And finally, a page of this. It's a remake of page 136, the last full page I posted but since the next track won't have Ricci in it now, I had to change it. Zippa makes his little opening cameo here and will continue for the track. Have already done most of the backgrounds for page 137 so that should go more quickly. My speed on this comic is nearly snail-paced.

 I got a lot of mileage out of this one sketch. Was just playing about, wanting something more energetic and less tight, so redrew the sketch in Procreate and was just very loose and slap-dash with the paint. Then I went back and played with recoloring the sketch lines until I got something I thought was more interesting and outside my usual. Sometimes you can just keep pushing and still have fun.

 Did one of these things for Instagram, an art vs. artist. I'm the one in the middle. That was a reference photo for Digby and seemed appropriate. While I  didn't get enough of the comic done this year, I do think I made a lot of progress on the portraits and for that, I'm pretty happy. City Silent allows me to go a bit more wild with distortion and color. My portraits tend to be a bit more conservative. That means I'm somewhere in between?

 Been working on the remake of page 136 as the one with Ricci doesn't work any more. I need Digby to leave the scene and needed to change the style but needed to keep the place. So I spent a lot of time tracing over the photo I used for reference. Tracing! Gah! Except it works for this and it's not just vectorizing the photos. It's also still somewhat abstract. Colors are not final but the drawing is. I'll have to do some posing soon for Digby. Then I can just go to town on the cartooning for Zippa. No chance of this getting done before New Year's but it should be soon after. Just got to get through the holidays.

 Far from any kind of finished image, this is just a test to see if what I want to do is going to work. And I think it will. I want this track to go as quickly as possible. So what the background needs is some graph, a couple of Digby's as he exits the scene and some coloring. Still need to redo page 136 but with this approach out of the way, I think I can knock that out and get this damned track rolling.

 Ok, found the brushes and the color palette for Zippa. This guy, I think, can tell a story. Just had to get a little messier with him. I went far afield from the original idea, which was to do a straight, 'rubber hose' style character in black and white. And that's fine. When paired with the right background, I think he'll still read as 'graffiti'. At least I hope so. 

Back to work after being sick again. Then dinner club. Haven't had any energy the past week to work on much of anything though I have sketched Zippa a little. They were ok, but they felt...dull. So I started looking around for more inspiration and found something that shoved me in a different direction. Still using the 'rubber hose' style as inspiration, I made things a little rougher and got something I think will finally work. Three pages of sketches and a quick spray paint sample and I'm pretty happy. Just have to work Zippa into the last page of track 6 so his entrance won't seem so sudden and I should be able to proceed.
 

 Me, Drawing Me, Drawing Me. Finally finished this. I ended up re-drawing nearly everything at some point. After talking to my buddy Vince, I knew the last step was going to be to replace the foreground mic stand as it just wasn't cutting it. I knew I wanted a limited color palette and very dulled colors as well. I think this kind of feels like a woodblock print, and I'm ok with that. I really wanted to do another portrait that had most of the figure in it. Though it wasn't originally in the composition, I added much of the real background, too. It helped add a feeling of place without taking away from the figure. That being said, I left a LOT out. There's a whole other bookcase on the other side of the door but it wouldn't have added anything and would have likely wiped out the feeling of depth given by the mic stand.

I'm hoping this will get me out of my portrait phase for a little bit and let me do some more free drawings for City Silent. That project has languished which doesn't make me happy. I am pretty pleased with the progress I've made with portraits this year, don't get me wrong, but that comic is NEVER going to get finished. And honestly, the two tracks I've done this year were leaps and bounds over what I'd done before. Well, progress is progress.

 A lot to do today, but managed to get my sound editing and some work on this done. Redid all the lines on the pants as the originals were too thick to my eye. I also added some lines to the neck that were supposed to be there. I separated the arm rest and wheel from the mic boom as the darkness wasn't working in foreground and background. Fixed the carpet and added some details to the background. I think I like it a lot better but nothing is final and I'll come back to it later.

 Some progress. I simplified the lines a lot, dropping out shadows, adding some details that weren't there before. Some of it I like. I don't know that I'm sold, but I didn't have much time to work on this as I was at the job all day. Progress in small steps. At least the head and body are married together!

 Did some work on this today, including redrawing the whole image, in parts and starting on the painting part of it. Like the last full figure, I decided to do the head separately so that I could draw it in more detail. Once it's finalized, I'll vectorize it and 'marry' it to the body. The head I'm fine with. The body I'm thinking about. It's the shadowy areas that bother me as I don't tend to do shadows in this style, so when there are some in one place but nowhere else, they stand out. Might have to do some more drawing and try and fix that. But here's where I'm at.

