Thursday, October 29, 2015

The results of yesterday's live streaming. I've really enjoyed doing these as they seem to bring people together, not because of me doing art, which is totally fine, but because the folks that do come share their art, links to other artists and give advice to each other. This is the third page I've done in this manner and I've got six to go. What began as a simple ten page comic is now going to be 31 and deal with a broader topic than I was aiming for. Which is fine. Not the best way to make comics, but there you go. Short stories allow for more experimentation, I think. Anyway. Pencil sketch, the page as it was when I shut down the stream and finished version.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Finished page 24 which is about 4 from the ending, I think. Then there's a snapshot of the comic as a whole so far. I think I need another 'meanwhile' page in there between the truck and the boys back on the steps. This isn't the most consistent comic I've done, but I like it and it's certainly leading stylistically towards what I want to do with Ghiroy, just a little more extreme.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

The results of today's live streaming. I'm getting into this whole thing. While it's cool that people seem interested in the art and perhaps the making thereof, it's even cooler that diverse people meet and get together while I'm drawing and making a fool of myself (in a good way). So I'm going to keep this up. This page isn't done, but it's close enough. I was online for 4 hours today and a good number of folks were there the whole time. More than a little amazing. I know how this comic's going to end, I just need to get there. Perhaps with this kind of thing going, it'll keep me interested long enough to finish.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Yesterday was a sort of impromptu test. A friend has been streaming his work in real time for his Patreon backers. Sometimes this can be really interesting to watch and sometimes less so, but it is an attempt at building community. I've streamed once and had some people show up. I never did again because the kind of work I do, mostly in Illustrator doesn't seem all that interesting to me. It's almost like watching someone connect the dots. Most of the 'creative' part comes from the penciling, or so it seems to me. Still, after starting to work on the above illustration for about a half hour, I decided to give the streaming a try. I posted a link on my tumblr account and Facebook and then texted the above friend just so he wouldn't be able to say I didn't tell him. I also emailed Vince (thanks, Vince!). I had the sound on, so the viewers could hear me and I could respond to texted chats. It was actually a lot of fun; it felt like having a studio-mate. I'd toyed with the idea of making a Patreon of my own just for the possibility of building a community of my own. Will I always get even the two people I did? Perhaps not. It was still fun to do and something I should think of doing more regularly. There's nothing lost letting people see me work and swear.

The other part of the experiment was something visible in the two images above. The biggest change is the pose; the above friend noted that while the figure was good, the silhouette, the most important aspect of a pose in animation was ambiguous as drawn. With Illustrator, such changes are no big deal, so I changed his one arm. The more useful thing, though was playing with the layering options in PS. They're not available in AI, which is rather annoying, so this means that I'm not only going to have an extra step for "Ghiroy," but if it ever comes to being published in print, I might well have to redo all the output pages to meet the demands of printing. Still, one of the problems I've had in the past is using a transparent overlays. While they unify the palette and add feeling, they tend to make the image more chalky. I have to bump up the contrast in PS after the fact and that can do weird things to the high end of the tones. In this case, I made a silhouette of the figure in bright green, brought just that over in PS and pasted it atop the figure while changing the layer option until I got a much better look. In this case, I think the figure on the left looks a lot like he's in moonlight. While I want this world to feel alien, my partner thinks that I need to keep from going nuts when doing this kind of thing. He might be right.

Lastly, I was timing this as the style I've finally chosen for the comic is rather detailed and as such I was worried that it might take too long to render it all. It didn't, though it took longer with an audience. The image is only half done as the background is missing. Still, this represents a full page as I've found that as I go along, I don't really like panels all that much. I can't think of the last comic I did that had them. I prefer big images occasionally with floating images above for my 'panels.' Don't know why this is, but I've moved away from them since Tamino. The other thing I've been working on is the text. I've seen so many comics that are lovingly rendered that just have a word balloon with comics sans slapped on top and it's so visually jarring. Also, when I read comics, I can feel a mental disconnect when my eye moves from the image to the text. I'm going to try and integrate the words into the image, much like I did with the Smatt and Terry comic, though I wasn't even thinking about that at the time. In this case, the choice of lettering style is going to matter a lot. Each character will have their own. In other words, I have a lot of work to do.

Friday, October 09, 2015

Posted this yesterday in various places and got way more response than I thought I would. Friends who read the page came out and wrote really nice, lengthy responses to me, letting me know that they like my work, that there's belief in me and generally nice things of the sort. It was warm, welcome and somewhat embarrassing. I say the latter because I want Biography to be truthful, sincere. On the other hand, I don't want it to be seen as some kind of pleading for attention. I don't know. Maybe I'm so unused to reactions to my work that I've forgotten how to react to it. I get all squirmy and somewhat weirded out, trying to shift attention away from me and back towards something else. On the other hand, I do want to talk about this kind of thing, about the loneliness, the bad feelings regarding my work's lack of acceptance. It's a hard balance I don't really know how to address.

I've found that I've been learning to settle a lot; expecting that things won't go over well, learning to face the oncoming silence whenever I post work or eventually when I post Ghiroy. I've already decided that the comic's only going to be for me, that I'm not shooting for any kind of readership. Perhaps it's a way of keeping me from being disappointed or maybe it's me trying to be realistic and as such not be so disappointed any more. Strange that this particular page got people to read it for some reason, even though I obscured some of the words, tilted them and kept them behind little windows cut out of the comic covers.

This is the first page of Biography that isn't in the hardcover book I made. I hope I keep doing it. I just hope it's a little more interesting and less whiney as things go on. I think it's important to do, though I don't know why I think this, but I don't want it to just be one big complaint, either. I was wondering if I should just retitle the comic "Adrift" and be done with it. Or something. Or not.