laurels: not to be rested upon.

Peggy
January 14, 2015

I’m looking at the final version of that Drowning City test image I did yesterday and I am delighted: it looks exactly like the way it looked in my head when it started coming together in the winter of 2001. It always needed to be painterly and messy and modelled, in a way that I simply did not have the skills for back then. I could maybe mess it up a tiny bit more; I’ll have to think about ways to do that quickly and efficiently.

I feel like I could make this look happen about as quickly as I do Rita once I get into the groove. Which feels like a big speed-up from the somewhat similar look I was chasing in Absinthe – I really hadn’t learnt to simplify a lot of the process yet, and I was having to constantly think about things like “how opaque do I want this shadow to be, and what blending mode should I use?”. I should revisit my Absinthe templates and codify a bunch of stuff the same way I did for Drowning City, so that I can hit the ground running when I resume dong that, too. (Absinthe was also slow because of all the elaborate backgrounds I was doing, of course! That probably won’t change. Though they might go a little faster with what I’ve learnt in the time doing the Tarot deck and Rita.)

It’s going to be really exciting to actually get to use things like “blurs” and “textures” and “smooth color transitions” again. Though I’m sure I’ll be aching to return to the simple flat colors of Rita by the time I finish Drowning City. Or maybe not; maybe I’ll want to start doing something even more visually ambitious. Who knows?

Anyway. The immediate future of my drawing hand mostly involves more Rita. And more pre-production work on Drowning City – more character portraits, website design, and research. There is mythology I need to read!

Drowning City: toolbox

Peggy
January 13, 2015

I’d made a couple of little test fragments, but I felt it was time to do a real test image for The Drowning City.

As I did this, I tried to codify what I was doing into a handful of styles. For Rita, I’d just do flat colors and the occasional brush, but this has a lot of settings going on – pretty much everything listed in this palette does the equivalent of poking at three or four other palettes to choose a color, maybe a gradient, maybe an art brush, and add some effects to it. Much easier to just do it once and save it.

As I work on the comic, this will probably expand – I’ll have a few styles for various bits of each character, maybe stick some details into art brushes like I did on Rita, and in general use a lot of Illustrator tricks to let me do complex imagery without much work.

(Come to think of it, doing a couple more drawings of some of the other main characters might be a good way to refine this toolkit, and add more bits I may need.)

Edit. Worked on the styles for a little longer; took out a lot of use of ‘roughen’, gave the shading styles a bit of an extra halo, and refined the art brushes. It is still messy and organic but it was a little too messy before.

Wizard World New Orleans 2016

Peggy
January 11, 2015

…was the second-worst con I’ve ever been to. The coveted spot of “worst con ever” was Bent-Con, a queer-oriented comic con in LA where I sold all of $100 worth of stuff in the first two days, and blew off the last day to go to the beach.

Wizard World New Orleans 2015 was pretty good. I didn’t quite break even but I was only down $200 and had a lot of fun due to stuff like Chewbacchus rolling a couple floats and a brass band through the aisles now and then; it was a big Nerd Mardi Gras.

This year? I didn’t even cover my table, let alone flying in from Seattle. I got to sit next to someone who had bult a wall-o-prints as tall as a standing adult across the entire side of her table. Which cut down what I could see of the traffic by about half. (And when I asked her to, like, remove some of it on Sunday morning, she refused. People who do cons: please don’t do this shit if you’re in artist alley. You may TECHNICALLY be able to do it but it feels really rude, trust me. One grid’s worth of prints, I can deal with, that’s normal, but completely cutting off my view of the folks to my left? You are being an ass.)

The view to my left for the entire con. Real neighborly when the biggest resource is eyes on your work.

Talking to other people as I packed up on Sunday, it turned out I was far from the only one. This was just a shitty con all around. Which is kinda heartening; it’s good to know I was not making a major mistake or anything. The various theories people floated were:

No Chewbacchus! Which meant no party mood, which meant tighter wallets.
200 more artist alley tables than last year, without the increase in attendance to support it.
Middle of January rather than early February meant wallets still hurt from Christmas.

I think all of these theories account for part of these terible sales! I looked at the sign-up sheet for next year, looked at my costs and expenses, and looked at the date for next year’s con: “TBD”.

