"John! JOHN! We've gotta do another one! Quick! Think of something..."

I'm kind of curious about John (Reppion)'s creative process, I should ask him to do the next blog post - does he have any idea in his head what I'll draw? Is it a surprise? ( I know the first one was... cus I just drew it without him knowing it was gonna happen) Does he expect me to pick out one detail then I go with another? Anyway, I have no idea. I should do something about it.

This week's folklore thursday topic is local food. Which prompted John to come up with:

Brambles grow wild across the UK. Their thorny vines bring forth sweet Summer fruit. The berries must never be picked after October 11th. This is when Lucifer fell from Heaven, landing in a blackberry bush. In  revenge he spoiled the fruit by spitting upon them #FolkloreThursday

Went through - what is now - the usual process, splitting it up in to panels as I saw it. Lucifer falling from Heaven was gonna be the big one, big fun old devil to draw. I initially wanted to make Lucifer look half angelic, a sort of glow through the middle of his body but, frankly, at the size I was drawing it, I couldn't get the detail in I wanted so I dropped it, went straight to the devilish form (it's one page, you don't have the space to mess around).

Panel 1 simple establishing show-we've gotta be in the UK (I wanted Northhampton, just for funsies, an industrial english town overgrown) but space and lack of familiarity with the place meant all I could do was get a skyline with a big chimney in there.

First three sentences broke down into three simple panels, showing an establishing shot, brambles, industrial town, then a close up of some fruit (and I threw in a nice little bird, for the sake) and the third panel tried to figure out a way to get the date in there, then realised I was torturing myself and I could just literally have a date fly past the panel.) Added the little bird flying away too.

I thought it'd be fun to draw the panels as vines (which is a pretty stupid idea, cus it was hard work) but it really did make it feel like a nice piece.

Split the line "this is when lucifer fell from heaven" and "landing in a blackberry bush" - irresistible to have satan have his bare bottom impaled on a couple of little pricks (er)

Felt I needed a facial reaction after the pricking of his bum (something wicked this comes), and then it came to the "spoiled the fruits by spitting on them" and I pencilled that. In conversation with John it turned out the myth has a few variants, he spat, he pissed and he ... well.. let's say he does something very deeply unpleasant to them that spoils them.

To me spitting on it felt... I dunno, less funny than the devil taking a piss on them, so that's what I did. I split the line so the "he spoiled the fruit" was rubbing up against the line of urine from satan (it's almost abstract, and you may not be sure what you're seeing) then "by urinating on them" is juxtaposed against the image the drawing of satan rubbing his sore butt. It made me laugh. And that's all I ask.

Like a fool, I coloured the first one, and thought - that's cool, I'll do b&w for any more. But no... I ended up colouring this one too.

I had to play with the placement of the letters too, because of those stupid vines I drew for panel borders.

Satan's reaction to the sting felt like it was missing something, and it was clearly missing a simple line of dialogue. I'd accidentally turned my primary colour to white in Clip Studio, so when I lettered it it was reversed (white text on black) but I liked that so kept it.

By the way, the black and white art for both strips is available to buy, if you're interested, just fire me off an email!