Issue 09: October 2025... The Halloween Special II

If you missed the last issue, you can read it here.

IT IS HALLOWEEN. So, we have the longest newsletter of the year. In addition to being the best season in general, Halloween is also a great season for art, so I hope you've taken in some beautiful ghosts and pumpkins from your favorite artists. This time, we'll take a look at a personal project, a book on my shelf, do some Q&A, and as always there is new Everhaven stuff and Lorcana stuff.

Here we go:

Re-Introducing: Mortimer & Stone

Halloween seems like a good time to talk about Mortimer & Stone. This is a comic series I started working on about 10(!) years ago, and it sits on the back-burner, simmering away patiently... it's one of those someday projects to scratch the itch for cartooning.

Mortimer and his best friend Stone the Gargoyle are assistants to a dastardly and inept mad scientist in a lugubrious mountain village. It's a buddy comedy full of ridiculous creatures and jokes that make me happy.

I have a handful of scripts, character designs, storyboards and outlines, and eventually I hope I can put them all together into real sequential form. For now, we can just check out the test artwork.

Anyway, I thought it would be good to officially re-introduce the project here so I can share (albeit rare) updates as they occur.

The Everhaven Archives

Some slightly spooky stuff from the lost world of Everhaven... these are some pets I designed to pair with the Witch player class, and a couple of mount creatures that felt especially Halloween-y.

Shelf-Discovery
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This was an easy pick for Halloween... Derek Laufman's The Witch of Wickerson

I've followed Derek's work since the beginning of time! He just keeps getting better, and these days is a force in comics as the resident artist on I Hate Fairyland with Skottie Young and Image Comics. The Witch of Wickerson is a short spooky fable (with some hilarious side characters) that Derek put together maybe five years ago, about a family of mice in the deadly clutches of a pig-witch. Derek's economical use of minimal colors and heavy inks is wonderfully done, BUT I have it on good authority there is also a full color French version on its way. You can get a copy of Wickerson on his website, and then join me in looking forward to more stories from the world of Wickerson.

Card News

Whispers in the Well is the mysterious 10th Lorcana set and its arrival is imminent. I did a lot of visual development on this set, including this splash scene for the box art

The cards for this set are looking great, I am really proud of the artists. Hope you enjoy it!

Q&A
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​I harvested some autumnal questions from the socials, here are answers that ran long. By the way these questions were asked by phenomenal artists...

Q: Do you fully sketch/line your paintings first or do you like to design it as you go?

A: There is nothing I love more than improvising a painting, which makes things like mood painting so much fun. However, it's not super realistic for client work with more specific requirements or aspect ratios. So I can definitely go into a mode where I line everything, but it's a very different mindset. In the interest of time, it usually ends up being a balance of the two.

Q: Do you have a streamline process for making your pieces? Or will it vary, if so how?

A: This relates a little bit to the previous question, it really depends who is driving the purpose/goal of the piece. For my own pieces, I don't really thumbnail or color study because I'm in charge of the outcome and solving my own problem. For a client or colleague etc, it's much more iterative and conversational because we're working to solve a problem together. So you might start with a very wide search and narrow down the possible solutions, whereas for my own piece I probably won't start drawing until I have at least some of those solutions ready to go.

Q: At your level of experience, do you still find yourself learning new things about creating art?

A: Yes! I have been learning a lot in recent years about exposure and chroma. One of the very good things about client and teamwork is it forces you into territory that's unfamiliar and you have to learn how to work with palettes and characters you haven't touched before. Also I find that your tastes change as you go along, so things you didn't think much about learning before become suddenly fascinating.

Stay spooky!

John

www.johnloren.com