 I worked out a black and white version of the sketch tonight. While I think it's a successful translation, I also think it helps me decide that I really want to do a gridded drawing instead. This is just a step. A necessary one. It might seem a waste to some. That's ok. It's the end result that matters.

 Another case of me wanting to draw tonight. Was going to do the whole grid overlay thing but then decides just to do a loose sketch instead. I might develop this, might not. The foot's off, but I like the rest of it fairly well.

 I worked on the comic today but it was hard going. I've been sick the last few days and have had energy to do almost nothing. This afternoon, I was in a portrait mood again so went through my photos and pulled one out. It was a selfie of my high school friend Tony and me when we last met over the summer. I cropped me out and just drew him. It all came together really quickly, which was a nice change. I'm pretty happy with it.

After all that work with Zippa and the rubber hose style, out of nowhere, Disney released a new Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short today. *sigh* I know that people are going to think I was trying to ride on that thing. Oh, well.

For what it's worth, I went through a lot of sketches before I got the style and ratios down to something I thought worked. It's also hard getting the poses from dance videos to work. Seems that animation is ALL about what reads well and not at all about what actually makes sense. I did do a kind of test to see how things might work together and I think it'll work. The question is, if he's more or less a hallucination, whose is he? Digby's? Silas'? Not sure yet. Posting these mostly for my own memory.

 

 Did a couple more of these today. I think I have the character design down as well as some of the rules (most of which have to do with not obscuring body parts, which I have to work on). So now it's time to work on how to integrate them into the rest of the comic and hope that it works as, stylistically, this is the biggest shift so far.

 More work on this guy. I was a little disheartened after looking at yesterday's stuff. It just wasn't working for me and I was second guessing the whole idea. It all came down to the character design. It was too complicated, not iconic enough. I really wanted this to look like the results of a real graffiti artist painting something like Mickey Mouse but also making it their own. So I went back to the source, in this case Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. I have a book on the earliest of Disney characters. Pretty much ALL 'rubber hose' animation characters at this point followed the same rules. Disney's were more iconic than most which is why he kept going. I drew some Zippas, adapting the style but keeping it Zippa as well. At first, I wasn't sold. So I went looking online for images where people had co-opted characters and painted them. That gave me the breakthrough I needed. These, I feel, look like what I wanted. Vectorization really calms down the spray effects in a good way. So I think, with careful application of backgrounds, this little shit can do the song the way I want it done. It's all about selling, which was his thing in Tamino. Also, I'd wear a t-shirt with the top design, no trouble.

Did a bunch of sketching today. This is only some of it. Going to have to do some more tests to see what kind of backgrounds are going to go with this. I think I have some ideas, but we'll see. It has been fun and weird to 'cartoon' again after all the portraits. A little voice in my head says, "Why are you wasting your time with this crap?" Maybe it's right? Don't know. I have let this project sit for too long, though.
 

Hoo boy. My partner gave me a suggestion awhile back and it was one of those flashes that made me nearly gasp. What if the next track wasn't being sung by Ricci but by...Zippa? I had totally forgotten about that little bastard. And you know what? He really would be PERFECT for a song about how artists are selling out, how what they want is only the money and the prestige. There is, or was, some definite friction in the graffiti world when street artists would go 'gallery,' or some, like myself who were never 'street' at all pretending to be as legitimate as those who only stuck to the streets. Thing is, I just had a song sung by a fox and I couldn't see that working. So I plowed ahead with Ricci, trying to make him work. And he almost did.

But this morning, I saw a piece of digital graffiti with Felix the Cat and thought, "that's the kind of iconic look I do want to work into the comic at some point. So I started doodling Zippa in 'rubber hose' style. While I had to change his style a good bit, I think he works. And here, he can act as an alter-ego to Digby, his 'darker' or at least more monetary-focused side. This means I have to add a couple pages at the end of track six, showing Digby painting this guy on the wall then walking away. And when he's done so, Zippa can take over. Maybe sometimes when I'm stuck, pushing forward ISN'T the best idea. And this, I think, would be more fun to draw and a bigger contrast to the previous track. I know, a lot of fluff about nothing, but it makes sense in my head.

 

 Had some time today between loads of laundry and nothing in particular to draw. So I took a sketch I'd worked on before and did another take on it. Things are lopsided on purpose. This was just an exercise to paint something. Yet another self portrait to add to the stack.

