doodles/brainstorming (full res. attached)

Been a busy summer and too long since I posted anything on here. Thought I was past the little book publishing burnout, but it's still hard to bounce back.

But scrolling through some visual notes from SPiKE now and seeing this reminded me of how much I love thinking of new scenarios and just escape into daydreams of this fictional universe and the boys' various little summer memories.

This one was sparked by remembering some of my own childhood memories, the good ones, like that unique sense of freedom of finally getting your own bike and riding around town all summer both alone and with a friend or two.

Made me think that even though Spike wouldn't have been given a bicycle, Sam most definitely would've had one. Saunders too, to make grocery shopping more easy since he doesn't have a car and it'd be a fairly long walk and the bus stop is far away etc... Saunders and Sam having a bike each just makes sense and I don't know why I didn't think of it before.

Spike would get to borrow Saunders' bike and Sam would have his own, racing each other to the gas station to buy ice cream on hot summer days or running small errands or just riding around for the sake of it.

In these sketches I imagined Sam's bike having a broken chain or flat tire or something, so they have to share Saunders' bike.

These types of scenes might be useful for scenes where there's a lot of dialogue and little else happening, or no dialogue and just some quiet moments to establish mood or passing of time or a location etc... I wanna give the readers a stronger sense of the little town they live in and how it sort of was their whole world for a while. Giving the boys bikes would make it easier to drag the readers along on a little sightseeing tour in a casual yet interresting way. Or so I hope anyhow.

...Plus I'll finally have to properly learn how to draw backgrounds, but with the purpose of creating a believable environment that feels as much as a character as the characters residing within it.

Also I had no idea to draw bikes so this helped a tiny bit xD

I might not have a lot of Spike-related art to show lately, but if anyone's interested I'd be happy to keep sharing my thought process on how I work, share some doodles I have lying around or something?