So yeah me and my buddy Dana are driving out to Spokane tomorrow for this year’s Worldcon. We’re sharing a booth and selling our comics – I’ll have both volumes of “Decrypting Rita” as well as the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn, and she’ll have the collections of “Phoebe and her Unicorn” and probably “Ozy and Millie” as well.
This morning’s half-awake thoughts:
I feel like there are several friends in my life who could turn into friends-with-benefits. And that’s on top of a pretty good ex-with-benefits relationship. Which is interesting. I don’t know that I’ll pursue any of them as any kind of Serious Secondary Thing (but I’ll sure keep being flirty with them, and if we end up together near a bedroom then well yes) but it’s a really nice feelling to have what with growing up as a depressed mopey hatepile who was pretty sure he would never, ever, ever find anyone to have sex with, much less love.
I’m not sure I have a point here. If you’re young and hatefully alone, be aware that this can change, I guess. Though you have to work for it; I spent a lot of time trying to make myself less of a bitter piece of shit, and I still expend a certain amount of effort to make sure that when the XWB visits it’s always pretty laid-back and chill.
edit: of course there is also the elephant in the room that I’m pretty financially comfortable now, and that also makes me a hell of a lot less stressed out and thus more fun to be around!
Some smutty lady drew a thing I don’t know how it got on my site gee this is a mystery. [NSFW]
Also I would like to note that using my ‘feather’ brush at a low line weight makes for pretty neat-looking lines for quickies like this.
This is one I use all the time when making comics. I draw shapes for my panels, then put them on separate layers. Then I click the targeting circle on the right of the layer, and hit the f-key I have assigned to this action. Illustrator then makes a copy of the panel shape for future use, turns the panel shape into a clipping path for the entire layer, locks that clipping path, and makes a new layer inside this layer called ‘bg’, which contains a slightly larger copy of the panel shape.
Then I can start making more layers inside the panel’s layer and draw freely, without worrying about anything protruding outside of the panel. When I’m done working on a panel I can close up its layer, which results in a lot less clutter in the layers palette.
When I start doing ‘Drowning City’ I may make a variant of this that creates an opacity mask for the layer instead of a clipping mask, so I can draw panels with pseudo-brushed edges. I’m not entirely sure of this yet; I need to see how painted panels look with crisp edges and messy ones.
So there is this thing going on at this year’s SPX where Nickelodeon is actively soliciting show pitches. And on a whim, I started thinking about what the heck I could throw together for a laugh that would be appropriate for somewhere in the age range of 6-11. I ended up remembering this silly thing I drew for the event of my friend Gabe’s comic “Big Pants Mouse” ending:
And the idea of “cute cartoon animals stuck in a self-important Japanese cartoon about mech combat” stuck. Obviously I couldn’t just take Gabe’s characters as is; I’d have to make up my own.
Or would I? After all, I have this old funny-animal pulp sci-fi cartoon idea called “Ensign K” floating around. I could just pluck the existing characters out of that and recast them a little.
Obviously “Buttstania” is a placeholder here. Also that shoulder patch needs work. Looks way too much like the logo from “Dresden Codak” right now.
I decided to keep the “mechs that look like giant pants” because that makes me laugh. Ideally, the whole thing will be cartoony and funny-looking, but the script will never acknowledge how absurd the world is; the characters take their lives perfectly seriously. At least one named character will probably die every season. Not a gory on-camera death, mind you. Spaceships exploding kinds of deaths. Clearly I am aiming for the upper end of their 6-11 age range, here, but why not? Working on this would make me laugh a lot, and would give me an excuse to get really stoned and have that Star Blazers marathon my nine-year-old self dreamed of. I also kind of want to use this an excuse to finish watching Revolutionary Girl Utena while I’m at it.
Outline a season’s worth of episodes, draw a silly spaceship and a few more of the characters that need to exist in this (captain, bridge crew, a few members of the Tryskari Empire, etc), and it’ll be done. Then the question becomes whether or not this is actually a thing I’d want to spend any serious chunk of my life working on…
Oh hey if you make a few graphic styles to make it easy to switch between a few sets of settings on the ‘scribble’ effect you can really quickly do something pretty close to cross-hatching. I tried this on a super quick doodle then wanted to do something a little less quick, so I roughed out dragon-self pole dancing because that’s kind of a default thought now I guess.
You can do a pretty similar effect with pattern fills but that tends to either look kinda fakey or wholly mechanical; this one is both really precise and just a little bit organic, which is generally where I want all my Illustrator work to reside. I like it.
About a half hour, Illustrator. As usual. I am pretty sure doing this in real media would have taken a lot longer and made my wrist less happy. I’d have had more control over suggesting the contours of the surface but honestly I’m not sure that’s a tradeoff worth making.
(CYBOrG ARTIST IS PLEASED WiTH Her CAREFULLY MODULATEd INHUMAN PRECISION)
OH YEAH. I just hit the pull-up bar on my bathroom door and lifted my eyes up past it like it was nothing at all. Pole inverts, here I come.
Now I guess I get to start working on doing more pull-ups at once. And doing them slower. And lifting my legs up elegantly while doing them. There’s always something to make it more of a challenge. Maybe someday I’ll even go so far as to buy ankle weights.
(I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it here, but I’ve started doing pole dance class again at the new studio my former instructor set up. I went through a refresher on the entire syllabus for Pole 1 in one hectic day, and have been slowly working my way through Pole 2 at a more normal pace. Not being able to lift myself up cleanly with my arms has been really frustrating. Now I can, which should let me start inverting again soon. Now if I can just make myself attempt enough pole sits so that I can build up a tolerance for supporting my entire body weight on my inner thighs, I’ll be back in business.)
“I wanna draw something”, I said to myself. “But I don’t want to work on anything that actually matters to anyone.”
So I looked at @SketchDailies for a subject. The latest one was Yosemite Sam. I googled up a model sheet and this happened. Probably somewhat influenced by the Duck Dodgers stuff at the Chuck Jones exhibit I went to last week. 1h, Illustrator.
In this dream, I was with my mother. We had a trip planned to Qatar. I have no idea why we were going all the way around the world, but we were. The flight was going to leave around noon, and we weren't properly packed; instead she had me moving stuff around the house (the one I grew up in, which she moved out of not long after I left for animation school), then we were driving around the city while I stressed out about our schedule. Which I couldn't pull up on my phone because my phone just never works right in dreams. She wanted to see how high the river was before we left for the airport, apparently.
I guess this was better than last night, when I found myself dreaming about weeping because she's dead. I woke up and was sad for a while because of that one.
Yesterday morning I decided to ask Google if there was any Rule 63 of Dr. Robotnik. There is some but not very much of it, and most of it looks more like a skinny sexy anime babe cosplaying Robotnik. This one is still probably too damn skinny but there’s actually SOME weight to her, damnit.