Kayla from Earth: Character and World Building

Kayla from Earth started as a comic book I wrote and drew, then later explored by creating concept art in Photoshop. The story follows a woman ripped from her life on Earth and stranded on a fractured alien planet, where the wreckage of a thousand crash-landed ships became a city, and survival meant building a new life among species who had no reason to trust her.

This page is a look under the hood. It’s a breakdown of how I take a character or a place from a hand-drawn comic panel to a fully realized piece of concept art, using a mix of traditional illustration, photobashing, and AI tools. My goal with every step was the same: build the world by hand first, and use AI only to push that original art further and faster.

Below are some hand drawn pages from the comic book, as well as concept art I created in photoshop.

Below are process visuals of how I used my illustrations and concept art to build out character sheets and environment images with AI.

Once the character sheets were built, as well as some environment references, generating the cinematic scenes in Gemini while maintaining character consistency was much more efficient than my previous workflow of using LoRAs with ComfyUI.