I finally managed to pull off the page I've been practically dreaming of since the start of the comic. I don't know why, but it makes me feel like I've reached my first major milestone.  More than chapter breaks, which are more convieniece than anything else, reaching the major scenes and 'Ah Ha' moments have a great sense of acomplishment.

Beyond that, the doublepage spread is something I don't think I will be attempting again anytime soon. I really, really wanted to get it out for the week it was due, but of course the production timing of it happened to coincide with my trip to Birmingham, UK for the 100th international Rotary Convevtion (Amazing, by the way, just absolutely straight up amazing.) As it was it was down to the wire. 

I'm really greatful for the fans I have - so far they've been pretty straight up amazing. But the reception of milestones always makes me a little nervous. I'm especially nervous about this page, since there are alot of subtle (and not subtle) details in it that are kind of critical to the story - there are so many hints in it from which you can infer the construction of the world that this comic inhabits. I'm not sure if revealing them here is enough, or if I should do some more obvious re-enforcing of some things later. Either way, the groundwork has been laid, and I can do what I can.  I expect quite a bit more world building to be revealed in this chapter.

So,  for about 8 months now I've been using a new laptop. My old baby, Aulis served me well, but two years near constant abuse was not very kind to the poor thing. The power connection on it is very fragile, so Aulis is a backup PC and remains stationary for the most part.

I currently work on a new tablet I've nicknamed Eris, another Toshiba, this time of the Portege line, since the satellites were discontinued.


Model: Toshiba M700 Portege Tablet PC
4GB ram,  2.2 GHZ dual core, 100 GB hard drive ect. ect.

This darlin' is much faster than my old laptop. I learned to deal with Visa, and all of its associated annoyances that are supposed to make your PC safer and all that jazz. I've discovered this to be a slight pile of crap, since I got a virus on the thing that I just can't seem to shake (irritatingly). Luckily all it seems to do is turn all my ads when I browse the internet into ads for viagra and 'male enhancement', which is annonying, but I can't afford to get it sent away during the school year - It's way too esential for me.

I felt a bit betrayed by my anti-virus actually.  I used Bitdefender for two years on Aulis, it never had so much as a sniffle that wasn't detected and immediately terminated by Bitdefender - and I was much less careful with my downloads than I am now. Such is life I guess.

That aside I am mostly happy with this machine. The heat dissipation on it is fantastic, and it runs at a pretty fair clip for anything I want to do. It's almost a kilo lighter  as well - A huge advantage since I lug it everywhere with me. Importantly, I can run Painter X with almost no trouble at all, although i don't actually have very much time to play around in Painter.

The comic is done pretty much entirely in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2009, which is about $100 and perfect for my needs drawing and sketching wise. What weirds me out though, is that Sketchbook takes in the pen pressure data from the tablet screen perfectly, while painter can't seem to recognize it for crap. If I'm going to get serious about using painter, I'm going to have to get this resolved. Inked and greyscaled pages go straight to painter, because Painter is much more sophisticated when it comes to dealing with things like image resolution and converting to .gif and .jpeg files than Sketchbook is. Sometimes I'll use painter to lighten or darken certain panels if I feel that I didn't get the greyscale quite right the first time around.

I'm really looking forward to doing some real painting in Painter soon - I've got a piece planned that I think I can actually pull off, but I'm still not totally comfortable with the huge variety and selection of brushes available, and figuring out what to use and when.

My major complaint is that the pen calibration is not totally perfect. I think it's a function of the included touch screen, but I can't get the pen to calibrate so that the actual cursor lies directly under the pen point. It's annoying, but I've gotten used to it..

Progress: 31 Pages complete.
(My buffer is very, very slowly coming back. I want to be at least 4 weeks ahead before I start thinking about double posting ) 

So, I figured out that I can only actually write this thing if I draw it simultaneously. I'm of the firm belief that comics should be a fully integrated media - the  pictures and words are not separate entities, but part of one combined language that is used to tell the story. Also  included in this language is the arrangement and layout of panels and borders. So, every time I try to simply script out the words, typing on the computer, nothing comes out, or at least nothing good.  

