This is the final new image for 2017. Haven't done a Year's End card since 2010. The Village at Year's End is a place that only exists one evening per year, a place, a repository for the emotions and happenings of the previous year. They're often sad, or at least melancholy. Silas was the last one pictured for one of these. I did a series with the Ice King and a few others. One of them is the only piece of art I've done for which I have no record at all. They all have little poems, some more than other. These are a little card to myself, something I prefer to Xmas ones.

Did the sketch in Procreate on the iPad but thought about developing it in AD. I think it was the right decision. That being said, Procreate has spray paint brushes and I wondered if I might be able to use it through Super Vectorizer in an AD file. As it turns out, I could and so was able to get something organic and yet vector at the same time. Pretty happy with that.

I've been keeping this blog now for 11 years. I had a goal this year to at least top last year's entries. That would mean I've been at least somewhat productive. In some ways, I have. I got two comics off the ground and am toying with a third. Biography continues with more entries than last year and, with a shift to Procreate, I might be able to make new pages more quickly. I wrote 27 songs for an opera comic, got that started though didn't get as far as I wanted. This year has the second most entries of the blog ever which I hope is telling. As long as Blogspot exists, I'll keep going just so I have something to refer back to. There's a lot of bad stuff in there, but hints and points I can re-read and work on later. So, I guess I should look on all this as a positive and hold tightly to whatever artistic momentum I can. Here's to 2018. Let's hope it's a damn sight better than the last year.

Quick sketch on the iPad last night of my dead mouse, Rooster. I regret killing him off as he's more fun to draw than Smatt or Terry. Guess this is before he died, then. I was going to paint/render this further but my partner stuck his head in the studio and said how much he liked the sketchy lines so I thought I'd at least export a version and post it.

An experiment with my iPad with what I threatened to do. I'd forgotten that I actually did this once in Biography back in its second year. Was REALLY hard to edit that stuff together in PS. This took me less than an hour, and I just used the iPad. I can see me doing this kind of thing with the cartoon coyote wandering around my real house. We'll see how it goes.

Family and friends are nice enough to give me more of what I really don't need; books. I especially don't need art books. And these aren't all I got. I also got the Art of Coco book. I have LOTS of those. They are inspirational though sometimes daunting, making me feel really behind. That being said, I think it's really important to look into things that stick in your head, even if they're things one doesn't like at least at the outset.

Tried a new approach to the comic this time, and I think it worked pretty well. I posed holding the books, took the photos with my iPhone, sent them to my iPad where I just erased myself out of the picture, then drew the coyote character in, all within Procreate. Might use more photos in the comic in the future, at least to add some backgrounds here and there. The setting and style has got rather dull and static. This comic used to have more experimentation in it. Three pages more, and it will surpass Tamino, my longest comic in length. I still don't get very personal with it, for fear of reprisal, which is annoying but I think it's worth doing.

Sometimes I forget to play the little "drop the lines layer" game with my digital stuff. In this case, I think I DO like the image better without the lines layer. This isn't a good thing, or is it? Sometimes I like to think in terms of only color and shape. Seems that, sometimes the lines are just there to help me along as opposed to being a part of the final.

Another few days without being able to draw anything. It's more a block situation than a time one. Things just weren't coming together. I can't draw what I WANT to draw. This image, more or less, came into my head today and I've learned that this often means I need to draw it to get it out of my head. So I did. Just Digby, the fox that sometimes walks for me, in the dark.

And then later, I colored it.

Sometimes I like to draw just to draw. There is something about the act of making something, anything that's quite satisfying and for me, when it includes pencil and ink, I get a kind of warm, 'finished' feel. It's especially true if the image isn't FOR anything, it's only point is to draw and be happy. That's what this is. That being said, I think the rabbit-thing (he has no other name) is kind of the inner spirit of that because he's so twisted and breaks so many of my other rules. I can be my most active and action-y with him and not worry about how he looks. There's still a trace of rubber-hose animation in him, which is where he came from. Don't want to lose that. Others have done this kind of thing, too. It's a fun sandbox to build in.

Forgot to post this from yesterday. More or less, this is what that comic will look like. Slightly updated looks, less awkwardness, which also mirrors my high school experience. I'll poke at this as time allows.

Did some quick sketches of Harlon today. Now why would I want to do that? In the shower, where I get most of my best ideas, I was thinking about when I had planned to do a follow up to Harlon a number of years ago. It never happened, exactly and instead it kind of jogged into Biography. The rabbit is gone, long gone. I think I worried that if I did do a sequel, it would feel cheap, and I wasn't sure I had the material. As I thought about it in the spray, the same kind of simple ideas that I used for the original were popping up with little prompting. If I do this, and it's an if, I would give myself the same criteria; square comic, one page per idea, 30 ideas, 30 days. Or something like that. The time period doesn't matter. The number of pages, I think, does. These were done on the iPad and I think I like the style of pencil and shading. We'll see. Haven't gone further than this so far...

Very quick and dirty Howard done with the iPad. Wanted to see if I could apply the same process I use when demonstrating portraits to one of my characters. There's an extra step of getting the head and body to fit, but otherwise, took about 20-25 minutes. There's the usual marks made for placement but this time I turned off the pencil drawing to finish it as it looked more painterly. The more I do this, the less it bothers me that there's 'tracing' involved, which there really only kind of is. The actual lines made while 'tracing' are laughable at best; I try to keep them loose likely for worry of 'cheating,' and guilt associated with it. That being said, tracing doesn't get me likeness, which I have to work on. The iPad is proving to be its own tool and as such, I use it totally differently than I do when making anything else. So, experiment. We'll see where this goes.

Managed this today when nothing else was working. Felt like I wasted the whole day. Maybe I did. Finally did try something new with Biography; use the iPad I bought to try and supplement my work. I think, with a bit of refining, this might work ok and I can make this something more frequent. The one thing that gets in the way of my doing more Biography is that, while I have ideas, it takes too long to draw. Don't want to spend too much time on this; it's only a journal comic. The idea is more important than the art, though I don't want just stick figures.

Today's demo at the store. This time, on a whim,I dropped out the usual pencil sketch layer, decided I liked it and went on from there. Got a kind of vaguely post-impressionist thing going on and am happy with it. Reminds me of some of the stuff I used to do in crayon, which kept pretty much to the primaries. Might try some more of this later.