For those of you who know me from my web comic, Itchy Feet, you might know I'm definitely able to draw a bug-eyed bean-like man with stick arms and legs:

But that fellow doesn't exactly fit into the world of the Merry Mariner. I worked a lot over the past year to improve my skills drawing people, and I'm getting much better. I'm no Bill Watterson, but it's enough. What I'm still not really good at is drawing perspective, landscapes, and cities (somewhat critical when building a world like the Seven Seas, full of wondrous places).

Luckily, I know someone who is good at drawing those things: my brother Erik.

In August, Erik and I were both back home visiting family, so I asked him to help me with a drawing of the Merry Mariner at sea. Drawing perspective is tricky enough, but drawing perspective with boats is even harder. Boats are a weird shape; from every angle they look completely different. So doing a three-quarters angle on the Merry Mariner - not just a ship, but a windmill as well - was frustrating me. But I recruited Erik, and together we drew the picture on the main page of the website:

It was great, because I could do a rough sketch of the idea I had, then he could hash out how he thought it should look. Then he'd hand the pad to me and I'd make the lines a little finer or adjust this or that, and give it back to him to fill in some more details. We'd pass the sketchbook back and forth until it was more or less done. Finally, I inked it in, scanned it, and colored it. 

I'm really very happy with that drawing, and proud because it was fun to work with my brother on it. I feel he's really part of this world now. It would be a cinch to draw these fantastic places I'd dreamed up, so long as I could pass my brother the sketchbook whenever I got stuck.

But then summer ended, and we went home. I returned to Berlin, and Erik went back to Bangkok, Thailand. Now what?

For Verona vs. the Doldrums it was okay, because most of the drawings in that story are of people or a corner of a room. I could manage by myself. But the next story, Waldo and the Spider's Sting, takes place in the city of Marjoram - a city carved out of huge stone spires, with swinging bridges, catwalks, and ancient ruins in the hills beyond. I was definitely going to need Erik's help. I couldn't just have him do the entire drawing, because I needed to populate it with the characters.

So how to "pass the sketchbook" halfway across the world?

My original idea was to mail the drawings to each other, but that would take forever, and you'd risk losing original artwork in the mail. Next I thought I would just do the foreground, and he would do the background. We tried this for the story's title picture:

First, I sketched out how I saw it, but I thought my city looked too much like a bunch of Christmas trees, and Erik agreed. So I inked the foreground and sent him a scan of it, and he drew up a background with a much more interesting cityscape. The idea was that I'd just combine the two in Photoshop. Background, foreground. Easy, right?

It worked...okay. The perspective is a bit weird - it looks like they're on something raised way high into the air, or flying, not down in the city's port where they're supposed to be. You can't even tell there is a port. Also, now that you're looking at it, you can see our drawing styles are quite different. This is not Erik's fault, he did his job. It's just the nature of trying to combine two separate images into one. They don't really fit together.

It's actually a great image for the story's cover, because a Merry Mariner cover should tell you three things: 1) what the problem is, 2) whose story it is, and 3) where it's taking place. This one covers all three pretty well, so if the perspective's a bit off, who cares?

But for the drawings in the book itself, I knew we needed to refine our method. By now some of you may be thinking, why not just do it digitally? Draw it with a digital pen, and collaborate on the same document in the computer. Trouble is, I don't like using the stylus pen tablet thing. Everything I do these days, I do on the computer. I like that drawing is the one thing I still do with actual pen and paper. I get to look away from a computer screen for a little while. I do it for Itchy Feet, and I'm going to do it for the Merry Mariner. Erik feels the same way.

Anyway, the final drawing should look like we just sat down and did it together, in the same room. Today, I believe we accomplished that:

Here's how we did it. 

First, I sent him a photo of my very rough sketch, and told him what I didn't like about it - for example, that I didn't want the ruins to be clichéd Greek ruins with columns and triangular roofs (despite drawing exactly that in my sketch). I wanted it to look more Turkish/Levantine (Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, etc). Erik did his version of the drawing, inked it, and scanned it over to me.

I printed out Erik's drawing and taped it to the backside of a piece of tracing paper. Then I sketched over the entire thing with a pencil, detailing it a bit, and adding the Wild Man on top based on my character sketches. Finally, I inked the whole thing and brought it into Photoshop for final line work and shading.

I'm quite happy with this one. It seamlessly combines both our styles, looks compelling, and works visually. It's not one of the more complicated drawings we have coming up, but I think this established a viable method to follow. It doesn't beat passing the sketchbook to Erik in person, but considering how many thousands of miles are between us, it's not bad at all.


- M. Ray Rempen

Well...it's finally up!

In 2011 I first had the notion of an inkling of a spark of an idea to write a series of all-ages stories about a family of adventurers who travel around the globe in their windmill-ship. I've always loved to travel, to soak in a local culture and wander the streets and markets of foreign cities, but I've never really liked the tourism part of it. I've always wished I could tramp through exotic, faraway lands, untouched by modernity or war, where around any corner there might be mystery or adventure. I want to visit Ottoman Istanbul and Qing dynasty China, be the first to explore the pyramids or scale Mt. Everest, to buy a talisman in Sri Lanka which will transport me to a colony of natives dwelling in huts in the jungle canopy.

So I dreamt up Verona Wicklow and the Merry Mariner, to visit this non-existent, nostalgic world in their shoes. They can take me - and you - with them on the impossible adventures on which I've always wanted to embark.

That was 2011. It's now nearly 2015! Over the past few years I've been building up this world, getting to know the characters that inhabit it, and fine-tuning my own skills as a writer and illustrator so that when you sit down to read a Merry Mariner yarn, you're drawn into the world like you're seeing it on the silver screen. Whether I've succeeded or not is for you to judge. 

In fact, you can do that right now! The very first short story in the series, Verona vs. the Doldrums, is available to you, for free, right this very moment:

Verona vs. the Doldrums was written to be an introduction to the ship and the family. We'll spend the entire story aboard the ship itself, familiarizing ourselves with the Merry Mariner and the Wicklows. Starting with the next short story, next month, we'll start weighing anchor in some of the wild and fascinating locales on the Seven Seas. 

As with every Merry Mariner story, Verona vs. the Doldrums is self-contained, so you don't have to read it in order to understand the next one. You'll be able to read all the short stories and books in any order you please.

As you'll see on the "Stories" page of the site, my plan is to write six short stories, each from the perspective of one of the members of the family Wicklow. There'll be one per month from now until May, and they'll all be free. Next summer I'll release the first full chapter book, The Merry Mariner Sails the Sands. There will be at least seven books in the series, and probably a number of other short stories sprinkled about as well.

This is just the beginning. I can't wait for you to see what's coming up. 

Welcome aboard!