texture experiment

Peggy
October 9, 2014

I was sitting around answering questions in the Illustrator subreddit when I found a link to a neat tutorial on faking toothbrush splatters in Illustrator.

So I tried it out.

I added a wrinkle to it that the tutorial didn’t bother with; instead of having a lot of duplicated shapes with grained-up gradients over flat fills, I just added a new fill to my shapes with the Appearance palette, then gave them various linear and radial fills that I added the grain filter to and set to multiply mode. Less shapes are better, in my mind, because it’s a ton easier to go in and tweak things for just the right curve.

(You could also just draw the grainy gradients inside the shapes, which upon reflection would probably be a bit faster, but I dunno, I just like the technical sweetness of the Appearance palette sometimes.)

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out for a 15-minute doodle. I may have to do a more involved piece using this effect sometime in the future.

Here’s the AI source if you want to poke around.

(If you’ve read Rita, please do not try to read any significance into my color choices – this is just me picking random colors that felt fun together.)

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Fan porn.

Peggy
September 22, 2014

I have a friend that draws a lot of porn. Today, she wanted to stretch a little after doing a bunch of Serious Work and posted to Tumblr asking for Interesting Kinks To Draw.

One of the requests she received was, and I quote: “Egypturnash’s Rita, in her dragon chassis, with a big fat cock and balls”. She decided not to draw it, because it felt like “a smut request” to her rather than just a random interesting kink. But she told me about it.

My feelings about this are pretty complicated. On the one hand, I know damn well that drawing porn of a thing, or causing porn of a thing to be drawn, is how the Internet expresses its love for that thing. Hell, I drew a picture of GLaDOS and SHODAN getting it on. It is a good thing that people care enough about my crazy comic to want to see this sort of thing. On the other hand, I’ve kind of developed a certain amount of respect for these characters; while I’ve implied that Rita’s got a healthy, and occasionally kinky, sex life – in all of her incarnations – I kinda feel like the bedroom is just not a place I want to put my camera.

On the gripping hand, my mostly-dormant smutmonger alias drew a porn of Rita having sex, with a couple hot-swappable genitals lying in arm’s reach, so it’s not like I can say “THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN!!!!!1!”.

(And for the record: you want porn of Rita? Go for it. I’d love it if you linked to the comic in your image’s description… and I’m not entirely sure I want you to show it to me.)

Anyway. I’m back from Rose City Comic-Con and I just wanna have some solitary dinner and go to sleep.

while my site was down

Peggy
August 29, 2014

My site was down for a couple of days due to some complications with it moving to a faster server. Those happened to be days I doodled in.

A friend’s scruffy dragon lady character.

Twin, getting really stoned, on a day when all I seemed to be able to do was to get stoned and doodle my characters. I fucked around a lot with my collection of art brushes here.

Yesterday was Jack Kirby’s birthday. I saw a LOT of fan-art of his characters that day. Me, I just did a blatant style rip doodle. Probably needs some metallic leg bands to be honest but whatever, this was like ten minutes.

Continuing style test for that vampire thing I’ve been kicking around. Yeah, I think it works. Someday I’ll actually do a short story about her. Someday. In my copious free time.

Also I finally spent some time fixing the style for Five Glasses of Absinthe. Now it’s using my horizontally-oriented comics theme, with different css to make it, um, not horizontal and stuff. There’s still some stuff that needs tweaking but it looks a hell of a lot better than it did for a while.

Books!

Peggy
August 5, 2014

Rita 2 is here and it looks fine.

It took me a little while to actually feel any emotions about this fact. I felt oddly empty about this accomplishment. In part because I’d just had this exchange on DA’s forums:

It’s just another step on the path. I’m not even done with volume 2; I need to ship out about half of the 400 books now cluttering up my studio. And when that’s done I’ve got to finish drawing volume 3, hope it doesn’t turn into volumes 3 and 4, and kickstart, print and ship that one. Maybe when that’s over I’ll feel finished. Maybe I won’t until I put out the omnibus.

I will probably express some happiness tonight at the cartoonist meetup, though. And at the release party we’ve been talking about maybe having at Phoenix. I dunno. There’s an emotion hanging over my right shoulder, just outside my peripheral vision, and I can’t catch sight of it no matter how I twist and turn. I’ll have to lay in wait and catch it unawares, I guess.

