As a test, a remaster of the cover(!) of my first Patreon comic: The Spoiled Prince and the Witch.
Now for something unexpected. (first image the remaster, second image the original)
For a long time, I have considered selling my Patreon comics as standalone downloads for people who don’t want ongoing subscriptions or aren’t interested in downloading each file separately. However, just putting all my pages into a single folder and selling it for $5 or $10 feels cheap to me. Because of that, I figured they should include some bonus material so they’re actually worth buying. Among other things, I decided that I should remaster my older comics using the skills I have today.
And so, this month, I decided to try remastering an older image of mine. Not redrawing it—just reworking the lighting, colors, and backgrounds—to see if it could actually be done the way I imagined. (This one is special, though. If I decide to remaster the entire comic, I won’t upload every single page again as bonus art of the month.)
And it worked. …Well, sort of. It was a LOT more time-consuming than I expected. Granted, the actual coloring was done quite fast, but the background was a pain. Back then, I mostly redrew 3D background models by hand, but this time I wanted to do it properly. Unfortunately, the original file was quite corrupted and crashed the 3D app frequently, so I had to give up on it and manually remake every single visible part of the castle in this image. And don’t get me started on the nature part of the image—only the horizon was something I was still quite satisfied with from the original drawing, haha.
As for the drawing itself, it was really unfortunate that I had drawn the individual hair strands directly onto the final image instead of on a separate layer, which meant I had to redraw them. They do look better now, but I definitely wouldn’t have done it if I could’ve avoided it. One thing that really improved compared to the old picture was the clothing. Granted, I’ve only started drawing clothing like this over the past couple of months—and mostly for close-ups—but I’m still glad I could improve it here. The thing I wanted to improve the most was the skin. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking back then, especially since it doesn’t look that strange in the following pages. While I was at it, I also slightly fixed the head shape, though nothing major. For the mini guy, there wasn’t much I could do beyond general color improvements using my current techniques.
Here is the original upload from April 2025. I’ve been doing this Patreon thing for 11 years now, it feels kinda weird. https://www.patreon.com/posts/2283025
Wow. Not only did this remaster take a long time, I also ended up writing a lot.