PROJECT JOURNEY
2019 - 2025

Lord of the Dragons Comic Project
(January - March 2020 Summary)

Published Monday 6th July 2026

As 2020 started (for what was still my animation project at the time), I began the year with a strong vision for my story. After discovering the excellent free-to-use animation software Blender (and with the added benefit of using similar software like Photoshop since the early 2000s, and becoming quite skilled at it), Blender felt familiar, yet also different and more advanced (as inevitably it would be).

In early 2020 in an attempt to move the project along as quickly as possible, I was initially working with 3 Blender 3D character designers. One designer was initially creating one of the dragon models for me for a scene later on in the story, another was creating the main human character Leo who features in my story pretty much from the start and another was creating Summer, the lead female character in my work.

It quickly became evident that even though I was working with 3 people that said they could all do the same thing, one was much more experienced in creating realistic models than the other two. What I had initially thought was a good idea became an expensive lesson in trying to get consistent results.

What wasn't so obvious from the start was that there was a large skill difference between the artists. Each had similar portfolios, but in retrospect I can only blame myself for not asking the right questions up front.

I didn't ask the right questions ultimately because of my lack of experience. One of the artists also turned out to be more skilled in creating low poly models for video games where smaller file sizes matter over detail and also two of the three didn't really have solid experience in what's known as rigging. There was also a tendency it seemed for people to say they could use Blender if they also used other 3D programs and I think the crossover isn't potentially as straightforward as at least one of the artists thought it would be. There is a saying that “assumptions make an ass out of you and me” and this was correct in this case - I had assumed they would all know Blender character modelling to the same level because I had watched a number of YouTube videos of how the process goes.

So with 3 models created, in reality I had one that was actually usable. The dragon model was very good (and rigged) but had gone through a lot of revisions (60+ models!) and the two character models were essentially not how I wanted them to look and with no rigging.

At this stage in early February 2020, I realised things weren't working. Working with 3 people was difficult because each person interpreted things differently (and as mentioned before), each had varying skill levels. I didn't ideally want to work with just one person as I thought it was a risk to the project (even though I was learning Blender myself) but this person and I just understood each other and their work was first class.

Because of this, I asked them to take an existing model and enhance one of the human characters to see what their work was like comparably, because comparing to a dragon model wasn't really like for like due to a number of reasons.

Great Expectations, Great Results.

The instant I opened the file and saw the changes they had made, I knew this person was the person I wanted to work with on this project – the model was fantastic and exactly the translation I had wanted from the original artwork image to a Blender model. This character had been in my real-life dreams over a decade earlier and it was uncanny how alike the model now looked to the actual character in my head. After a couple of months of things feeling like a lot of hard work and expense, I was ecstatic with the results.

In March 2020, as almost everyone in the world knows, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. I continued to work on the project and another model was tweaked to get it how I wanted it to be. I don't want to post the earlier models for comparison - because at the end of the day, two people did work on these to try and create what they thought I wanted. But the quality for me from the artist I have now worked with for a long time was so exceptional that the models were almost incomparable in detail and quality.

By the end of March 2020, I had five models created from my story. At the time I considered these finished, but in reality, what I was about to discover in the coming months was that when you are creating posable 3D models, there is a lot that you can't test until you actually start rigorously using the models for their intended purposes.

An Accidental 3D Distraction

For the Lord of the Dragons project, I have always had big ideas. In early 2020, I think I was (in retrospect) chasing too many of them at the same time. I was thinking about animation, voices, animated logos, theme tunes, trailers, environments and more – all of which needed to come together for the project to work as I envisioned it. I worked on all of these things at some point during this time, but won't add further detail to them here as most of them never were used for any purpose although may be interesting details of how I got to where I am in the future.

As someone who always has a lot of ideas (and in my younger years was very entrepreneurial), I decided from 2019 to focus solely on this project - as I had penned the works of this project many times over the previous years, but never committed fully to it.

What do I mean by that? Well, honestly, writing my story as a book was how Lord of the Dragons first started, but I quickly realised that wasn't what I wanted to create. Namely if I'm honest with myself, I never “finished” writing because I would procrastinate too much about the words I used and the details and the consistency of characters and lore chapter to chapter. The project as an animation removed all the things I found difficult about writing the story as a book and instead instantly it felt like it gave me the creative freedom I love to have. Blender enabled me to almost instantly bring things to life visually and focus solely on the story I wanted to tell; not whether I had accidentally written one section of the story in the past tense by accident!

But what having the 3D models did create for me was an accidental distraction. I have always loved technology and understanding things that the majority of people don't seem that interested in. In this case, it was 3D printing. At this time I was interested in both 3D printing models and playing cards to accompany the series. I put the latter to bed because I didn't have the creative I needed to work on these (although I do want to pick them up at some point) and my interest in 3D printing now I had my own characters in a printable format was well and truly sparked!

These distractions were essentially the same problem I have had throughout my life - an inability to focus on one thing as is required (i.e. progressing the story) because I think I have so many other good ideas that could become something. I missed the irony that I was being distracted again by 3D printing, because to me at the time, 3D printing the characters was a part of the project and I loved the thought of having character models standing on my shelf to see every day as I worked on the story.

I subsequently spent hundreds of hours printing and failing with models, namely because I started with an incredibly intricate one as my first 3D print (A HOGG, or House of Green Guard with an open wingspan that proved almost impossible to print!) and it took me a while to fully understand supports and structures to make printing easier. It was also in the early years of 3D printing (and not at all like it is now), so things were much harder to get right from the start. I have written a few posts about this a while ago now which you can read by clicking here and have since printed most of my early characters. The first model which took more of my time than I care to remember to get right – a HOGG called Landarco is pictured below.

Needless to say I enjoyed learning 3D printing, but what happened over the next few months following my 3D printing era was I began to focus on environments and actually getting the animation project back on track. What happened next was full scale environments and facial animations.