Come One, Come All! Slip Behind The Curtain And Meet
Paul Duffield
So Paul, tell us about yourself?
I trained in illustration and animation at uni, and I’ve been a professional creative in a variety of fields for about 12 years! I’ve worked as a comics artist and writer, an illustrator and designer for books and magazines, a storyboard artist for film, and as an animator.
Main Projects:
My main project at the moment is The Firelight Isle, a tale of coming of age and cultural discovery in a civilization watched over by mysterious masked priests. The main characters are Anlil and Sen, who are childhood friends about to be parted as Sen takes the trail to join the priesthood, and Anlil weaves a sacred offering. Patreon helps pay for it all.
Other Hobbies, Guilty Pleasures and Obsessions
Many! I play a lot of video games and watch a lot of TV, including tons of anime. I play a variety of stringed instruments for fun, and also do a lot of board gaming (currently making my way through Gloomhaven with a friend). My most consuming hobby is probably LARPing, which I love designing and making outfits for, and writing music for when I can too.
So, tell us about your early experience. How did you fall in love with telling stories in pictures?
I’ve been obsessed with drawing from a very young age, but in terms of telling stories with pictures, it was really the beginning of online comics that did it for me. When I was in college I was introduced to the idea of producing your own comics and posting them online, so I started a webcomic, and hunted down a lot of comics by other amateur creators (there were no centralised webcomics sites back then). That really sparked my love for making comics.
What media and programs do you work in to produce your project?
Typically just Photoshop, although I also use InDesign for publishing books, and when I’m working on animation, I use Premier Pro and After Effects, too. I also sometime used 3D programs like Sketchup and 3DSMax to create reference models.
Can you tell me about your typical day or strip-creation session? How does your work process flow from idea to finished page?
If I took a snapshot of a single day of creation, it would normally just focus on one stage, like doing linework all day, or doing colouring all day, since I try to break the process into stages and do it in batches. On the production side of things I think I’ve managed to streamline my process quite well, and I work heavily with another amazing creator, Kate Brown, who can take on most of the process for me if time is tight.
On the ideas and writing side of things, it’s much messier! I use a hacked-together combo of written notes and scripts, along with thumbnails and sketches of various levels of detail. I’ve done a LOT of re-writing on The Firelight Isle, so there’s very little of the script that hasn’t been completely changed since I first started writing it.
You use a lot of religious overtones in your work. What attracts you to this theme?
I don’t follow a particular religion, but I find religion and the study of religion absolutely fascinating, and I’m always drawn to accounts of spiritual experience, possibly because I’ve never had any myself! Seeing the supernatural and sublime in the things around us seems to be a deeply rooted part of human nature, and I think it would actually be very hard to write about people without writing about religion in some way. Even if people aren’t explicitly religious, they often approach reality and community in religious ways.
You've used a lot of information about weaving and dyeing. I'd love to hear about how you do research for your project.
Research is one of my favourite parts of a project! Apart from a general interest in clothing and sewing, for The Firelight Isle, I watched a lot of instructional videos on weaving and dyeing textiles, along with visiting museums with exhibits about weaving, and looking into weaving techniques from a variety of cultures and times. I also got a couple of huge books which catalogue contume and clothing patterns from peoples around the work. It’s amazing how deep a subject it is! Despite looking into it for a long time, I think I mostly just discovered how much I could never know without hands-on experience.
What’s the most difficult part of your work?
I think the most difficult part is the totality. All the individual processes - the writing, the art, the design, the research and fun and challenging by themselves, but drawing them all together and making them into a working story is the hardest part. There’s always so much to consider in every panel, and my mind can only hold so many concepts and thoughts at a time.
Can you tell me about your storytelling process? Do you prefer to script your stories, fly by the seat of your pants, or somewhere in between?
A combination! I like to know where my stories are heading in a lot of detail, so I’ll plot them out beforehand, and in the case of The Firelight Isle, I’ve written a full script. But in terms of the pages themselves, I’ll often be changing layout and dialogue right before publication, and the parts of the script that I haven’t started drawing yet are constantly in a state of flux. It’s like taking a bunch of loose strings and knotting them together - the loose ends flop about and get tangled as I go, so I stop to untangle them from time to time.
How much of a buffer do you like to keep?
I’d love to keep a huge buffer, but I’m not able to do this full-time, so I don’t have any at all! Episodes take a LONG time, so my only choice is to post as I complete them, and even that’s not regular enough to build and maintain an audience reliably.
What’s a question you’d like to answer once and for all about your art and/or that question you’re sick of getting asked?
Haha! This is a great question. With The Firelight Isle, I guess the question I get asked most often was “is it inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender?”, to which the answer is no. I watched Avatar for the first time last year and absolutely loved it, so the comparisons are flattering, but the story and visual style of The Firelight Isle is something I developed before I’d even heard of Avatar.
If you could send a note back to yourself when you began working on your skillset, what would you say?
Hmmm, tricky one! I think I’d encourage myself to try and find a mentor. Someone who had all the skills I wanted and could help guide me in learning. I had to do a lot of self-discovery as I went through education - my tutors were all very skilled, but none had that experience in stylized figure drawing, comics and naturalistic animation that I had to struggle to gain.
