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Quest Sprout was first introduced to the Swords comic series last year, and quickly became one of the most popular characters. Now I've teamed up with Makeship to make plushies, which will only be available for a limited time. QWEST!

Quest Sprout is a small green hero from a fantasy world where everyone and everything's weapon of choice is a sword. He's always wandering about asking the locals if they need help on a "qwest!" and he'll always take the job, no matter how small the reward is.

More info: makeship.com | twitter.com | Facebook | Instagram | patreon.com | ko-fi.com

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I Made These Comics About A Quest-Loving Adventurer, Now He's A Limited Edition Plushie

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Paul Haraida
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Somehow made the most agonizing quest the most innocent thing I've ever seen.

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As a kid I grew up on Mark Kistler's Draw Squad, which taught me the fundamentals of cartooning. When I got a bit older my work started getting heavily influenced by Pokemon, Dragonball Z and Yu-gi-oh. I think there are still a wide range of anime influences in my work. Even though people often compare my work to Scooby Doo or Tin Tin because of the simple faces, I don't really consider those strong influences on my style. My comics started out as traditional lineart, colored digitally with a mouse, which is the way I did several short-lived comic series - but after my mother and brother bought me my first Surface 4 drawing tablet a few years ago, that's when my comic career online really started to take off. With a drawing tablet I can work anywhere, any time, with a lot less steps between creating the art and finishing the coloring process. A little sketch can be online within seconds of me drawing it.

To create a comic usually takes about 2-3 hours, from concept through to lines, coloring, shading and finally lettering. My sketch process is usually very rough to save time. I think I enjoy the lineart stage the most. All the other bits are just work! The longest step is usually doing flat coloring because I tend to go crazy and add a lot of small details. When coming up with concepts, working within some simple constraints like "everything has to be about a sword" might seem restricting, but in reality, the opposite tends to be true. You can begin to experiment and bend tropes while always having a clear goal. I think the hardest part is how many ideas I've had to scrap because I couldn't quite make them swordy enough.

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By design, my comic series is quite chaotic and the series isn't told in any particular order. This gives me a lot of breathing room to explore some alternative ideas if I get stuck on a particular joke or story arc. I generally avoid burnout this way so I can keep working sustainably. Because I have a full-time job outside of my comics, doing about 3 updates a week is all I'm committing to currently.

I've had someone describe my comics as "a brief moment of joy on my timeline". I think social media has become quite a stressful place, where you can just doomscroll for hours being shaped by the most negative outlooks on a range of topics. If my comics can break that up a little, I think they've served their purpose. My Instagram was originally just a place for a mixture of art and selfies, it was only when the comics started taking off on Reddit and my following count started to climb rapidly that I rebranded it into a dedicated comics account. I've since made a new account for selfies and other comics and if that happens to take off in the same way, I might have to do the same thing all over again.

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What motivates me as an artist right now is building a financial foundation so that I can go into making comics full-time. Swords has had a lot of unanticipated success, but I still have deeper, long-form stories that I want to tell, that I started years ago. It was that string of failures that really made me appreciate at the very beginning that Swords was something special that I should keep working on, from the way people reacted to it. Those other stories still live on in my heart, though! I want to work on them too!

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#18

I Made These Comics About A Quest-Loving Adventurer, Now He's A Limited Edition Plushie

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I Made These Comics About A Quest-Loving Adventurer, Now He's A Limited Edition Plushie

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Isaac Molchak
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I love these!! But they're way out of order and that makes following the story line a bit difficult... Qwest...?🤗

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