The Making of Yemaya's Origin

1, 2 and 3: This is the sequence as I originally sketched it out last summer. I really liked the first page, and a couple of the TF sequence images on the second, but I wasn't really happy with it overall. I really liked the first couple of images on page three, with Gabriella/Yemaya looking in awe at her massive new muscles and her costume forming on her, but I hated the costume design and wanted a longer sequence of Lauress casting off her old woman disguise. I also thought the mini-TF sequence squeezed in at the bottom was a bit overkill, even though it looked pretty cool.

4: Because the TF sequence on page 2 just didn't sit right with me, I went back and did it again. For some reason on this version, I had Lauress back in her guise as a voluptuous Amazon. I think I planned to have her reveal herself before an amazed Gabriella before her own transformation took place. With hindsight, this was probably a better idea, which I came back to try and address when I redrew page 3 (more on that later!)

Although again, I liked some of the shots from this revised sequence, it still didn't nail what I wanted it to be in my head. So....

5: I drew it again! And, same story, I liked bits of it but wasn't happy with it overall. I liked the blossoming flower motif and the shot of Gabriella's rear exploding from her shorts on the first version. I liked the two figures in the top right hand corner on the second. I actually was quite happy with the third version, but I thought it would be a real shame to ditch all of the good stuff from the other attempts. So--because I'm a 'have your cake and eat it' kind of guy, I decided to try and take all the bits I liked from all three versions and make an epic double-paged sequence!

6: As mentioned earlier, I also wanted to look again at page three. I liked the original, but didn't like that costume and wanted to do a more detailed sequence of Lauress de-aging back into her usual form. This was a fine page, but the problem was I didn't love that shot of Yemaya flexing as much as the one I did on the first attempt. She just felt a bit lost in that Temple courtyard there, and the first one seemed to better convey size, power and rapture. I did love that little sequence of Lauress, however I knew I could not reasonably fit it on to the original page three. I inked it anyway and decided I would figure out how to incorporate it later.

7, 8, 9, 10 and 11: I wanted to keep the basic structure of the MK 1 TF sequence. I inked the bits I wanted to keep and digitally scrubbed out the bits I didn't. Then I did the same for the other two pages before merging all them together. When I did I found that I had a lot of negative space to fill, so that was an ideal way to put that Lauress sequence in there. I liked the two transformations occurring in tandem with each other, although I do wish I'd been more disciplined and just added another story page before Gabriella's transformation to detail this.

As I said before I really liked the motif of the blooming flower as a metaphor for the power blooming and blossoming within Gabriella. I drew a lily to overlay the image of the Alta-energy shining from Gabriella's vulva to emphasise this.

When I was drawing this I was reading an awesome Wonder Woman graphic novel called Historia. The art is incredibly detailed with lots of double-page splashes of beautiful design motifs and elegant drawings. That was definitely the inspiration for this-- a mad, florid page where there's lots going on. Obviously I can't compare anything I do to true geniuses like Phil Jiminez, but I do like to dream big! I guess It's at least a step up from when I used to ink crudely drawn boobs in biro, anyway.

Before I coloured anything I scanned all the black and white art and created a mock up of the page to see how I could fit it all together. I was a bit worried that it just wouldn't cohere at all, and I'd be left with a load of disparate images that I couldn't really use. However, I was quickly able to come up with an arrangement that I was happy with, so I got colouring.

I decided to stick to my original page three, despite that I had stupidly already inked some of the images where Yemaya is in her costume. This meant I had to draw her flowing hairstyle over the top of the terrible balaclava-style headdress I'd given her and then painstakingly remove it digitally once I'd scanned the drawing in. I had to scrub out that mid-transforming Lauress because it wouldn't now chime with the sequence that occured on the previous page. This necessitated a new Lauress drawing, which I then pasted into the background. I also wanted to replace that mini-tf at them bottom-- meant to illustrate Lauress telling Yemaya that she would undergo a transformation every time she became sexually stimulated as Gabriella-- with a full body shot. I had to draw the lower half of her body on another page and then stitch it on to the top half. All unnecessarily time consuming! Maybe I should have just re-drawn it all from scratch.

12 and 13: When I was putting page two together, I thought it would be cool if there were ghostly images of other Altawomen swirling around Yemaya, as if they were welcoming their latest recruit. Having spent too much time on these three pages already, I was loathe to do any more drawing for it, but I remembered that I had done some sketches a few years ago that I really liked. I found the sketchbook they were in and scanned them. I didn't mind that they were pencil drawings as this gave the figures that faintly ghost-like quality that I wanted them to have.

14: A closer look at that Lauress sequence. De-aging TFs aren't really a kink of mine, but it suited the story I wanted to tell and I was quite pleased with how this turned out.

As always, thanks to Leee for allowing me to play in the sandbox he created!