I should buy a postage printer.

glitch

Peggy
July 29, 2014

A friend pointed me to some glitching tools created by a Mysterious Net Art Collective. I may be using these for an upcoming page, to obscure some crucial information that’ll be in the gloss overlay in the printed volume…

Woo! A Patreon goal!

Peggy
July 18, 2014

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*

thinkin’ about ads and printing and stuff

Peggy
June 11, 2014

I got some email from Project Wonderful this morning telling me that my funds were about to run out. I was surprised – I had campaigns running? And it turns out I did; I’d run a broad campaign, then threw some money at the two top performers in terms of actual engagement, and forgotten about them. For about two months.

Bumbling around Google Analytics suggests that I have pretty much gotten all the archive bingers I’m going to get out of Sinfest and Grrl Power, so I guess it’s time to do a new broad campaign to figure out where to go next. I might put a bit more in and have a higher maximum bid this time; we’ll see how I feel after I go wire a couple thousand bucks to China to pay for printing.

Which is my agenda for today. I was intending to do it over the phone, after an unsuccessful trip out to the BECU by University Village yesterday, but I just looked at my figure in the mirror and there’s a distinct improvement from a couple days ago, so I may well just get my ass moving and walk out there again.

(See, last November, some new federal regulations came down to require a half-hour period of takebacks on international money transfers, due to a rise in scams. Part of these regulations mean that you can’t initiate one after 1pm – at least after 1pm on the West Coast, I dunno if it’s 1pm in Your Timezone or 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern – and you can’t even do all the paperwork for it and have it fire off tomorrow morning. Fucking scammers.)

Also to be honest I really find that doing business over the phone is in an awkward middle ground. I’d rather do stuff either in email or face-to-face if possible. So what the hell, I’m gonna get some serious walking in today…

—

I would like to run some ads on Girl Genius; I figure a quote from Phil Foglio would go over pretty well with the rabid fans of his comic. But sadly they have switched from Project Wonderful ads to Hiveworks ads, and HW involves actually dealing with a human who has five zillion other things on his mind instead of just poking at an endlessly-ready program.

edit. Oh hey I forgot to actually post this. It was still sitting there in MarsEdit when I opened the machine up at the bank to give them the crucial details. Then I walked back to the U and had a tasty, protein-heavy breakfast at Portage Bay – I’ve got pole class tonight, I’ll be turning that pretty much entirely into muscle I think.

Aaaand I just dropped $200 into PW, and bumped the amount I was willing to let it spend per day on my ‘comics with more than 10k daily views’ from $20 to $40. So we’ll see what happens there.

pondering my next moves

Peggy
June 3, 2014

Hmm. I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to spend a few days doing rough layouts and dialogue for the entire rest of Rita. I’m getting close to the end; I have a synopsis of the next eight chapters, which will take up about 48 pages total if I hew to about 64 pages per volume. Which I would really like to do.

I’m about done with the last page of the current chapter, and don’t have any more roughs to work up – I typically do them in groups of 3-5 pages. This would be a sustained effort that would make the next page take longer, but it might be worth it in how it’d make a lot of the rest of the work simpler, in a way. Plus I’d be able to start sllloooowowwwly filling in a couple of really insane pages planned for near the end of the book. And maybe try to nail the page count down to exactly the right size.

On the other hand… I just counted my estimated page counts for the rest of the story and am doing pretty good – I’m estimating 50 pages, plus the 18 pages I’ve done so far on book 3. Only 4p over target, not bad. Book 1 was 56p of story, 2 was 58p – add in about 8p of front and backmatter and volume 3 will clock in at about 76p all told. Which I think is a hell of a lot better than “the last book is twice the size of the rest combined”. If I find any fat to cut, I’ll do it, but this story’s already pretty lean.

Dug out my sketchbook roughs for the last volume, changed a lot of chapter numbers to match with the “BOOK 3 HAZ A CHAPTER ORDER” note in Evernote. Drawin’ time, for at least the next chapter or two, if not the whole story.

Bayeux

Peggy
May 28, 2014

bayeux-1.8

I have decided to package the custom theme I use on Decrypting Rita into something that other people can hopefully use.