The most I can usually do is general plot outlines - set my goals for the chapter and let the narrative wind its way towards those goals. There are little touchstone events that I am working towards. In chapter two that touchstone was the moment Serp. revealed that Felix had encouraged her to kill. Other goals for the chapter were to end with her on a roof, and to reveal that all of Serp's old contacts were going to be unavailable due to Felix's defection.

If you really don't want spoilers, I'm putting chapter three goals under this cut - you have been warned.

( spoilerific )
Spoilers over.

Anyway, so now when I script, it looks something like this: (I don't consider this a spoiler by the way, it's hard to tell what it means without context)


(I've already done the first panel in inks as you can tell)  but mostly all of my writing is done via really crappy stick figures, and panel descriptions, but written inside the panels. I did about 10 pages of chapter three this way in a flurry of writing, after which I had to carefully go back and re write all the panel descriptions in  so that later, I would know what the hell I was getting at when I drew a circle with an arrow on it.

This has mostly taught me that dialouge is not supremely important, as I used to think it was. The first chapter was written with an eye towards stuffing as much of that dialouge int there as possible. Chapter two was less so, and chapter three, I hope, even less than that.

Our pipes sound like a motor boat.

I kid you not. Nearly every time someone turns on the hot water in the kitchen, there is a horrible, moaning groan that reverberates through the house. My room is under the kitchen mostly, so I hear it ALL THE TIME. I'm kind of glad that I'm moving at the end of the month, since we've asked our landlord to fix it, and so far he hasn't done anything. He came, heard the horrible noises, told us he'd be back later, and evidently ran for the hills.

UMMM sketch! right - Messing about a bit with Carmen, who, if we're doing Film noir archetypes here, is your "Virgin" character - unrelentingly sweet and all that

( Sketch below the cut )

In other news Digger is free now. If you weren't reading, or aware of Digger before, go read it now. Ursula Vernon is a supremely talented individual, and Digger is funny as hell sometimes.


Progress: 26 Pages

One of my characters has been frustrating me lately. His motives have gone all ambiguous, and I think he's also suddenly changed roles so drastically in the story so as to become a bad guy. Felix wasn't going to be a bad guy, but  I think he is now.

That is nothing to say with how frustrating it is to draw him consistently. I only manage consistancy with the main character, serpent, because I draw her ALL  THE TIME. Felix is harder to get right, since I'm not sure exactly how  to get the expressions I need on him. Everytime I come out with something I like, it dosen't look like Felix at all.

The first version I ever did of felix over a year ago was pretty close to how I wanted him to be:
( Sketches below... )


Progress : 14 Pages

Comics are going up, and I have the world's tinyiest fanbase composed of people I live with, and the few people who trickle in from the comic being on SmackJeeves, since recently updated comics get posted on the front page an' all.  Quite frankly I'm thrilled. Also, terrified that my buffer is running out  - so I keep scratching at comics in the back of my head, and when I really should be writing up lab reports. That, and re edititing pages that I thought were set in stone months ago. Oi.

On an unrelated note, I can finally sleep well again knowing that I don't have to fear that Sarah "End Times" Palin had any probability of becoming president due to her runningmate's advanced age.  I'm sorry, but I would much rather  4 more years of BUSH than to put a mad dog, anti-abortion, young earth creationist who belives that the raputure is coming who ALSO can't name a single newspaper she reads, failed to graduate from at least 3 colleges, and mocks the premise of basic scientific reasearch into the hotseat with the nuclear codes.  *breath*. At least Obama seems sane, and not likely to keel over anytime soon, and also not likely to turn america in the theocracy it's trying to be.


... right.

So first post in about a million years, but hey - THE COMIC IS UP.  It has a shiny website and a new title.

Yes, the comic is up.  It is up here: excecation.smackjeeves.com/.

( Read more... )

-Ursula

So, being not content with only ONE comic project, apparently I have to start up a second. This one is short though! I promise myself... ish.

Anyway, I have no compunction about sharing with this one since the first big twist comes on basically the first page - second page if you want to get technical.

I'm not doing any planning for this one. I know the beginning, middle and end of the story, generally, but I'm writing the dialogue as I draw the pages, and I kind of like it this way - I get to focus more on telling the story with pictures instead of words. It its really quite liberating.