What message do you hope readers take away from your work?
I think that unless your work is highly instructional or didactic, hoping for your readers to extract a specific message is a somewhat doomed enterprise, and once your story is out there, you lose all control over how it’s interpreted.
So, in the absence of having explicit lessons or messages that the characters spell out, I try to work with concepts and themes that run throughout the story. The Firelight Isle is about a few things - searching for your identity, finding your place in your culture, where you draw the line between your duty to yourself and your community, and how you feel excitement or fear about the boundaries of your world.
I try not to reach specific conclusions about these things though, because they’re questions with so many answers that explaining them away reduces their power and complexity as elements of a story.
What keeps you devoted to telling the story you’re telling?
Some sort of madness I think... I’ve been doing this for nearly seven years now, and unless something surprising happens, it will probably take another three to complete! Seriously though, there are a number of things driving me on. One is the simple desire to finish, to sit back and look at a completed thing and feel that sense of accomplishment. Another is sheer stubbornness and the sunk cost fallacy. Another is my belief in my original vision for the project, which if I’m honest has wavered a lot. My understanding of the themes and material I’m working with has changed drastically over seven years, but to a certain extent I’m stuck with the ideas and attitudes I had back then. Even so, at the heart of it, I think The Firelight Isle is a story worth telling, and I hope readers feel the same way. I also feel a deep sense of gratitude and commitment to the many people who have supported me along the way, not least my Patreon supporters who make it possible to continue.
Thanks for a great chat, Paul. And a hundred thanks for the wonderful work!
Hurry Hurry Hurry! Got Your Ticket? Come and See The Edifying Explification of Zoe Sugg, As She Discusses The Use Of Toys For Reference!
Technique Tuesday: Toys/Modeling
References! A critical part of any artist’s toolkit. I’ve got several folders of bookmarked links for photo references, but even after I’ve spent some time searching, sometimes I STILL can’t quite find the right angle/pose I’m looking for.
Plus, searching takes a ton of time! So that’s why I prefer toys and 3D objects as references!
Understanding How it Works
One of the things I love about using models is that you can really get a tactile experience of whatever-it-is you’re trying to draw. Let’s take a refrigerator! I know that:
It keeps things cold/frozen
You need a handle to open it
It’s gonna swing out, towards the viewer
The food inside sits on shelves
Notice anything crucial missing from the above list? Maybe not… But you certainly would if you were using it! Where’s the door shelves?! Oof, I can just imagine opening the fridge and watching all my beer, ranch dressing and energy drinks spill out. What a nightmare. And because I understand how important that is to the function of my fridge, I know I should include it! And now my fridge will look a lot more complete.
Same goes for referencing a 3D model of something: When I had to incorporate a mail truck into a pitch, I went and bought a little 6-inch mail truck toy. This little thing helped me figure out how the back opened up, how a driver would sit in the front, etc.
Cost
“But ZuZu! Toys are expensive!” you say? Well… yeah, some of them, definitely. I have a few Bandai figures that cost…. Uh, a lot. $30-80 depending on extra features. And the only real solution there is to save up your commission money or wait til someone owes you a gift (perhaps several someones… I’ve asked friends to collab on pricey gifts before!). My Bandai figures are WELL worth the price for the articulation that they boast.
Thrift It
But I also have this handy dude~!
He’s regularly some kind of expensive classroom model, but due to the power of Thrifting, I found him at Goodwill for $5. Hey, don’t look at me like that! I draw a lot of horror comics! He’s not creepy! …Not THAT creepy. Anyway, he’s gonna help me with a lot of great references when I have to show people getting their guts ripped out :3
I also pick up random things when I find ‘em on sale. No idea what I’ll use my tank for, but it was in the $1 toy bin at Goodwill and it came home with me. Keep your eye out for what you can pick up, borrow, or grab for cheap. It’ll come in handy *someday.*
Getting the Right %$#*ing Angle
Now, I might be about to commit Art Blasphemy(™) here, but sometimes it’s also helpful to photograph an item and import the image into my drawing program.
Look, I’m a cartoonist, ok!? My brain doesn’t think in 3-dimensions! 2-D is best D! There’s times that you just canNOT understand an angle. The foreshortening refuses to work, the proportions just aren’t coming out, whatever. When I’ve made 20-30 attempts at something and keep hitting a wall, I’ll often import my references. And most of the time, if I end up tracing/working over it for a bit, I realize that I had a super simple fix that I just wasn’t seeing. Maybe that angle needed to be WAY more acute than I’d realized, maybe I just didn’t put the shoulder far enough back and that’s why the head was looking too large, etc.
Honestly, I’m not a purist. If it’ll help my art and help me get a better understanding, I’m all about importing my images.
Go Buy Some Toys!
Now that I’ve given you an excuse to indulge your inner 5-year-old, get out there and go buy some cool stuff! I’ve included some links above, or you can go hunt around and support your local economy! Send me pics of the awesome reference tools that you find! I’m @ZuZu_Cartoons everywhere, happy hunting!
So Paul, tell us about yourself? 