Nope. I’m not taking a crapshoot on the next one being this shitty. I would have lost money even if I was a local. I mean, yeah, it might also be awesome. It might be another Mardi Gras party con. But I am not going to flip that coin and risk starting 2016 off with a shitty con.

Basically this was the worst I’ve ever done at a pro-run con.

Next con: Emerald City Comic-Con. Which I made more money at even on my first, worst year.

I got into this beta test…

Peggy
January 8, 2015

Three days ago: initial testing of a thing.

Where the next page of Rita was when I got on a plane yesterday.

Airplane seat, my lap, my laptop, and four pairs of squishy arch cushions for high heels.

Add two rubber bands and I’m ready to work.

Three hours of airplane ride later…

I was skeptical about this when I first heard of it, but applied for the beta test anyway. I can now use Illustrator in a single, cramped airline or bus seat. I’d still rather use it with the keyboard and Wacom tablet in front of me, but that may change as the software takes shape.

Pro artist friends: if you have a Mac and an iPad let me know, they may be expanding their beta test in a few weeks.

Store: RE-OPENED.

Peggy
January 6, 2015

Now that 2015 has begun, I have re-opened my online store. Order comics and Tarot decks, and I will get them in the mail soon afterwards!

I’m going down to Wizard World New Orleans this weekend, so if you order anything now it will definitely not be shipped until early in the week of the 19th. Plan accordingly.

The Magical Grass Brush

Peggy
January 5, 2015

Man, I love Illustrator.

This gif is cycling between the full preview render and the outline view of a tiny handful of paths, with some magic applied. It’s based on this method of creating grass, but substitutes a little triangular symbol for the generic line, and drops the ‘roughen’ effect.

It looks astoundingly close to the grass I’ve been drawing for the past few years via individual strokes with a triangular art brush, but takes a tiny fraction of the time to make happen – at this point, I have definitely spent more time documenting this than it took me to draw this grassy hill, once I had the appearance stack tweaked to my liking. And if I wanted it to be Just Right, I could easily go back and add a few more pieces of grass by hand to fix a few awkward edges.

If you want to play with my version yourself, here’s the appearance stack and effect settings. Make two green colors and switch freely between them while drawing some overlapping shapes, stick a shape behind them with just a basic solid fill, and bingo. Grassy terrain.

a good weekend

Peggy
January 4, 2015

Stuff I did today:

Put on a blindfold, got stoned, and was fed tiny little artisan chocolates by my ex-with-benefits.
Went to the cafe and played a decent little SF-themed deck-building game that actually involves fighting with the other player instead of playing simultaneous solitaire better than them. (edit: Star Realms, if you’re curious. Simple and fast and fun.)
Bought a TV for my mom. It’s a late birthday gift; I’ll also be helping her set it up when I visit her next week.
Fiddled with the beta test version of a program that lets you use your iPad as a drawing tablet for your Mac. It worked a lot better than I was expecting it to; I sent ‘em a list of suggestions for improvement. More on that later, when it’s released.

Tomorrow I should work on Rita.

Impending endings.

Peggy
January 2, 2015

I woke up this morning thinking about chapter 25 of Rita.

This happens every now and then. It's an important chapter, with a story event that I've been planning since the very first thoughts of “wouldn't it be cool to do parallel storylines on the same page”.

Thing is? This time, it's the next chapter to rough out. I have been looking ahead to this chapter for four years; it's been the distant light in the darkness that I've been navigating by for all that time. It's gained more details as I've gotten closer, but it's still felt like it's been a million miles away for all that time. Now, suddenly, it's right there in front of me.

It's kind of scary. Have I laid adequate groundwork for it to make sense? Will I be able to pull off the complicated drawing necessary for it to look anything like how I've envisioned it these past four years? I don't know. I have some ideas for how to do this bubbling up from the back of my brain; I'm confident that one of them will work well enough. I may get off the rails of my two pages a week schedule again; I may not. If I keep it on schedule that's awesome, but I'd rather take the time this chapter needs – it took me four years to get here, I don't think a week or three either way is going to matter. I'm going to finish this thing properly.

