About The Project
Bound Blades is a project that has gone by many names since I first started working on it in 2005. It started as a story that was aiming to be a political commentary on the state of the world in regards to the imbalance of powers within our society and has since evolved into a Dark Romance with some political commentary.
The thing that I personally know it for, though, is the story that started my creative journey that led me towards my art style as it is today, so welcome to the most uncomfortable look back at my creative journey that I have to offer with the oldest story that I’ve been developing.
All character designs, concept work and illustrations were completed between 2005 and 2023. All work can be clicked on to be viewed at a higher resolution.
From Humble Beginnings
A Look Back at the Start of Everything
But first! A Heads Up
This Project Breakdown is going to be a hell of a lot different than the other project breakdowns since Bound Blades didn’t start as a project that was meant to be shared publicly. It started purely as an attempt for me at 18 to even start learning how to draw and write a story and that’s… it.
That means that this page will contain a hell of a lot of artwork that is not even remotely close to how I draw now as well as screenshots because for some reason, me at 18 didn’t really save a lot of final files of what she was doing and instead was weirdly obsessed with taking screenshots from within the art program (?????????? This is where I begin internally screaming) or they were done in an art program that I no longer have access to and is 100% defunct.
This is all to say – please. I beg of you. Temper your expectations when it comes to what you’re about to see. The work that I did back at 18 was not necessarily bad but it is different, and this page is more of an in-depth exploration of how I started my journey creatively than any kind of a flex because by god, looking at everything I used to do is incredibly humbling in every possible meaning.
Bound Blades as a concept came at a time where I started to challenge myself creatively. Up until then, I pretty much exclusively only drew in what was in alignment with anime and manga art styles of that time (with a heavy helping of Kingdom Hearts Influence). Around the time I started tinkering with this idea also coincided with my pursuing higher education which caused me to start thinking about what it meant for me to take drawing seriously.
Part of that involved me focusing on how to design characters with diverse features. It started with me doing an art series with my own interpretation of Disney Princesses and then led towards the development of my first legitimate original characters: Nadia – a half human, half vampire mercenary for hire.
Developing her character design made me realize something that I didn’t realize before – even after trying to do my own interpretation of Disney Princesses: A lot of my perception and relationship towards how I drew – especially when it came to female characters – was wholly defined by idealized Western or East Asian beauty standards. When I started developing Nadia, I felt an intense need to challenge that. I wanted to make a character that felt like she was actually my character. As a young adult who was processing a lot of heavy experiences and trauma, I really wanted to design a character that felt like she had actual weight to her and didn’t come across as a female character who was floating through everything going on.
This would inevitably lead me towards embracing designing a character with features that at the time were usually rebuffed when it came towards female characters: Strong Nose, Strong Jaw Line and Uninventing eyes – features that I would hear throughout the years would make her seem too masculine to be considered a woman.
Looking back, it feels weird to see that this initial design would be considered so challenging that any time I shared artwork of her online, people were quick to jump and say that she is a literal impossibility, especially considering how her design has evolved since then.
Either way, I being the person that I am, took that criticism and did what you obviously should do: Double the fuck down and embrace everything that everyone says is impossible.
At some point in time, her design just became a marker for how I would relate to my style’s evolution. Even though I couldn’t work on this project constantly, I’d always pull the story back out and begin working on her design and artwork to see if I was actually succeeding in achieving my goal of making her a character who had a defined sense of presence that you didn’t continually see.
It also became even more important to make sure I was communicating who I saw Nadia to be as I started focusing on developing the actual story. The world she existed in wasn’t pretty. The work she did (a Mercenary) was also not pretty. There was nothing really pretty about her in any capacity and I wanted to embrace that about her character and how she existed in her own reality.
Working with her character made me learn how to be a lot more conscious in how I was depicting the characters that I drew. It wasn’t enough to just create a character that was challenging. Every time I would turn back to the project, I could tell just how seriously I needed to take that characterization of everyone in the cast. I was no longer finding myself bound by my original sources of inspiration and instead was staring at something that would become the central defining aspect for my art style around 2016: These are stories about people, and people are what I needed to see.
