PROJECT JOURNEY
2019 - 2025

The Lord of the Dragons Comic Project

Published Sunday, 21st June 2026

As I put together the final changes to my first Lord of the Dragons comic before it goes to print, I thought it important to reflect on what’s happened with the project since I first started it in mid-2019.

I have intentionally neglected updating this website as I spent a lot of time and effort building this website (more of that to come later in this post) but then soon I realised that whilst I enjoy building websites (and I needed one), no one is really going to be able to enjoy my story until they can actually experience it for themselves.

I stopped adding anything to the website mid 2025 and even though I had a house move in that year, focusing the rest of my time on completing my first comic (rather than posting on social media, adding to my website and all the other work I do on the project) - which was the right thing to do. It sounds obvious, but whilst I was getting lots done, I was getting the wrong things done. I have developed 3D environments that I wouldn’t really need in the first few parts of my comic, so whilst I wasn’t wasting my time, I was creating things very far in advance of when I’d need them - which was a bit silly.

Often when I talk to people about my comic book project, one of the first things friends say is - that’s a long time all those years, why haven’t you finished it yet? My response is a mix of things - but probably because it isn’t really just a traditional hand drawn comic and there’s been a huge amount to do that I couldn’t have conceived when I first started. Yes, there have been times where I have paused my work on the project for months at a time due to things going on in my life, but really a large part of the project (as I review it in retrospect) was the time taken for each stage the project (and some distractions!). I have learnt a lot, done a lot and I’m really proud of where I am today. Here’s a summary of the 7-year journey that’s taken me from having a rough, unfinished draft of a book trilogy I started in my late teens, to now where I find myself on the edge of fully publishing my first comic at age 41.

Year 1 - My Comic Began as an Animation Project (2019)

I love reading, I don’t actually physically read much anymore (as I listen to 99% of the books I read rather than actually reading since 2016), but I have always loved the way I imagine things when reading them. Anyone that reads a lot will know that when you get an adaptation from a book to a TV series or film, it often (but not always) never quite hits how you imagine it will. I’m very particular about the Lord of the Dragons world, how it feels, what the characters look like and the details which you can only really create consistently (in my opinion) from images not words. Everything is so real in my mind, I want it to be represented for people to enjoy it exactly as I mean it to be.

So when in 2019 when I came across the 3D animation software Blender, my mind was instantly lit with a clear route of how to bring characters to life visually for the first time. The software was free, incredible in terms of possibilities and (whilst it took me much longer to learn than I had initially thought), I could begin to bring my characters and the dystopia in my head to life. I set out with the intention of doing the whole project as a video animation straight from the start and excitedly got started.

Drawing my Comic Book Characters

Whilst I consider myself very technical and yet also creative, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do everything by myself. I had a dozen or so characters who would feature in my animation and I needed to get all of these created in Blender. The very first step was taking these characters that had lived in my head so visually for so many years and getting visual mock-ups of them. I spent the next few months from April 2019 to November 2019 working with a very talented comic book character creator who drew these characters for me.

I also had some pieces created as visual mock-ups which I intended to use to flesh out my website.

Some of the characters in the comic I’m soon to publish are below and I’ll add in more of the characters as they enter the comics in real time, so not to have any spoilers!

Taking Concept Images and turning them into Blender models

With my concept artwork complete, I thought it made logical sense to get to work on the main character of my project - a human called Leo. I did my homework and found someone I thought would be able to bring the character to life in Blender. However, after about a month, I hit a bit of a snag. The person I had found to do the work didn’t really have any experience of rigging characters for animation and also it became quickly apparent they didn’t understand my vision of the characters visually. Despite them doing the work, I wasn’t really happy with where the character was, so decided to work with another character model developer - who I started working with in January 2020.

Click here to read the comic's project progress in 2020