And then I get to hold off celebrating. Because the book won't be done quite yet. There will be about twenty pages after that climactic moment that have to try and bring the story to a satisfying conclusion, despite the pointed absence of one important event.

Anyway. Guess I should have some breakfast and get to work.

2014 review.

Peggy
December 31, 2014

It's the last day of 2014. If I'm going to do this, I'd better do it now.

Mostly I feel like this year was dominated by Rita. The second Kickstarter took forever to fulfil, in no small part due to me fucking up and having to reprint the book. I still haven't dealt with the shirts I promised; I should really make that happen. I may have a fulfillment partner for book 3, which will make life a LOT easier.

And of course I drew lots of pages of the comic. Going by the posted dates on my website, it looks like I drew about 100 pages this year! That's more than I thought; I feel like I could have done a LOT more if I hadn't been weighed down by the printing mistake, shipping, and winter blahs. Still, I actually managed to keep to my aim of two pages a week pretty well on average!

I finally got to be the GOH of a convention. Rainfurrest, with a theme of “cyberpunk”. Sadly our plans for the most wicked awesome con book ever (full color with a unified palette running through a lot of the art, French flaps with a super panoramic cover) fell through at the absolute last second, but I had fun. Made the most money I ever have by finally sitting there and cranking out badges on my computer. I'd be buying a small printer if I was planning on doing more furry cons any time soon, but I'm taking 2015 off from furry cons. (I will probably be social at RF2014 and might be social at Furlandia but I ain't dealing anywhere.)

I started a Patreon in February after one of my fans ASKED me if I had one so they could fund me. I think that says a lot about how that site is doing something right. It has slowly grown over the year into something that is paying half my rent on a productive month; I posted nine pages this December and got about $600 before fees. I am definitely going to be figuring out how to thank those folks in the back of volume 3. I am hopeful that by this time next year, I will be paying all my bills by drawing comics. Unless I decide to move to a more expensive place and cover part of my rent out of my savings or something.

I didn't move; I didn't have any upheavals in my social life that I can remember. I'm sure I had a couple of minor tiffs with Nick but our “ex with benefits” relationship is so low-key that those are easily dealt with.

I upgraded my living room with a new projector near the end of the year, and said “well there goes the deposit” when I drilled holes in the ceiling to mount it. That made me feel like an adult.

At ECCC, I pulled together a group booth for next year. In a much better location than I'd been in before. I'm looking forwards to that. And should take care of a few bits of business related to that, now that I think about it. I might do that when I finish writing this.

A few ideas for future projects appeared. I am just hopelessly in love win unreliable narrators; someday I must attempt to write something that actually has a narrator you can completely trust. I think I could maybe fit that in around… 2019?

I failed to find the time to finish a couple of side projects that could lead to more exposure and a little prestige. Oh well.

My mother's health took something of a hit. She's a lot less mobile than she used to be. She still seems to be interested in life, so I'm not too worried yet, but I'm feeling her mortality more than I used to. I'll be seeing her soon when I go down to New Orleans for Wizard World NO, which is really more of an excuse to see her and get some sun than it is a financial thing for me.

This year's exercise choice was pole dance classes. I would probably still be doing them if the studio hadn't closed down near the end of the year. I'm seriously debating going for circus arts next year; it really depends on how well I can get art stuff done in the two hours of bus and light rail it'd take to get there and back.

So that is the notable events in my life this year.

Looking forward to 2015: group booth at ECCC in a great location, finishing Rita, starting the next project. Not too bad. And possibly getting to the point where I am no longer living off my inheritance, either. That would be really nice. And maybe running off to join the circus.

That was a day.

Peggy
December 30, 2014

Today:

Mostly laundry. It had piled up, I had to do two loads. I have tried to organize my life so that I only ever have to do one load (since there is only one machine in the building), and it is nice when it works, but having the machine broken last month plus winter fucked up my schedule of laundry.

I still need to fold the stuff. And I still have like a half a load left. All leggings. I may deal with that tomorrow.

Also I roughed out the next couple pages of Rita, so that's good.

Otherwise I just went for a walk, bought too many snacks at Trader Joe's, and sat in the living room reading critical articles on video games. Not much of a day, really.