Monthly production report 2026-05: KDE NEON install guide, a long making-of and Italy.
This is my (first) monthly production report for May 2026. I will try to make it a monthly habit. I publish these reports mainly to keep my monthly supporters informed about my activities and to log my progress.
If you want to join them, you can support my work on:
Weekly comics: Mini Fantasy Theater
As usual, I produced and published each Wednesday of this month four comic strips. From episode 51, 52, 53 and 54 (see them under).
While drawing episode 54
I'm still in the relatively new series with Url, the Adventurer, and Litchee, the Pink-Fairy. The month started with episode 51 where Url had a very questionable behavior: lying to Litchee about all the gold he spent for a magical violet dagger. Many disliked this trait in this character and this (toxic) dynamic inside the duo, and I received many comments about it.
In the episode 52, I tried to do some "damage control" and could make Url express sincere apology and an act of redemption.
Then, came episode 53, where both transform into fishes: this one had a story easier to understand for a wide audience, and I decided to pick this one to record the full process for a later video tutorial (already published).
Finally, after many misadventure, I thought it was time to reward both adventurers with the episode 54 about the cat temple. This last episode of May was easily the more sucessful in terms of audience.
Full sources and alt text: Mini Fantasy Theater comic page
About the challenge of producing them, It was the first month of production under my new KDE Neon GNU/Linux system, running under Wayland. I spent time adjusting my script, automations, and little helpers on the way. I had also to revisit the video recording and editing workflow, and adapt my laptop to the same solution.
Production tips: I adopted putting on Krita the Reference docker plugin as a side panel on my right-click pop-up palette. I load on it a PNG with my color reference and palette for my characters. Easy quick color pick!
My mini custom palette for coloring the MiniFantasyTheater episodes
Pepper&Carrot next chapter
I did not manage to make big progress on the next Pepper&Carrot episode in May: my focus was really about switching my workflow to Wayland and documenting it. For the next chapter, I have now a full story written (since March/April, it took me 8 revisions) and the storyboard done with the dialogs lines and all. But I I felt not enough confident to start the production of the page in May on my new KDE Neon operating system. I needed to see how it would work for smaller project at first; and the MiniFantasyTheater comic strips were ideal to test all the step of the process and the translation system.
This is a dense episode, comparable to the Episode 36, A Surprise Attack in terms of background, actors, page count and action. This May gave me a little bit of distance with my scenario and storyboard, and it's a good thing: I have now a fresher eye about it. Unfortunately, because I have only texts and storyboards, I don't have anything to share visually, so here is an early concept-art sketch of Shichimi, Torreya and Pepper:
Shichimi, Torreya and Pepper, sketch for the future chapter.
Bonus: tutorial, making-of, article, brushes
The production of my long massive KDE Neon Linux install guide took me a big part of the time I had in May. It took me weeks of work to test, note feedback, structure them into an article, test the script I give inside it, and see if I can reproduce the and follow myself the guide to install my laptop.
But the consequences were great: my website got down under the amount of visitors; recording more than half a million on the first days. I had to setup in the emergency a clone of the article on another server and tweak the RSS to not send the full article to readers because the server was serving too much.
I also spent a lot of time on merging very interesting feedback that contributed to enhance the article. It also had ripples and got feedback about it from KDE Plasma, GNOME, XpPen, Huion, Wacom and Red Hat, each project interested to enhance the Wayland situation for artists on GNU/Linux.
Article link: Interim Install Guide: KDE Neon User Edition for a professional digital painter workstation
The cover of the article
Conferences and Convention
At the very end of May, I was invited to Torino Comics in Italy on the booth of the publisher Silly Studio. I spent my week-end to sign your Pepper&Carrot books and I love to meet a new audience discovering the series I started in 2014. Discussing with the audience about the series, to introduce it, to discuss the characters is always a time that motivate me to do progress on the series.
It was also a joy to finally meet IRL the Silly Studio team, and two long time contributor translator on the Italian version of Pepper&Carrot: Matteo Bertini and Carlo Gandolfi.
On the SillyStudio booth, at Torino Comics
With the Silly Studio team
Meeting Pepper&Carrot translator and contributor Carlo Gandolfi
Meeting Pepper&Carrot translator and contributor Matteo Bertini
Misc
- Illustration: I finalised and published the Dryad illustration, poster for the Geek Faeries event in June.
- Collab': I shared on the Fediverse an exquisite cadaver done with artist Gynux.
- Website: I improved the speed of the RSS on the blog, and the 'table of content'.
- Beta-testing: I reported bugs specific to what I observed in preparation of the KDE Neon article, and tested color management on Krita 6.x on Wayland.
The Dryad illustration, CC By-Sa
