Happy Boxing Day! If you’re reading this page in the morning, without prompting from me on social media that it exists, you must really be an avid fan! Thank you so much, but this is truly the last update to it! A little behind the scenes feature for you!
I’ve had the idea in my head for the advent calendar for several years - the broad strokes of doing an “advent calendar” with the initial conceit that Cammie is adding a decoration to the tree every day, but quickly things become slightly more of a plot than expected as stuff goes wrong, likely seagull related with everything becoming especially ruined when Cammie starts chasing it. It felt perfect for last year, to provide some “christmas content” while the comic was still in the Summer Special, but I just… didn’t have the energy to draw it last year I guess! This year I was feeling the same, but just had that moment of “if not now then when” and managed to summon the motivation after all.
In my head I always imagined it being drawn regular style, on a white background for ease, but ended up going with the more stylised picture book style because I wanted it to be warm and rich in colour. The specific core elements of the penguins weighing down the tree in a nonsensical funny way, Cammie tying it with a tense string to keep it upright, and the seagull biting it and flinging everything everywhere, I came up with only this year when starting work on it. Hard to pinpoint a moment but I’m glad all these elements came together.
Between work and regular comic work etc I knew I didn’t have the time to go “all out” on the art - I needed some sort of shortcut. I started by figuring out a “chibi” art style for Cammie on the left, then made a “doll” of separated parts that I could pose her in each day.
The art itself for Cammie was always drawn fresh over the top to keep it from (hopefully) looking TOO stiff. Only background elements and props were copy/pasted from day to day, although even though I tried to future-proof myself as best I could, about 50% of the elements that could have been copy/pasted and edited ended up needing to be redrawn from scratch at some point or another!
I planned out the entire calendar from start to end in sketch form so I would know what elements need to be drawn from the start and make sure my layering was done with consideration for what was yet to come. Below are all those in order, with additional commentary as they’re relevant.
The two penguin decorations are of course an obvious reference to “Bebu” and “STD’s” from the Summer Special Arc:
I got about 6 or 7 days into the calendar before realising I hadn’t drawn the black on their head connecting to the beak properly and had to go back and edit it in! Luckily I got a good 10-11 days done before the calendar begun on December 1st.
The little pastries Cammie made are called “Joulutorttu”.
I ended up moving Cammie to the left of the tree from my original concept here, so both penguins were visible. Funny how easy it is to not notice such obvious blocking issues when working with transparent sketches.
The next decoration is of course, Layla’s dog, Jamila (with little Reindeer antlers). This might seem outlandish to own, but I have several christmas decorations “of” my own dog… coz they’re rough collie decorations. And my dog is a rough collie!
I didn’t design Cammie’s Christmas dress up front - just wasn’t something I had time for and trusted myself to improvise when it came time to draw the full art for this day. I always planned from this point to do a surprise pin-up of Cammie in this dress for December 25th, so I made sure to design it to be appealing with that in mind.
The next decoration is the mascot from Bri and Cammie’s old favourite childhood restaurant, Milky’s. I imagine Cammie’s had this since she was a kid, some thing they were giving away there, and it’s probably a bit washed out and weathered now (but you try and depict that at the level of detail and rough crayon colouring I was working with here!)
What Cammie is writing in her letter was never meant to be a major point, but since it’s only barely legible - it says “Dear Father Christmas, my morality this year has been of an above average quality and I believe I am elgible for the following presents:”
In most cases I trusted my future self to remember what expression I had in mind for Cammie, but sometimes I left myself notes. I had the funny idea of having the seagull cast a shadow of itself inside the lampshade where it’s hiding, but it would be too obvious what had happened with the open window if I put it there on the previous day, but wouldn’t make much sense to not appear until this day (Cammie is looking at the window on the previous day so it must already have gotten in, but where is it if not in the lampshade yet? Etc).
Hopefully it comes across that the joke here is that it took Cammie 15 days to put out 5 decorations on her tree when it was implied at the start she would be adding one every day, and now she just suddenly fills out the entire rest of it in one go (of course, to make time for the climax).
Of the major decorations added, the top one is my childhood character Frogy, who has cameo’d in the comic in many places before.
The second one down is Professor Chin from my previous comic “Phantasm Dyad”, dressed as The Ghost Of Christmas Present from the chapter “The Christmas Carol Rip-Off”. (On Day 24 of the Chamomile Advent Calendar, he gets his top hat too!)
The third and bottom one is Fiss the Elf, from Louistrations’ Christmas game series “Get in Santa’s Pants”. Check the games out here! They’re lovely little christmassy romps that can be beaten in 15-30 minutes each.
(Art from the game by Louistrations)
I knew I had to slip some kind of Louistrations’ reference somewhere in here - Chamomile got a cameo in their own advent project based on their comic Apricot Cookie(s)! back in 2020. Said advent calendar appeared in the background of a christmassy Chamomile comic published shortly after, and there’s been an Apricot reference or two beyond that in the comic as well, but still I felt compelled to do something in my own advent thing, it only felt right!
I swore I drew a sketch of the seagull about to bite the string holding the tree up here, but I must not have saved it and just improvised the final seagull art on the day.
I scoured the whole comic, but was surprised at how unco-operative it was in providing “christmas decorationable” references to use for all the various decorations. I was really hoping I’d come up with some that would be particularly funny to hit Cammie in particular places for this moment, but didn’t really pan out beyond penguins to the eyes.
I considered making day 24 be day 25 and just have a depressing day of the empty room still just left as is on day 24, but I think a single day is enough for the moment, no need to really tease it out - like, as if I’d actually end it so depressingly!
In the end I decided it would be more narratively satisfying if Cammie’s christmas was saved by her friends instead of a bunch of shaved T-posing Cammies with cheaply done height/width adjustments, but this version of the ending is definitely less cliché.
Below is the “palette” of resources I built up over the various days for my own reference, mostly colours related. The “1. Snow! 2. Candle!” were reminders that every day I had to cycle the snow to the next variation (I knew some folks would want to navigate through all the days one by one and it’d look rubbish if the snow stayed the same in every picture), and edit the advent candle to have another day burned off.
And finally, here’s the hellscape of gore that results in turning on every layer at once in my sketch file, for anyone who just wants to take in the whole story at a glance.
Thank you for reading and Happy New Year!