 Time and a few color adjustments later, I'm calling this one done. I went back a few times trying to work on the hair and never finding another approach I liked better than what I already had. I darkened the shadow areas, the base hair color and details. I saturated and darkened the sweater details as well. I swear there was an update to AD between starting and finishing this as the layers menu looked different last night to me. All in all, I'm pretty happy with this and the two people outside this blog who've seen it gave me positive feedback. I only hope the recipient likes it, and the model. I am always so anxious about giving art as gifts. I feel like I'm inflicting it on my friends. Luckily, I don't do it very often.

 Had a day off so, among other things, I had a chance to work on this. Another case of frustration, tossing it aside and finding out I like it more than I thought later on. Her hair is a little monumental but as my partner pointed out, her hair IS. I'm particularly happy with the little splash of freckles on her face. Part of this one is seeing it through other peoples' eyes. It's meant to be a gift. She's a lovely person and I want some of that to come through. Will let it sit and come back to it in a couple days just to see.

 When in doubt, give a portrait. Started this tonight, a portrait of my friend Kate. She's a lovely young woman, married to my buddy the Weezil. Last year, they were kind enough to take a portrait of him as a holiday gift. I'm hoping they're that kind again as it's getting harder and harder to find things for people. The two of them were over the other night and I snuck some photos. The ones of her were a bit blurry because of course I can't manage to take decent reference. Still, I found one that had a decent expression though it's going to require that I really figure out -hair-. I've managed to avoid it for a long time, but she has such nice, flowing hair that I can't really see not doing so.

One thing I've learned about my own process is that these drawings are really just undercarriage. They're a guide for something that won't look anything like this down the road. The lines are far more numerous than the finished product will be. As per the current style, I want to keep this to as few colors as possible. Step one. We'll see how it goes.

 Oh yah, this. I was in a mood to draw, to make something so started making this on my new iPad...which I had to return. After 30+ years of Apple equipment, this is the only time I've had to return something based on quality. The pencil would just quit drawing, erasing or otherwise interacting with Procreate. I tried everything I could; using different pencils, different tips, hard restarts and two different kind of restorations and the problem persisted. So I took it back. Luckily, I hadn't erased or traded in my old one yet so I'm still using that. The M2 was nice, don't get me wrong but I honestly don't know if I felt any real difference with what I'm doing. Anyway, tossed out this little doodle which was started on the new one, finished on the old one. A scribble, nothing more.

 Procrastination and tiredness. That's all there's been since last post. I've also been trying to decide exactly how I want the next section to look. I went looking at some dance videos, including an old Paula Abdul video that had animation in it of MC Scat Cat. While that animation was a bit crude and done on 2s, it had poses and attitude that I kind of wanted from Ricci. This version is a good deal bigger than the one in Fite!  but I still wanted him mobile. He kind of reminds me of Ed Asher from the old Mary Tyler Moore show, and that's not a bad thing. I think I got a good kind of flow here and, if I can make the moves feel like they're connected, it'll work. Did some quick tests tonight. Now to work out how the text is going to work. Otherwise, the backgrounds, unlike the last track will be really minimal both to provide contrast and to make this one go a bit more quickly and easily.

 Finally got a chance to get back to this. Was in Boston for a week and had a house guest as soon as I returned. And, well, distraction. I really liked the head I'd done for Ricci designs before so just decided to plaster it on top of the one that was here. Have to remember to make him loud and obnoxious as that's who he is and that's kind of an undercurrent of the song. It's dark, possibly a hard read. I think the backgrounds on this track are going to be much more simple, perhaps even single colors. Might also want to make it feel more like a stage, even more than It's been. We'll see. Art production has slowed towards the end of the year though I think quality is better than last year. That's the goal anyway.

 This is the latest version of this. Still not happy with it. There's a certain...I hate to use this term...'magic' missing from it. Feels too...honestly dull. So I'll either put it aside to come back later or try a different approach. Even the subject admits that it looks more like him. For me, there's just no...oomph.

 I decided that the problem had to do with the original drawing. So tonight, after work, with a little scotch, I decided to re-draw the base for this portrait. I'll sleep on it and come back later to double or triple check. Sometimes these things take extra work.

 

Worked some more on this today. I did a lot with tiny details, adding, erasing and the like. When I got an image I thought I liked, I went to vectors and colors. I did three different versions and liked all three for different reasons. Right now, I'm leaning towards the middle one as I think it's the most balanced but I also think I need to do more with the basic image itself. It's just not quite right.