Elizabethan Autumn
Changes to Words of Interest
Words of Interest, as some of you know, is my "word of the day" comic in which I use royalty free victorian artwork (or my Whale an Squid characters) to not only tell a joke, but hopefully teach the reader a new word they may have never had a chance to learn. Personally, out of all my comics, this concept has always been one of my favorites. I love learning new words and finding fun ways to put them in sentences and/or use them in my daily vernacular! Using clip art (borrowed or made by myself) also provides me with the opportunity to work on better jokes because I can spend less time working on art and challenge myself to write something outside of my box. Though, I will admit sometimes I don't land every joke, but really that's the point; This comic is also a writing exercise for me to become a better writer as well.
Victorian Cadence
As much as I love this comic's concept, it has definitely been my least visited site out of all my comics. This for me has always been a shame. A few of my favorite jokes I've ever written are Words of Interest jokes! In the time of my hiatus I've brought prints of some of my favorite Words of Interest and ALT. comics to shows and people have liked them both equally. This for me is reaffirming, though raised questions for me as to why it's not as popular on the internet. After discussing with people here and there I've come to find that people don't even realize that Words of Interest is another L.A.W.L.S. comic. This led me to investigate as to why this may be the case. I began looking through my archives and realized a few things rather quickly. I believe a huge factor in this is that other than the Whale and Squid characters, there really is no L.A.W.L.S. "presence" in them. It dawned on me that I should perhaps add some of my more signature characters, namely Cadence and Autumn.
Example of an Elizabethan dress.
Researching the Era
Considering how much I enjoy the Victorian esthetic I figured this would be a fantastic opportunity to learn more about it and dabble in drawing my own versions of classic styles! I spent some time researching cool Victorian hats, dresses and other things from the time. I learned though that when you search the word Victorian on Google or any other search engine, you also find a lot of overlap in Elizabethan styles as well. Unfortunately I didn't realize this when I first drew Autumn. It was a reader on Facebook that call it to my attention. At first I was worried that this would be something that would ruin the concept, but after further consideration I realized that it didn't really seem to affect what I was going for for the art: the essence of class. So, I decided to go ahead and leave Autumn in a more Elizabethan style but made sure to draw Cadence in Victorian garb. This leads to an interesting side note. The style of dress I chose for Autumn ended up giving her a bit more of a Queen-esque feel, which I liked because I've called her the Goth Queen before.
Examples of Victorian dresses
Victorian hat references
One thing I learned from this research is that I really wish women still wore hats. Maybe not the Victorian styled hats, but there are plenty of elegant choices that I think look really pretty. Am I alone in thinking this? Would any of you ladies out there wear them if the modern fashion provided you with choices that fit what you were wearing? I'm sure there are modern hats out there... but when I've gone to hat stores looking for top hats and such, it seems like most of the women's hats are hats that would only look nice if you were wearing fancy dresses. Even then, I feel like you'd have to be going to an era theme party to wear them. I don't know, maybe I'm weird. Either way, because I liked the way a lot of the hats looked I decided also that I would give Cadence I super flowery and crazy looking one.
Preview of an upcoming Words of Interest!
Looking Forward
Since I'm talking about Words of Interest so in depth, I'm sure you're wondering what you can look forward to with this project and when I plan to implement all of this. The newly updated Words of Interest will still feature a few comics with the two main Gentlemen I've been using thus far, but I will definitely be adding Cadence and Autumn. If people seem to take to the change well, possibly I'll add the betta fish or even Hatticus and other characters. Is there any particular characters you'd like to see Dapper'd up?
This is also a good opportunity to announce that the next book I plan to release will very likely be a Words of Interest: Volume 1. The reason being, I will be posting a lot more of these comics while I continue working on L.A.W.L.S. Volume 2 behind the scenes as well as release new ALT comics (the main object here is to be able to make better comics for my readers, while actually being able to post content). There will be more information on this later though. Let's move on to what I'm sure most of you are interested in: when I'll start these comics again!
FERLY (FER-lee) noun;
Something unusual, strange, or causing wonder or terror.
To that I'm gonna say: I've been holding off on posting again until a few things line up. A major thing is the fact that I'm trying to figure out exactly how I'd like to deal with the whole website situation I am in. Up until now I've been hosting several sites for different comics and projects. Remember how I stated above that people didn't quite understand that Words of Interest is in fact part of the L.A.W.L.S. Universe? Well, I think one reason is that it had it's own site. I've recently decided as a way to lower the amount of maintenance I have to do, so that I can focus actual comics, is that I'd like to put all my comics in one place. I'm in talks with a programmer right now who's hopefully gonna help me develop a site that host all 3 comics in one place: L.A.W.L.S., ALT. and Words of Interest. Depending on what we are able to do, the comics are going to either be hosted here at Corvink or at a single L.A.W.L.S. domain. Do you have any opinions on this matter? Frankly it's gonna come down to what we're able to accomplish but I appreciate your opinions. I mean, you are in fact the reason I am doing this! Either way, I'm hoping that in the next few weeks him and I will be able to figure this out and I'll be able to update you all on which it's gonna be. Till then I will continue to post production blogs and post samples of things I'm working on over at the Corvink Facebook.