Otto & Olya Page 1 “commentary”

I’m in a Discord group with a few other artists and when I told them my intention to redraw everything I’d done on O&O so far it was met with pushback - they thought that despite my growing dissatisfaction with what I’d already drawn, it was better for me to just accept it and push forward, because it was better to complete a project than “chase my own tail forever.” It’s not the worst advice, but looking back on the old pages I really did feel like they were not anywhere as good as they could be, and I had made some stylistic choices in them that, if I wanted to stay consistent, would have proved to be very time consuming in the long run.

Page 1 originally looked like this:

It was drawn and rendered digitally, before I made the decision last year to start drawing on paper again, and one of the big motivators for me starting over was that I wanted to have actual physical artwork instead of only files on a hard drive. It’s a little more time consuming for me but I think the value of having physical ink and paper artwork is higher than ever.

The other thing that I thought was a mistake was that I was doing a fully-rendered “painted” style which would ultimately have driven me crazy with the amount of work involved. I had considered that I could treat it like some manga where the first few pages were fully detailed paintings before switching to inked lineart, but I didn’t like that idea and wanted to stay consistent. Inked lineart with flat tones is much easier to accomplish in the long run, and when considering a project that’s going to run for possibly hundreds of pages you have to make concessions for efficiency.

I also just didn’t feel like this page was convincing enough, it felt very empty and barren, and I wanted to make the page a little denser.

Klub99 is not a real place but it is an amalgamation of a few clubs in Berlin that I go to or have been to. One of the things that’s interesting about these clubs is that they are often very discreet from the outside, they just appear to be industrial buildings with unmarked entrances. I like the idea of passing through an unremarkable door and descending into a different world hidden from the outside and that’s the effect I was going for here.

The name Klub99 is a little nod to the 1971 giallo film Short Night Of Glass Dolls. Giallo movies are going to be a big influence on this story as you’ll soon find out…