updated!

Tina Kim - Oct 29th
Matthew J. Rainwater - Nov 5th
Asiazia - Nov 12
Alicia Muhm - Nov 19th
Laur Uy - Nov 26th
Tara Abbamondi - Dec 3rd
Zach B. - Dec 10th
Ron Randall - Dec 17th

Extra special thanks to all of these talented people who contributed! You rock! Transpose Operator will be also be able to resume the 2 updates a week schedule once more after the guest art gallery!

Open Desert - Supporting Cast

Here's part 3 of my posts about a pitch Project I'm working on atm. I'm simultaneously working on a bunch of different projects, including several NEW pitch projects, the first Transpose Operator Graphic novel, setting up my second webcomic, working on commissions and a ton of other things.

Anyway! Back to Open Desert- this is part 3 which is about the supporting cast and notes about how the pages are planned.


SEIF: The leader of a band of desert nomads, he's a strong leader with an upbeat personality. Feena and the others meet his tribe by chance after escaping the prison. He leaves a strong impression on the three of them, his aid saves their lives and makes them start questioning the way they view themselves. Originally Seif was a bigger player, but having 4 main characters was overload, and I actually like him way better in a back-up capacity.

Man is this concept sketch rough, I'm not really pleased with his outfit in this, but I think it's given me a good start. Originally Seif had an eye-patch  but lucky for him I decided to give him both of his eyes as a final design decision.

Above we have Deemer, Anokee, and Hastor.

DEEMER: The head prison guard at the labor camp, he's a smart and brutal man. He's able to catch onto the fact that Feena and the others are planning something but he's not sure what. He makes it a point to keep an eye on them, and punishes them whenever there's even the slightest opportunity to do so. He's the 'villain' for the first part of our main character's journey.

ANOKEE: She's a knowledgeable sage of sorts and the matriarch of a small village of spiritualists who have taken up residence in an ancient abandoned city. She welcomes Feena and the others into her village, and her influence pushes them to make some hard decisions  The Anokee arc is about halfway through the story and I'm really excited about depicting where Anokee and her people live because not only is it an ancient abandoned city, but it's a half submerged abandoned city. Since the planet is mostly a desert it's kind of a big deal. This arc is also my biggest motivator to do the story in color because I know it would be awesome in color.

HASTOR: The main antagonist of the story, he shows up really early on but waits to make his move. His goals and motivations are very secretive, and as you might guess, he is not a nice guy. He's extremely underhanded and sneaky, often getting others to do his dirty work. His involvement in the final arc is a major game changer for everyone.

I was messing around with the idea of having a prologue to 'Open Desert', but I'm still not completely sold on it. I think I would have to thumbnail and script the entire thing to be sure about how necessary it would be. Below is my first attempt at it.

I like the concept of having a prologue. I think this sets up the situation and Feena and Nalo's relationship pretty well, but again I would have to plan everything out to be sure this was the best way to start the story.

And that's the end of part 3! I'll be revisiting this story at a later date, and posting some of the original art I did for it later this year.

Hire me for Freelance Work and Commissions!

In case you were not aware you can hire me for Commission Work as well as Professional Freelance Work.

The specifics can be found here: http://roxyssketches.blogspot.com/p/commission-roxy.html
and the page will have a permanent home in the right hand side bar, along with my portfolio and other art links.

Open Desert - Nalo and Mikah

Last week I posted about my pitch project that I was working on called 'Open Desert', and this is part 2!

There's three main characters in this story, Feena who I posted about before, her sister Nalo, and a friend they make while in the Prison Labor camp named Mikah. Our band of travellers are able to escape the dangerous prison but are of course labelled as fugitives as they traverse their desert world and look for a place to belong, and figure out who they want to be.


NALO: She's known for her beauty and friendly attitude. While She's friendly she's also pretty conceited  being the younger sister she was doted upon, and with Feena always looking out for her she never had much to worry about. Nalo is very confident and stubborn and rarely listens to others even though she's always depending on others. When she arrives at the prison it becomes undeniable to her that she can't depend on herself, and so her character arc begins.

Nalo is a lot of fun for me to work with since her character change is pretty dramatic. I'm looking forward to drawing her hair too, that volume is ridiculous, in a good way, haha. Nalo and Feena are basically opposites in not only their looks but their attitude, pretty much the only thing they have in common is their stubbornness.

MIKAH: He's a charismatic faker, to put it bluntly. He's a smooth talker and liked by most people, he's been at the prison for several years and his knowledge of how the place works in indispensable to Feena and Nalo's escape. Nalo is pretty infatuated with him the moment she meets him, Feena however takes an instant dislike to him and doesn't trust him. Mikah has a shady past that he's been running from, he thinks his time in the prison has put enough distance between it and himself; however his miscalculation causes it to catch up to him and cause trouble not only for himself but his two new companions. He's basically lived his entire life trusting no one but himself, but if he wants to survive he's going to have to change his attitude.

