About
About Pyra
Hello there, I’m Pyra Draculea (yeah, I know… I was a teenaged goth and saddled myself with a ridiculous name when I was 19…)
A bit about me: I’ve been cartooning since I was a kid and currently have 2 cartoon worlds, Noah’s Archipelago and Ricky B. the Rock N Roll Rat. My first real comic was Zamo the Destroyer, which I used to post on my Myspace 20 years ago.
I’ve had a couple other comics I didn’t really do much with, such as What the Hell?!, and aside from making comics I’ve always had an overactive imagination full of entire strange character sets with their own lore. Some of these have occasionally come into tangible form, such as The Nick White Show, others will never see the light of day.
(I also used to make obnoxious experimental noise and industrial rock as maQLu, but that’s a story for another day.)
Aside from on my own sites and social media, my cartoons have been published in Discorder Magazine back in the day and on my math homework all throughout school.
While I have done some digital cartooning in Procreate (the first almost four years of Noah’s Archipelago until recently), I prefer the old-fashioned analog way and mostly work in black & white on paper, usually using India ink on Bristol Board with a non-photo blue pencil underdrawing.
I am currently working on a few books of my comics including the first Noah’s Archipelago treasury, an omnibus of all the Zamo the Destroyer comics, and a Ricky B. the Rock N Roll Rat graphic novel called Ricky B. Goes To Sea. And because I apparently still have too much free time and I have the attention span of a gnat, I am also developing a new comic world inspired by my time in college radio.
About this blog
Whenever I take painting classes or the like, I tend to default to making art about my characters, which leads to people asking me about them and then when I babble on about the backstories, I am frequently asked “how do you come up with all this stuff?” I’ve also been in writers’ groups where I am complimented on the depth of my worldbuilding and been asked for tips on worldbuilding and characterizations.
On the flip side, in January I started livestreaming working on my comics, graphic novels, and related illustrations, and people sometimes ask me in the chat how they can improve their art or improve their comics.
I figure I’m no expert since I’m stumbling along like anyone else, but I know a few things I’ve learned through trial and error and practise and research, so I thought maybe it would be useful to start putting out a bit of what I’ve learned and what I think works and maybe it might help some of my fellow cartoonists.
Here’s the plan: I’ll aim for one post a week, which I will split off in different directions: post as a blog here, record an audio version for a podcast, and marry the audio version with video of me drawing for YouTube so as to make it accessible in different formats.
I’ll have a variety of main categories, including but not limited to:
- character development
- storytelling structures
- worldbuilding
- creativity and idea generation
- technical aspects of making comics (eg, book layout, page layout)
- materials tips and reviews