It didn’t matter if they were elves, werewolves, vampires or anything else. At the end of the day, these stories captured the lives of these characters as they lived and I’d be doing them an injustice if I didn’t put in the effort to capture that part of them.
Capturing The Beauty in the Dark
Another obstacle that I found myself having to deal with was coloring. I’ve been working pretty much digitally exclusively since I was around 11/12 years old (literally started drawing on the computer using a Mouse and MSPaint). When I went to school, a lot of my focus was on studying traditional painters and that really shows in the coloring technique that I started exploring when I first started really taking my art seriously:
To be honest, I don’t really think I ever considered the work I was doing particularly bad, just not effective at communicating what I was hoping to communicate.
Then around 2013, I started exploring the avenue of turning this into an actual graphic novel and I started really thinking about her as a living, breathing being which made me start confronting even more ideas around how I was depicting beauty: Up until 2014, women who had dark skin and natural hair were not really dominant in my work so I made the decision to change that.
Nadia was no longer pale skinned with straight hair. While I always intended for her to be Black, the idea of how to depict Black people in any capacity was something that sat pretty intensely in my blind spot. After some decision making, I ended up updating her design to who she is now – a dark skinned Black woman with curly hair. This at the time was a pretty big deal for me with the story starting to shift towards a romance because I – a Dark Skinned Black Woman with Natural Hair – never really saw women who looked even remotely like me in the kinds of stories that I always wanted to see.
It was exciting to me to start writing a story where a dark skinned Black Woman was being actively loved, adored and protected even with the kind of high risk work she did in her day to day life.
What I wasn’t expecting was how much of a learning curve tackling the coloring for this would be. I never learned how to color dark skin or non-straight hair. I never really learned how light effects and reflects off of dark skin differently than it does lighter skin. I never really learned how to capture different textures unless it had to do with something like clothing or other man-made materials. I also didn’t really know how to properly capture Darkness – in any way shape or form – without everything being lost in the shadows.
This is when I started taking coloring more seriously and – you betcha – started challenging myself to think about how to reflect the darkness and heaviness that existed within the story that still allowed the characters to shine through more clearly. At some point I realized that dark didn’t have to be literal. It can be something that was more evocative in tone and could be more reflective of the mood being set than literally having everything being dark and shadowy in coloring.
I started embracing my love of vibrant colors and started experimenting with how I could use bright colors to make things appear unsettling. I took time to learn lighting, spent more time working on color theory and just let myself mess around until I got to the kind of end result that I was looking for. I also forced myself to get away from the usual muddy-earth tones that we were used to seeing when it came to High Fantasy. The world felt drab and I was just hungry for some colors that felt like a feast for the eyes in what it was trying to tell me.
Honestly? I’m very happy with where I ended up landing. This project basically helped define what I would consider not just my drawing style but my coloring style in a lot of ways. It pushed me to embrace a lot of things that I’d consider inaccessible to being able to see in the kinds of stories that I loved as a teen and as I started to grow into an adult. It taught me how to be a hell of a lot less afraid of embracing the things that I was often times criticized for like being moody or having a lot of intensity. Especially as a female creator, there’s a huge spectrum of my own humanity that I often feel denied with actually loving and accepting. There’s often too much pressure for us to come off as overly feminine in a way that denies the fact that we can and do go through dark and trying times. With how complex the story is turning out to be, the last thing I wanted to do was have an art and coloring style that implied levity when even the topic of Love and the choice of Loving and Being Loved is it’s own existential quandary and central focus to the story.
I didn’t realize when I first started developing Bound Blades as it were just how important it was for me to understand just how to make it look the way I’d want it to in order to better support the story but now? I’m definitely in a position where I can say confidently that this is a story that’s ready for me to start writing.
And look. There’s even a logo ready to go and everything:
