Now you may not know but Emerald Dream harbours some amazingly creative talents amongst all of the pixel people. Whilst browsing the official forums I discovered two such types in the forms of a couple of shifty looking Undeady types!

Introducing here Necrall and Necralla (aka Scott and Laura Atkins) the bad boy/girl creators of “A Cup of Tea.”

Necrall – bad boy? Please… I’m a goody two shoes carebear!

Firstly guys, thank you for agreeing to have a little chat with me, its always great to hear about people doing fun and interesting things on Emerald Dream, I personally have really enjoyed looking through your back catalogue of comics, and look forward to more people on the realm enjoying them.

So where do these creative juices flow from, are your jobs/backgrounds in the creative field?

Necrall – I’m a games designer, so as such I need to be the creative mind behind games, not just story, but art direction, mechanics, controls and overall feel or atmosphere of the game. How this relates to the comic is I come up with the initial ‘joke’ and then expand on it with props, stances, speech and delivering of the punchline then let Laura do her work.

Necralla – Chocolate. I eat exorbitant amounts of chocolate and that’s where it comes from.

Necrall – Laura… you’re umm leaking some creative juices. Oh wait no, just drool.

How do you come up with the storybook concepts for the comic, what are your influences?

Necrall – LOL MEME. No really, a lot of them are based on internet memes, Zergling rush, the All your base..

Necralla – “I had a Necralla, but I eated it” hehe.

Necrall – Aye, the lolcat one. The characters are all The Firm members, some of the concepts, despite being memes, are based on conversations we have in Gchat or on our forums.

Necralla – Sometimes they continue, sometimes they’re just random. Depends on how we feel.

Necrall – Murky was Necralla’s murloc pet, we came up with that due to her love of the cute harbingers of death. Later on we then won the Blizzard 2008 Valetnine’s competition so now Neca has a real little pink Gurky.

What mediums do you choose to use for the production of your pieces?

Necralla – I used to draw in pencil then ink it. After that we scanned it in and Scott coloured it in Paint Shop Pro.

Necrall – The early stuff was awful. I spent more time cleaning up Laura’s lines than colouring. I used Paint Shop Pro 6 and I used various filler and grabber tools, they freaked out if lines didn’t connect up so I hads to fix all the loose lines before colouring. We used to save it in JPG but I really didn’t like how pixelly and blurry the images turned out, so we put the comic on hold till we found a better way.

Necralla – I use a WACOM Bamboo drawing pad, it’s a nice big A5 size compared to what I used to have. It’s huge! Like the size of my wee laptop. I use Photopshop 7 for all of it. The lines get drawn there then I colour it with lots of layers. The sketches are all really scribbly and pink then I go over it properly in black. I put all the base colours down, then my shadows then highlights with blurring. Lots of blurring, I dislike cel-shading.

Necrall – I spend my time now doing design work and making my own games, so my colouring skills go unused. Thus Laura’s better at it than me now and I have to admit Photoshop makes it look easier than how I was going about it with masking and all that nonsense.

I myself work in the Creative industries so I know what a WACOM pad is, for those that don’t would you care to elaborate?

Necralla – A WACOM tablet is a big piece of plastic that you use a pen shaped thingy to scribble on and it magically appears on your screen. It makes me think back to when I was in art college doing still life. We weren’t allowed to look at the paper only the object, I found that really hard. You have to use a Wacom like that as you’re looking at the screen constantly.

How do you compare the use of digital mediums and the more traditional use of pots of paint, do you favour either and why?

Necrall – I prefer Digital. I’m not a very good or accurate artist, so being able to undo my mess is a necessity (Ctrl + Z FTW). While I don’t do any art on paper, I do enjoy building and painting miniatures. I’m a slacker though so haven’t touched my Warhammer 40K models in a couple of years.

Necralla – I like traditional, but I take forever to do them. There’s paintings from three or four years ago that I haven’t finished yet. I’m too much of a perfectionist always going over lines, then I ruin the picture and have to start over. But I like digital because I change colours to what I want, delete lines and go back to what I had before.

Necrall – In other words indulge your need to spend two or three hours doing one line.

Necralla – Yes to make it perfect. My mum and dad always said they’d rather have something made than bought, think that was more when you’re little and don’t have any money. So I used to make their birthday cards and Christmas cards and anniversary cards every year, I found it fun so now I do it for everybody. Although Scott get’s the special ones.

Necrall – People look forward to her cards more than the presents, seriously! They’re always personal like putting the person in a funny situation like dressed up as a Thundercat or her dad doing gardening wrong by planting himself alongside his pumpkins to be ‘one with the pumpkin’.

I like to do my research on people before I interview them, and SHOCK I found a photo of Necrall playing what looks like a PSP on his wedding day! We know you play WoW what other games do you guys partake in and do they have any influence on the artwork you produce? (I’m not a stalker honest!)

Necrall – Stalker fail. It was a DS with Pokemon Leaf Green. I like a lot of games. I love RPG’s, FPS and RTS the most. Though I’ve been known to dabble in a lot of Puzzler, Casual and flash games too. I really love the Indie development scene and what they produce. I gladly buy short £5 games just to support them. The work I see in various games inspires my own designs and own stories but plays little in the comics I write.

Necralla – I don’t think games have an influence on my artwork, I love looking at everyone elses art, I spend each night looking through new deviants and the artists I have on my feedreader. When I’m not playing WoW I’d be playing Scrabble or Boggle, little silly games that require no concentration whatsoever.

Necrall – That’s because your mind can’t concentrate on anything not chocolate or pink related.

Necralla – You make Laura crying face :’(

You both have kindly agreed to be contributors to Emerald Dreamers, with “A Cup to Tea” owning a regular spot, can you tell us what we have to look forward to over the next few months!

Necrall – A Cup of Tea was originally done as an in-joke comic for The Firm featuring Firmlings. Heck even the name is an in-joke from my very first raid in The Firm in Karazhan where I served Moroes a cup of tea… bag. We’ll probably continue with Firmling characters but with jokes everyone can appreciate. In other words JOO GET LULZ.

Necralla – Whatever Scott bribes me with real life cups of tea to draw. I try not to venture too far into Scott’s mind, I’ll get lost in there.

Necrall – *lost in thought*

The latest Cup of Tea is here for your pleasure…..

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