Coppell High School senior Scarlett Bliobenes appears from the outside to be a reserved figure as she finds every minute she can to draw on the Procreate app between assignments and during mornings before her art class.
Take a closer look though and you find that through her pen, she’s piecing together a comic with its origins in her realm of dreams by basing the plot on a dream she had before she started on the project.
Train of Whispers on Webtoon is Bliobenes’s webcomic about the protagonist, Maeve, as she tries to find her way back home after waking up in a strange realm, accompanied by a strange man.
Bliobenes’s love for stories has been apparent from her youth. Checking out as many books from the library as she could starting in elementary school.
“I remember our teachers used to always get on to her about reading during lessons,” Yaalinee Prabhu said. “She was the first one to start reading chapter books, and almost finished reading the entire library at our elementary school.”
When she was in sixth grade at Coppell Middle School North, Bliobenes began to develop her skills in the visual arts when she found an interest in character design. She taught herself to draw until eighth grade where she took her first art class.
“The art teachers and I joke that we don’t really need to do anything with Scarlett because she is so personally motivated and driven and has come to us with that drive” Coppell High School AP/IV Art teacher Michelle Hauske said. “She has come into the these higher level courses with a skillset and knowledge that she has learned from her own personal practice. She’s so personally driven that she goes and she learns on her own.”
Over time the characters she created took on a life of their own as her love for stories merged with her character design skills. She found herself with the necessary skills to make her comic and began working on Train of Whispers in her junior year, publishing the first episode in July 2023, and continues her commitment to the project on a steady basis, finding every moment she can to continue drawing it.
“That feeling where you’re finally able to recreate what you’ve been thinking of, and you’re looking at the finished product and it’s so cool to look at because it’s a tangible result of your imagination,” Bliobenes said. “I love the rush that I get from that. Especially a project as big as this, is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.”
Bliobenes plans to study advertising and graphic design at the University of Texas at Austin. She said Train of Whispers and future projects will remain a passion project until she finds stability in comic books.
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