I've been having a bit of a creative crisis lately, mostly because I've been reading obcene amounts of Manga. Due to the unfortunate existence of a website called onemanga, I have been spending hours on the stuff, mostly because it is all instantly accessable and free. In my defense, if you suddenly stumbled upon weeks and weeks worth of free, published graphic reading material, alot of which is well written, or at least well written sappy goo, you'd probably get sucked in too.

The problem is, all of this shojo is starting to show up in my work. I know that manga was influencing my page layouts before, but some many hundreds of chapters worth of it later, I've just started to realize how big of an influence it has been. Personally, there are some aspects of manga artwork that bother me, so I know at least I'll be able to do my best to stomp out the inclusion of overlarge eyes, random flowers in the background, and men that look exactly like women, but where it really snuck in and got me was in panel layout. Much of the manga I've been reading has this kind of vast, flowing open canvas sort of thing, with huge splashes that break anything resembling a panel, or a logical structure. As much as possible. panel lines are eliminated, so that you become unaware that they are there. It's almost like the mangaka had a limited use ruler, and thus had to cut down on borders to make it last longer. All of these things are fine - if you are familiar with how manga works, and you intend your story to be read in large, chapter sized chunks.

My story is not a frilly romance, does not contain elements of the supernatural, nor will I be able to release chapter sized chunks. My audience, I would guess, will not be a manga audience.

On the other hand, I finally figured out my extended flashback page, so that makes me happy ^_^ . I think maybe that I think too much about all of this, and I should attempt to do this comic more naturally. We'll see. School will continue to kick my ass, so all of this is also a bit wishful thinking.

Progress: 6 pages (after the restart)

I'm on to page three now, and I am already glad of the freedom that being my own writer allows me. I changed the dialouge mid page, and just went with it from there. I even went in an entirely different visual direction with the page than I had originally planned because it made more sense that way. I don't know what it is, but i am much more comfortable working this way. Included under the cut is a snippet of page three, the words modified.

here is a picture just for the hell of it because I feel like wasting my time  - a minor character with little to no purpose that I can think of - because the part one cast isn't girl heavy enough as it is. Alanna, the bad cop to Morris' good one (as far as either is either)




I've  been thinking about  revising the  comic's structure a  bit  and  changing the plot rather alot - there are a bunch of things that I can do with it if I do. I guess it is because I am realizing now more than ever that this is not the story I would write now, as opposed to a year ago. If I make these modifications, it will be both longer and shorter, to be quite cryptic; to be more specific it would abandon three separate parts and change the end to something approximating the original end, back when the comic only had one part.

This could all just be idle speculation/midnight ramblings/ mid exam insanity though, so we'll see

On a semi - related note, for some insane, illogical reason, I'm in the middle of switching to a Dvorak keyboard layout, so this took me about a million years to type. I average a measly 12 WPM right now, but I just made the change about 4 or 5 days ago, and figured out where all the letters were about a day and a half ago (I don't really feel like re labeling my keyboard - this way I know that I am at 100% touch typing, since I can't look at the letters at all) , so it isn't THAT crappy a speed - it's just frustrating as hell, knowing that I can type faster normally. I hope that in the end, I am made a better typer.

So the very first new page of the comic, version two is done now. I must admit, I really like this page much better than I liked the first page I did. I switched programs (moving from Ink Art to Alias Sketchbook pro, which is worth it's weight in gold when working with a processor like mine) and I used everything I learned from the first 14 or so pages I did before I restarted the thing, and I did a little research into the first pages of webcomics (at least the ones that seemed to have started with a plan) I have very little time to work on the comic though, which is a tad depressing, but it's for school, which I Iove dearly, so I guess that's alright ^_^. In the meantime, here is a strange little comic experiment that I did on a whim, after regaining my laptop after it was away for repairs

Writing is HARD. Writing is even harder when you have half a script already and only 3/4 of the knowledge of where it was supposed to go. It's even harder when you want to go back through pages you already drew and re write them while sticking hard and fast to one's own laziness and lack of desire to redraw them.