Freckles! It may be hard to see, but Mikah has a lot of freckles, it's a really fun design element I'm looking forward to messing around with. Mikah's joking attitude is going to be fun, it's so easy for him to set up Feena because she takes everything so seriously. There's plenty of drama in Open Desert, but there's a lot of comedy too, the characters play off of each other in a lot of hilarious ways.

oh yeah! Because it's the desert, EVERYBODY HAS CLOAKS! It was a lot of fun to personalize such a simple thing to each character to reflect their personalities. Sorry the sketches are so small and ghostly. I actually have a TON of older sketches from this story that show their designs better but it's on my old hard drive that I currently don't have access to :( When I go back to Alaska in December I can post them.

I have yet to do test pages for this story because I wasn't sure if I wanted it to be in color of black and white.  It's going to be a lot of fun messing around with the format, I can't wait!

Chapter 3 Q&A Page 4!

This is the last Transpose Operator Q&A page for Chapter 3! Go and check it out! I got a lot of great questions this time around that were fun to answer, thanks again everyone for your participation!

Starting next week there will be a dazzling parade of Transpose Operator Fan Art from some super awesome people. There will be a post covering all of them next Monday so be on the look-out!

I will be working on chapter 4 and various other project in the meantime. I will be posting the date of the Chapter 4 start soon- so watch out for that also!

Open Desert - Feena

A few months ago I was working on a pitch project that takes place in the desert. It's about two sisters who get thrown into a prison labor camp, and after teaming up with a fellow inmate the three of them escape and explore their world as fugitives and go on crazy adventures. It was a character story with each of the three main characters having their own arc. It would be a single lengthy book(Or possibly 2?). I'm going to be posting stuff with Feena, the primary main character now, and the other two will follow later.

Also... HOLY CRUD this is from 2009, that's how long I've had these characters and this story, of course it was very different back then, but still... it's crazy that they've been around for so long...


FEENA- She's a tomboy in every sense of the word and then some. Most of the time she's mistaken for a boy and she rarely corrects people for calling her one. In her world it's a lot easier for men as they have more freedom and are taken more seriously. However since she looks like a boy she's treated like a kid and it makes her quite angry. When she's thrown into the prison labor camp she decides to outright portray herself as a boy in order to protect herself and her sister. She and her sister are very close, but not in a healthy way, Feena enables her sister's laziness and is constantly protecting her and taking care of her to the point where Feena has very little self worth or self importance. Feena is a pretty good fighter, but her small frame makes it hard to fight against stronger opponents, she makes up for it in speed.

This story has been with me for awhile, it's morphed into a few different things at different points but I'm pretty happy with it now.

Really the dynamic between the three main characters is going to be super fun to work with, I'm excited about it. Their growth throughout the story is something I'm really looking forward to also since it's in a much shorter format than I've been working with before. When I shop it around to publishers, I'm also keeping in mind that I may just self-publish it too, we'll see. 

In the original version of the story, Feena and her sister enter a competition for an awesome treasure map, and along the way they fight the other contestants in multiple different environments. So while I ditched the competition element, among other things, the travelling element to their story has been essential. I've been a sucker for travelling stories for as long as I can remember, and I feel like it went along well with the internal journey all the characters were facing too.

Hope you enjoyed hearing about 'Open Desert', I'm gonna be posting more about it later, so be on the lookout.

Transpose Operator Q&A page 3!

And the 3rd page of reader questions and answers is finally here! Just one more to go folks! Luckily I was able to answer all of the submitted questions, so if you're waiting to see your feature it won't be long.

click on the image or go directly http://www.transposeoperator.com/?p=1284

Rin 2

Rin version 2! This is another character from the Chrysanthemum project I've been working on. She's the last of the school designs. This version of Rin shows her in the summer uniform. I'm currently working on pages for this project, it's gonna be great, I may be able to share a page or 2 when it's all over, we'll see.

Dustbowl Short Story

I recently worked with Himmleash to create a short story. They wrote the script and I provided the art, it was a great project to work on, I was able to push myself on black-spotting while working within a very interesting period of american history. I could keep going on an on, but it would be better to let you read the story instead.

I hope you enjoyed it! That ambiguous ending was just... haha... man when I read it I was like "YEAH! This is going to be fun!". Especially since I work in long form so often, doing this short story was great for a lot of reasons. 

But I'd also love to hear feedback from everyone out there! What did you think???

Transpose Operator Q&A Round 1

After each chapter of Transpose Operator there's a super fun readers section where you can submit your questions and get them answered by me, and the cast of Transpose Operator. Page 1 of 4 went up today! Go take a look!

If you've submitted a question, look forward to seeing it featured soon!