This is the first release, and still has a few things hardwired for my comic – if you’re afraid of editing a few bits of text in a PHP file, and poking at some CSS, this theme is not yet for you. Check out the readme.txt in the archive for more details.

The name, of course, comes from the Bayeux Tapestry, which presents the story of William the Conqueror in the form of one very long horizontal scroll. Scott McCloud cites it as one of the precursors to what we call “comics” in his book Understanding Comics; it’s arguable whether something lacking the modern innovations of “panels” and “dialogue balloons” qualifies as “comics” but it’s definitely “sequential art”!

Anyway. Good luck; let me know if you get it working on your site. If you can’t then I may try to help you out but no promises – those pages of Rita ain’t gonna draw themselves!

(And if you add in controls for the stuff I didn’t, please toss me a copy of your modifications – I like it when other people do my work for me!)

some stuff happened

Peggy
May 18, 2014

This weekend I decided to put some curtains in the living room. There are times in summer when I just want to sit down for a little video game break, and the sunlight coming from outside is way too intense for my little projector to throw a visible image. I’d been taping up some spare art board but that was (a) a pain in the ass and (b) ugly.

So I did some research online into the basics, and walked up to Northgate to hit Bed, Bath, and Beyond for a double rod, some swirly finials, and some clip hooks, and the fabric store for about four and a half yards of dark purple velvet. I’m planning to add some sheer red behind it once I get things arranged to my liking; one thing at a time.

I just got it up and liked what I saw, then took it down because I was using holes the previous occupants had drilled, that weren’t really up to the task of holding these heavy things up. I’m going to have to slip some screw anchors in there tomorrow for a solid grounding. I’ll also see how well it cuts down indirect sunlight reflecting off the white building next door; I may have to add some sort of lining to make them a bit more opaque. They’re not amazing but for about $300 total they look pretty good, and will likely look even better once I spend maybe a half hour hemming it, sewing some folds into the top of it, and hooking the rings in so they’re hidden by the top.

Hmm. What else have I been up to? I haven’t updated this in a week or so. Nothing amazing: slowly working on the next page of Rita, which includes a crazy background; getting some flowers to put on the coffee table in the studio, going to pole dance classes. I’m still not even anywhere near “terrible” at pole but I’m learning, and getting in shape as well – there will be days when my legs ache all day long, and I just grin, because it’s the ache of shaving stretched them like crazy the day before.

I’m also getting definite results from having that chin-up bar on the bathroom door. Unless I’m completely wiped out from doing something else beforehand, I can very consistently get my eyes up past the top of the door, go up and down a little bit a few times, and then bring my feet back to the ground in a slow, controlled fashion.

And now, some progress shots from that page…

: Initial rough of library panorama, drawn when laying out the page.

: Better rough after googling some huge libraries and looking at a book full of staircase porn. Most of this will be cropped out on the page but I’m going to reuse this bg later, and it’s honestly not that much more work to build it all now and get it right.

: Eventually it becomes complicated enough that Organization has to happen. Floor 1 is the one at eye level; all others are numbered in relation to that. The weird order is so they overlap properly; it may seem kind of OCD to make this many layers but it pays off when it comes time to draw things like “various people wandering around the building” and I’m not constantly putting the railings back in front of them or something.

: Draw one column, cut and paste!

: More columns on higher floors.

: Starting to build out edges of floors and railings (draw one line, create perspective with the width tool, alt-drag vertically, reshape to fit perspective)

: Trace a cool Art Noveau railing out of the staircase book, use as pattern brush, apply perspective distortion, wonder why the weight’s all screwy.

: That’s better! I had to apply the ‘outline stroke’ effect to all the lines that made up the pattern brush.

: Cameo appearance by Marigold Heavenly Nostrils and her friend Phoebe from the second panel.

: So many railings! So glad I didn’t have to draw them all by hand!

: Starting to block in walls and the beginnings of bookshelves. Also note the extra copies of the noveau ironwork in white/dark green to provide lighting/shading and contrast against midtone.

: Quick books: use line tool, slash ’em in. If you want to be more detailed you can make them different widths, and for perspective views you may want to think about the tops and sides, but this is often all you need if you’re not close enough to read the spines.

Hopefully I’ll get this page done tomorrow. Just in time for me to go off to Portland for Furlandia!