From this you must gather that I've chosen to attempt to continue the comic on my own, without Jia. Her lack of willingness to come forward and discuss the future of the comic tells me that she feels that there isn't one. If this isn't true well...

In any case, Now I have writing duties as well, and I don't know how this will affect the future of the comic. My major problem is that I don't want to start writing lots of random shit and then go back afterwards to make it all fit the end, or find that the end I end up deciding on. That and the fact that I'm dissatisfied with the original ending right now.

Plus I keep wanting to write the really cool climactic scenes and dodge the slower, plot building scenes. It is very frustrating.

On the plus side, I LOVE world building, even when it relies heavily on source material. After all, the 'city of St. Laurence' the setting of our comic is my own little fictional place with which to play. ( double checking this, there are cities called st. Laurence in existence, but none of them sit where MY st. Laurence is going so I'm in the clear)

Also extra, possibly unrelated side note which wasn't relavent at the start of this entry: Cough medicine and wine don't mix. Or they mix a little too well if you catch my drift.

Alright, so here's the deal. From the start, this comic has been a collaboration between myself and the previously mentioned friend (and housemate, I might add) of mine, Jia.

 

Unfortunately, about a week or so ago, My housemates and I were informed that she was pulling out of our lease, thus depriving us of one friend, $350 worth of rent a month (Which none of us could afford to replace with funds for our own pockets),  and her fifth of the utilities (including the previous month's). Without going into too many details, suffice to say that the situation was handled extremely poorly by all parties involved ( Except perhaps our landlord, who is a fantastic, wonderful man, who has saved all of our asses on this occasion)

 

This has put me in a somewhat sticky situation, in balancing my desire to continue with this project, and my extreme annoyance of her irresponsibility in this matter of living conditions. As of yet, she has not expressed any desire to me to either attempt to continue the comic as before (which may prove difficult, as many of my housemates no longer wish to see her within the walls of our house), or to discontinue her involvement in the project. If necessary, I WILL continue it on my own, in a somewhat altered form, as I will no longer have her unique input on aspects of plot and character. Most of the entire first act of the comic has been plotted out In fairly succinct detail, however the second two acts have not been.

 

Until this has been resolved, unfortunately all comic drawing activities will be on Hiatus. I will continue to post ideas to the blog however, depending on what direction things go from here.

Unfortunately for me, (or fortunately, depending on your point of veiw) the chapter I'm working on right now (chapter 2) has a bucketload of narration. I really hope that this will be the only really narration heavy chapter, but the fact that we have one only two chapters in does worry me a wee little bit. SO although I get pages where the only drawing is this man on my right, it also means that the entire left side of the page is filled up with text. Oh the words are alright, full of usefull plot background info ( of course, none of the important stuff) but I'll be damned If I know how to make it look good. When you open up a webcomic, presumably you want to read a comic, not a novel, and god knows I love to skip over heavy narration sections.

But practicality rears it's ugly head. To add more illustration means that there is less room to  put that lovely text that needs to get in there, which means more pages, which throughs the balance of the scene out of whack. I'm a total sucker for symetry, so when I've got this image of Lewis Wong, I have to balance it out with another similar one of his rival. If the Wong family gets a narration free page, then their rival the Walters must also.

What does this mean? I'll be damned if I do, except that somehow avoiding work gets me more work in the end . ALso, that I can't draw debonair housecoats worth a damn.

alright some things just strike me as things I have to draw. I had the privledge or seeing Destroyer play (sans band ) at the Sled Island Music festival. It was incredible to watch and to hear, and he made quite an impression on me. So, he struck me as something I had to sketch. The hints of colour reflect the lighting in the church (did I forget to mention that? The concert was held in  presbyterian church downtown. It was a really cool location and had absolutely fantastic acousitcs and sound)

Along with destroyer played Chad Van Galeen, which was also wicked, but for a different reason entirely. Chad's entire concert was like an experiment. As he was at the back of the stage for most of the concert I didn't really get as a distinct impression of him as I did of Destroyer.

