Amanda Kastner⬥StorySeamstress

Hello, friends! Today I'm launching my first-ever set of hard enamel pins on Kickstarter! You can get all the details here. Designing the Anne & Diana Enamel Pins The design process for these pins started with some tiny, 1" scribble-sketches in the back of my one-year project planner. (Side note: this planner has become an inspiration/idea catch-all in addition to weekly project to-do lists and I'm really loving it!) Next, I opened Clip Studio Paint and sketched the idea again digitally. The finished pins will be about 1.25" tall, so I scaled my sketch accordingly! I used a black brush to draw my final line art over the blue sketch. The black lines are on a new layer so I can easily hide the sketch when I'm finished. And here are the lines without the sketch behind them! The lines show the part of the pin where the metal will show. Now the fun part--color! I chose the colors from a Pantone color chart to help make sure the actual pins are more-or-less the col

If you follow me on Instagram , are one of my Patreons , or get my newsletter you probably know what's been keeping me busy lately... My first graphic novel! I've been posting the story online in weekly episodes (it finishes the end of April 2019--you can catch up here!) and now I'm ready to print it as a 100+ page book. This is what 100+ pages of story looks like--whew! You can check out the Imaginarium Kickstarter campaign if you'd like to pre-order a signed copy of the book--plus some other fun stuff like posters, pins, and original artwork!  Oh, and I have one last thing to share... free wallpapers! :)

Hello friends! Here is the final part of the 3-part series about creating my webcomic/graphic novel, Imaginarium . Part 3: Sharing the Story Guys, I've decided this is my favorite image from this series of emails: 100 pages (+2 short stories) all in one place! Yay! Now I have a story...but who will read it? My goal was always to make a printed book, but I knew that online it would find a wider audience as a webcomic. So, it's time to make Imaginarium webcomic-friendly! I took my finished pages, chopped them up, and rearranged them into a long, scrolling format that's easier to read on small screens. It was an interesting challenge to reformat my pages, making lots of decisions on how to cut and space the panels to give a smooth reading experience! I tried to choose natural breaking points for each weekly episode, usually turning two pages into an episode. I used several different cover images for the story...I'm still learning and experimenting, but the goal is an intr

Hello friends! This is part 2 of the 3-part series about creating my webcomic/graphic novel, Imaginarium . I hope you'll enjoy this little glimpse behind the scenes! Part 2: Drawing When you think about drawing a graphic novel, this is the part you probably think of first. But really, it turned out to be the easy step! Time-consuming, sure, but much less mental work that the planning/writing stage. In March and April of last year I gave myself a goal of drawing something every single day, even if it was only a few lines. At the end of two months, I had all of the pages drawn, inked, and scanned. This what 120 inked pages look like! Working from the thumbnails I had already figured out for each page, I first sketched the pages in pencil then went over the lines with ink. Page Process: Thumbnail, Inks, Scan, Color! If you want to see scans of all the original pages (seriously, all of them!) they're available at the "Honored Guest" tier on my Patreon! Page Rules To keep

Hello friends! This week I'm starting a short, 3-part series about creating my webcomic/graphic novel, Imaginarium . I hope you'll enjoy this little glimpse behind the scenes! Part 1: Planning When I'm working on a story-based project I've found I need to have decided on these two things before I can really get started: 1) Characters & Setting 2) A theme! 1) Characters & Setting For me, this is the part that usually comes first. It basically answers questions like, who, when, where? I had the idea of an eccentric baron who, in pursuit of the perfect estate, hires all of the necessary characters--a phantom, a hermit, a band of outlaws... Later I coupled this idea with the image of a girl washed up on a beach beneath a castle. Who was she? Why was she there? I had no clue, but I wanted to find out! So, I had a general setting and a cast of could-be-interesting characters, but without a theme to give meaning to the story, they'd just wander around pointlessly