Learning to imitate Sombulus

While drawing my comic The Backup, I tried to learn and get inspiration from comics I read. Most of it was just observing and learning what I like about other comics, but I also tried to imitate my favourites. So far the only success I had was with Sombulus by Christina “Delphina” Major. With all the recent uncertainty about which social media platforms will float and which will sink, I decided to go old-school and write a blog-post. Warning: this post contains minor Sombulus spoilers!

Disclaimers

Let me start with some disclaimers. First, I’ve done all this work like, a year ago? But after I finished my comic, I picked up learning different styles (that I didn’t have time for before). I figured documenting my learning process might be interesting blog-post series (even if only for myself and my mum), so I dug up my old Sombulus-inspired art to keep the series in chronological order.

I have never added the drawings that resulted from this exercise to my gallery, because it felt too much like plagiarism to show them without context.

Copying Sombulus Style

Now, everyone who has ever read Sombulus knows that Sombulus style is a bit of an oxymoron, because each adventure is in different style, and for a good in-story reason! You can see some examples below:

Figure 1: Five Sombulus pages, each in different style.

Despite that, I chose Delphina’s style as the first one to learn, because a) Sombulus was (and still is) my favourite webcomic and b) at least some of Delphina’s styles seemed similar to picture I have drawn before, like this shroom guy below:

Figure 2: My old drawing of a Mushroom Guy.

The first step of my learning process was to copy an existing panel as closely as possible, without tracing of course. I chose a simple, colourful style and two characters, Astyr and Yannel from the main Sombulus cast (it might, or might not be because of the wings). Some things that I could immediately see is that Delphina uses less blended shading than I do, and I think more subtle. Something much harder for me to reproduce was the variability in the line thickness. I tried using a brush that changes the line thickness depending on the pressure, but somehow I couldn’t control it well enough and I couldn’t imagine where the lines should be thicker. Drawing the little corrupted essence dragon was fun too :)

Figure 3: A panel featuring Astyr. First: original comic panel featuring him. Second: my copy.

Figure 4: A panel featuring Yannel. First: original comic panel featuring her. Second: my copy.

I think the results are all in all quite close, they look quite similar on the first glance. I think in my copies the facial expressions are less pronounced. Now, of course the goal of this exercise is not to learn to copy the style, but be able to draw something similar myself.

Original drawing in the similar style

Around that time I was drawing Aziraphale and Crowley as a gift form my fried and it occurred to me that Kazar and Fedros have a similar dynamics that the angel & demon duo from Pratchett and Gaiman’s book. So I decided to take a stab at drawing Kazar and Fedros dressed up for Halloween. I gave up on the line thickness part and decided to focus on shading. I’m quite proud of the result (below), tho Fedros doesn’t look as mischievous as I would like him to.

Fig. 4: My own original drawing of Sombulus characters Kazar and Fedros dressed up for Halloween as Aziraphale and Crowley.

Final thoughts

If you liked this blogpost, you might like videos by Srish, where she dissects other artists styles professionally :)