Valiant, the story behind the story.

This all started as the world went into lockdown.

I was looking for a creative outlet that wasn’t as messy as ink and paint that I could carry around with me where ever I went.

I started using Procreate on an iPad, thinking of it as just another medium I spent more and more time getting used to using it as a basic drawing tool.

As part of this process, I started illustrating fun single-page stories that I could share with my nieces and nephews back in New Zealand.

This became a fun way to interact with them as they started to throw inspiration back at me. As the stories became more complicated and intricate, that soon evolved into “The Meeting of Wonderlationship” which ended up being a monstrous ten-page long saga.

The next ‘Book’ was an attempt at a longer narrative story, on purpose this time… It was taken from a suggestion about the hidden relationship between Wonderlationship and Cornica, two of my niece’s toys.

“Valiant and the Oracle” ended up being 25 pages long and felt brutally difficult at the time.

Inspired by the improvement in the technical and creative quality, I took on the next project “Valiant and the Space Dog” which imagines our friends traveling to 1957 to rescue Laika the soviet space dog. (and our dog’s namesake.) a huge leap forward in technical quality, by now I had really started to dial in some of the more interesting techniques that really made it all come to life. Drawing on many years working in visual effects, I used similar techniques in layering my drawings as I would use compositing CGI render passes.

Seeing the huge leap forward in having honed these techniques and improving my drawing I took on the latest story “Valiant and the Temple of the Cat” The story and some of the characters developed with my nephew. It takes the friends on a crazy adventure to ancient Egypt, and when finished will end up being more than double the length of “Valiant and the Oracle”.

After all these stories, the characters have definitely come alive for me, and they continue to evolve and speak to me from the page.  I’m excited to share this next adventure with the world.