Splorers notes / 23.01.2026
First update of '26
It’s been a minute since I last wrote one of these specific updates and I wanted to get one in before the weekend so you folks don’t lose any sleep wondering.
Since my last update, I’ve mostly been working on the iPad trying to get the story details done, dialogue written and pages thumbnailed and laid out. I’ve been chipping away at it and I’m now at 18 pages to cap off the next part/chapter/section of the story. I’ve been busy taking the thumbnails, scaling them up and doing a clean-up pass to create roughs which I can then ink up.
I’ve still got a lot of clean-up to do but I’ve also got a stack of pages printed out ready to ink. I inked page one last month and then kinda stopped to focus on the stuff I’ve mentioned before.
Working on the iPad has been great from a process perspective and I feel like I’m settling into a process which I’ll stick to going forward, and adjust as I see fit. That said, I’ve been pining to get my hands dirty with ink again. The relentless tap-tap-tapping on an iPad screen is nothing compared to putting brush to paper, at least to me.
2 hours of my Thursday evenings is spent taking my kids to judo, so this is often a good window for me to get some shit done. This week was no different. I spent the first 45 minutes reading a bit of the behemoth Usagi Yojimbo volume I got from Humble Bundle last Summer, then I broke out my pens and got to inking.
To me, inking always feels like a bit of a milestone. From this point on, things are pretty much locked in. I might adjust a few things digitally later on but once I’m at this point, I don’t really go back to change a panel or a page. So it’s now where I really start to feel like I’m making progress.
I’m still aiming to start publishing these pages from the end of February but the reality is I won’t have all 18 pages in the bank ready to go. I just won’t get that much work done in the time available.
My focus for the next few weeks will be to get the first 8 pages done, more will be happy bonus. As I mentioned in my ‘Plans for 2026’, I’ll be posting these on an ongoing basis until the story reaches its conclusion so if I can get to March with 8+ pages in the bank, I’ll have a good buffer going forward.
By the next update…
Posting a schedule here on the run up to completing Sourdough and Hopps was incredibly helpful at getting me to focus on what’s needed in the right order.
Week commencing 26th January
Pages 1-4 will be inked, scanned and cleaned up with flat colours
Week commencing 2nd February
Pages 5-8 will be inked, scanned and cleaned up with flat colours
I’ll plan the rest of February when I hit these two milestones. I’d best stop writing and get cracking.
Have a nice weekend everyone!
