Me, hard at work on the cover of the Rainfurrest fiction anthology. SnappyCam + phone + Gorillapod = reference selfies forever. Seriously this is the best thing ever if you’re an artist, it makes those complex perspective poses so much easier.
I was going through the pile of sketchbooks on the coffee table, deciding which ones to keep out and which ones to put into the closet. As part of this process, I looked through them and photographed some stuff to get it into Evernote. Here’s some of it.
A few ideas on where that Batman story I started a while back might go. I think Nick came up with this DUMB-ASS JOKER PLOT? I’m not sure. Looking at it now I think, yeah, it’s at pretty much the right level of MALIGN STUPIDITY for a Joker plot. And I really like Harley’s line about “…and I think there were like twenty-three more HAs?” when she’s describing it.
Also here is something I will probably never do anything with. I like the idea but I’m not sure it’s the right one for me; if it sings to you then feel free to swipe it.
There were also a bunch of roughs for a story about Oscar and Dana, some bits for that demon sex story I’ve been slowly working on, and some bits of Rita. Some of which are for my eyes only, some of which I’ll be throwing into a process post on the comic’s blog…
I was writing a post on a comics-making board about how Some Ideas Take Time when I realized something.
I usually tag 1995 as when I started coming up with “The Drowning City”.
I’m planning to finally start drawing it next year, after finishing Rita. Which will be in 2015.
Twenty years. It took me twenty fucking years for that thing to gestate. For me to take all the tragedies of my life and use them as raw material for this fucking story that bubbled out of my homesickness and just wouldn’t go away. Ever.
All I can say is that I hope it turns out to be worth it.
And if it isn’t? If it turns out to be a bunch of overwrought, maudlin crap that I abandon halfway through? Well, at least I’ll have finally got it out of my system.
Stuff I did today:
0. Turned off ads on Rita because the Patreon campaign passed $55/page!
1. Handed off my Genesis to Fluffy. I’d bought one along with a copy of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles to use as photo-ref for a Further Confusion ad last year, and finally got sick of having it kicking around the living room floor yesterday. I offered it on Twitter and they were the taker; we hung out chatting for a while too.
2. Visited with Liz Meinert, an old friend from New Orleans. She’d been stuck half-dead for the past twenty years due to Mysterious Unspecified Problems, that finally turned out to be heart issues. She had surgery recently, and is bouncing back with a vengeance – something I can really sympathize with, given how I kinda completely shut down for most of twenty years after my father died, and am now running wild doing things like pole dancing! It was pretty great to hang out and talk about nerdy nerdy stuff.
3. Tweaked the Javascript scrolling for Rita. Or rather for Bayeux, the theme I abstracted out of Rita’s style. I improved that a little more in a few other ways; I may try to package it up for submitting to the WordPress theme archive before I go to bed tonight. It works fine for me on Safari and Firefox; I should probably test on Chrome but whatever, and IE? Whatevs. Also I switched Rita over to using Bayeux.
edit. submitted it, here’s the ticket for it. I r open source.
I knew I was getting close, but I wasn’t expecting to have it happen for another month or so. Big thanks to the donor who pledged twelve bucks per page and pushed it over!
The next goal is “move to a better-insuated apartment” at $750/page. I… I ain’t gonna hold my breath on that one. *grin*
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Seriously. We can turn the net off, people. This will never be surpassed. It is perfection.
I’m getting to the point of doing outlines of short stories about that lying vampire lady. All my major projects for the next few years are pretty much plotted out, so it’s nice to spend some time fooling around in stories with more freedom to play around!
If you’re supporting me on Patreon, you can have a look at the entire first draft.
I just tweaked the logo I did for the Seattle subreddit so it’s in the average colors of all of the town’s professional sports teams.
T-shirts available on redbubble.
Illustrator source file is here.
Also if you’re here from reddit, feel free to check out my ongoing graphic novel.
I found a link to this article on Ultima IV and found a sudden desire to use it as a personality test – when you start a game, it asks you a series of questions pitting one of the games Virtues against each other, and chooses your class and stats based on them. It turns out that the game is free on gog.com, complete with a Mac package. I tried to answer as, well, basically me, translating the situations posed in a manner most medieval into modern terms. Some of them were really hard. Interestingly enough I really wanted to choose ‘male’ as the gender at first; I think a screen full of lo-res 8-bit art was temporarily tossing me back to who I was when this was cutting-edge tech. I think when I played Ultima 3 it was with a party of indeterminate-gender “fuzzies”; I have no clue what, if anything, I played in U4.
Gnome (I think that’s what the G means?) bard, high dex. So basically a thief, right?
Or if I take it straight, well hey, guess what I do iRL: I tell stories. So well done, Mr. Garriott.
I don’t think I’m going to actually play the game. I don’t have that kind of attention span any more. Given that I never finished any of the Ultimas back in the 8-bit days, I’m not sure I ever did. Maybe I’ll just read through the first part of this here Ultima IV, V, and VI Let’s Play.
Woo. I finally got around to hacking up some keyboard shortcuts to change stroke weights in Illustrator. It is a horrible mess involving having Quicksilver trigger an Applescript when I hit command-option-control-[/] but it works – I mash the modifiers and hit [, and the size of my stroke decreases by 25%; modifier-mash plus ] increases it by a third. Which is close enough to the inverse of the decreasing to make me happy.
For further ugly hackery, I have bound the touch strip on my tablet to trigger those keys when I’m in Illustrator.
At some point in the future I might want to prettify the stroke weights it ends up with – a weight of 1.0002 points is not pretty – but for now I’m just going to enjoy actually being able to control this at small values without typing a number into the stroke palette. Which is a thing I find myself doing a hell of a lot when using art brushes.
Anyway, if you want ’em, download them here and have fun: Illustrator stroke width scripts