Trying something new

Had a nice Easter off with the lady. She's gone now, initiate sad mode.

So I've been looking for ways to speed up the time between initial idea and final comic. I can draw much faster (and technically better) in Photoshop, but as of yet that hasn't outweighed the advantages of vector in Illustrator. I did a few tests for Wednesday's comic in Photoshop. They looked something like this.

Now there are still imported vectors here but this was mostly an inking test. I like the texture that I can get on surfaces relatively quickly, but I'm not convinced it actually benefits the comic. I'll do some more experiments as I go, but it's looking like a better bet to just get more comfortable with Illustrator.

I need to start doing more detailed plans of the comics as a whole before I get too far into the art. Many of the final comics aren't composed nearly as well as they should be because I get too far along and don't feel up to changing things. At the moment I tend to just do small planing sketches like these:

Lots of artist complain that this is the real issue with digital art. It's so fast, editable, and disposable that we no longer value the formal basics like thumbnail plans and color tests.

Sir Rotherham is named after my new favorite pizza. It has a large amount of ham on it. It's awkward. I feel I need to get more characters with solid roles to diversify the comic, but the pig can't talk so... it may not help at all.

I'm trying to find time to get the D&D codex up to date but, it's pretty time consuming. Hopefully by next week.

Building blocks

More tweaks to the site done, and more to come. Got one of those little icon thingies. (Favicon) That's pretty awesome, right? Going to add a hidden page that catalogs all the words in the comics for easy searchability.

Here are some of the prep sketches from Sunday's comic, unfortunately these are degrading in quality because I actually draw most of the prep on paper. You know with pencil, like they did in the Dark Ages.

Maybe with a decent camera or scanner I might start putting those up.

In truth I don't hold a huge amount against John Mayer, though I've heard rumors he is a giant douchebag. But then, who isn't apparently. The John Meyer I love, is a fantastic South African artist who blew my mind back in high school, and unlike most stuff from back then he has aged immaculately. Really, check out his stuff.

Getting people's attention on Tumblr is pretty difficult so I've moved to a large format single frame ad for the comic. (This is where vector art is insanely useful.) The latest one was this.

Got to put some real time into the D&D page over this week to get it to what I want. An interactive map and lore center. The lore word document I have is getting very hard to manage, will probably do a timeline too. One that slowly reveals itself over the campaign.

Work to do.

Phew, all that traveling is over. It's good to be home. Though this is a new house, so I still trip over shit in the dark.

First off here's a comic that never was!

This was more a proof of concept than a final layout but I got bored of it. Also it felt too similar to this Penny Arcade, which is already unspeakably hilarious. I couldn't help screaming in my mind through all of Hugo, "It's a fucking industrial complex kid! No that's not a slide! Don't put your hand in there!"

Things on the horizon:

- I'm going to start a new D&D campaign soon, one I hopefully will manage to take places. I intend to use it as a world building exercise too, so it will have its own page home to any art and writing I do for it, expanding as the world does.

- I'm going to start proper work on either After or ADRIFT now that I'm getting settled in. Not sure which yet.


- Starting work with my friend's awesome two man band on art/photography/music videos. Will hopefully result in some pretty cool stuff. (That's called cross promotion, bitches.)


- With luck, I will be getting going on an iPhone/iPad game with a friend. That should be interesting and challenging. Mostly for him I would imagine since he will be doing the all the coding.

Lonely Valentine

Here's the little prep sketches for today's comic.

The heart moon was too cute to pass up. There was originally going to be a pile of DvDs on the couch arm but they really didn't read well at that size.

I've never actually managed to watch all of Marley and Me. I keep seeing it in parts. It's possible my fragile soul wouldn't survive a full viewing. Perhaps that's how they'll execute me when I'm finally caught. You know, for that thing I did.

If Lucy Fell and Mozart and the Whale are two of my favorite romantic comedies. I don't give a shit if it's pronounced Rom Com.

The comic was very close to being a Fallout valentine's day card, but I figured I'd been ragging on about old games too much. I still might do it as a separate art piece.

"Valentine's, Valentine's never changes." - Ron Perlman 

Kingdoms of Amalur

I'm actually really enjoying the game so far. Sure, it's run of the mill in so many ways, but it also plays slick as hell and lets me be bad ass.


Here's the sketch of the comic when I was thinking it up:

I'm having fun with the combat system. Switching between daggers and a bow on the fly and doling out flashy combos. It's made even more satisfying by the fact that I just left Skyrim where a little bit of this thought based combat would have gone a long way.


That isn't to say KoA is super clever, but it does have a nice immediacy to it.

Finished the main quest in Skyrim.

So I finally got around to doing the main story line quest in Skyrim tonight. In true Bethesda fashion the graphics bugged out making part of it a confusing lucid dream. And then some people clapped. I must say I was a little underwhelmed. I feel like these guys keep skating by on their huge world, and I was really hoping that they had stepped it up a notch this time.


In many ways Skyrim is a great example of everything Bethesda sucks at. From interfaces to animation, or any kind of AI and path finding. Yet it's done well enough that I'm sure they will only have to spit and polish maybe one of those things before the next one.


I know this isn't the point. I get that. I know I'm just meant to be exploring for hours on end, and I do. I have for the past three games. But I also feel I have the right to ask them to put an actual combat system in at some point. That would be cool.

Early ADRIFT Concepts 1

The main goal with ADRIFT is to create a mixture of a first person puzzler like Portal and a classic adventure such as Space Quest or Broken Sword. The main difference being, that death will be a very normal thing in the game. Quicksaving will be commonplace and there will be hundreds of ways to die.

The H.O.S Reminiscent

The H.O.S. Reminiscent is a Painter. Its trails weave a shield around the Earth, protecting it from our dying sun's corrupting rays. Affectionately referred to as Rembrandt, the High Orbit Station sports two separate spinning sections for artificial gravity. The Reminiscent also functions as a science research station and can house hundreds, but it is currently empty  and awaiting the arrival of its new crew. Well, not entirely empty.

Visually the ship is stark and cold. Its surfaces are clean and matte with sharp corners and straight lines. Windows allow light to slice the empty corridors. Lights color code sections of the ship - most of the ship is actually grey but strips of florescence make it appear other colors.

The Locals

The station has an omnipresent computer that runs most of its system and assists the crew. In addition to this computer, the Reminiscent has a pair of maintenance robots. These flexible machines are built to repair the station both inside and out.

Dark Days

Dark Souls is a fantastic game. Demon's Souls was too. They taught you the most valuable lessons games possibly can - that death is as unavoidable as the freaking tides, and grown men still cry. The only thing wrong with both of them was that they were attached to my hand by a cinder block called a console controller.

The petition to get a PC version has like 60,000 signatures on it now which is pretty cool. Go do your part even if you couldn't give a rat's ass, because we do. Though we all know these things never go anywhere.

When I first fired up the original Demon's Souls (Don't forget that apostrophe!) I proceeded to not move from the couch for 22 hours. I nearly died of hunger while dying over and over again. It blew my mind to experience that old feeling of, "sure I'm playing like crap, but that's because it's actually difficult."

Unfortunately it wasn't something that held up in the original game. The difficulty curve petered out once you got a decent weapon and realized that the attack patterns were very predictable. Dark Souls, the darker and less possessive sequel, fixed much of this by choosing to kick your ass forever and ever. And I loved every second of it.