So, without further beating around the bush:

Just a two panel scribble, trying to plan out an upcoming scene ( sort of , to the extent that you can  plan something without context)

Also, an excuse to see the protagonist use classic gangster speak ~_^

Practing the facial expressions of the main character - I think she looks best when she's annoyed. You can draw your own conclusions about the first one. I need to practice my low angles alot more

( Cut for Sketches )

As noted in the title of my journal, I work entirely in digital ink. So far, I've not been so good with the physical ink, as I fail at keeping blotches away from my drawings - but that's beside the point.

Like many a digital artist, I use a tablet, but unlike many a digital artist (and unlike oh... 99% of laptop users I know) I run a tablet PC. If you've never seen one before, you're in for a treat, because these suckers are awesomely cool. I don't just say this because I have one and have made it one of my secondary life goals to pimp the tablet pc revolution around the world, but because everyone else who sees it says so too.

I currently am working on a Toshiba Satellite R15 Tablet Pc, which I affectionately named Aulis.


Stats:

14.1 inch screen
1.7 GHz Pentium M processor
80 GB Hard Drive
512 MB of RAM
Windows XP Tablet Edition
Battery life: 3.5 hours average, but I can squeeze about 4.25 if I'm careful
Weight: 6.2 lbs



The swivel hinge in the middle allows me to rotate the screen and lay it flat against the keyboard. The tablet pen that comes with it works just like a mouse, only better, because with the aid of programs like Microsoft OneNote, I can handwrite all of my school notes directly into my computer. The software can recognize my handwriting and this makes my notes searchable. It also has a built in application to transform handwriting directly into typed text. (By the way, this can account for many of the capitalization errors that invariably appear when I start to do text in tablet mode).  As a student, I can't even begin to tell you how helpful this is to me, especially when taking notes with lots of diagrams or formulas.

Best of all however, I can treat my computer like a piece of paper. I like to play around in programs like Ink Art and Alias Sketchbook Pro, which run nicely with my processing power and offer tablet friendly interfaces. The problem I find with sketching in photoshop (besides that I can't afford CS2) is that it runs a little slow on my processor, and I can't really run anything like music or the internet in the background if I want good performance - that and the screen is about the same dimensions as your standard 8.5' x11' piece of paper, and the photoshop menus tend to take up way too much space on my little laptop screen when I've flipped it to tablet mode (When laid flat, the screen switches to a portrait orientation rather than the standard landscape one).

When I need it too, my Toshiba will function just like a normal laptop. The single hinge tends to be a little bit less sturdy than a screen with two hinges, but the Toshiba design is generally much more stable than other Tablet PCs I've seen, and even after an entire year of abuse, shows no sign of weakening or strain.

I personally have a great deal of affection for the Toshiba brand in general - I have few complaints about my laptop, apart from occasionally being a bit of a turtle compared to laptops in the same price range. Unfortunately, the tablet functionality came with a heavy price tag, which meant I had to sacrifice a bit in the way of processing speed in order to get a price at which my parents would bite. At home, my parents have a stoneage Toshiba so old that it still runs Windows 95 - but, most importantly, it still runs, not bad for a laptop that's got to be at least 10 years old. We've got desktops that have burned out faster than that, and I've seen my friends with Acer laptops gasp with despair as they search desperately for that letter 'C' that just dropped off their keyboard, and I've watched another friend's three year old Dell go into bluescreenofdeath fatal shutdown. This model is a few years old now, but still runs fine, and I haven't been exactly kind to it.

I could probably spend two posts explaining why Tablets are the next age in laptop computing, but let's just get on with it shall we?

Apart from that I tend to use little else. Most of the characters of the comic are drawn, at least partly in image from real life persons. If they happen to be someone I know (and many of the looks of the important plot building characters are) , I usually make them sit down for a few minutes while I stare at them determinedly and produce charicatures that look vaguely like them. If they're inconveniently in other provinces, based off of persons that are fictional/movie stars/movie stars that are fictional, I start working on the characters from photos, like this guy:




The resemblance is striking I know - but Mr Peck was the man in Jia's head for this one and I had to say I agreed with her. My goal is never to create an exact copy of the person, but a character inspired by their look or attitude. Sometimes this means that 110 pound, 5 foot three Redheads that live down the hall get turned into leggy double D firebrand songstresses A La Jessica Rabbit - but what can you do.

I also have a fedora and a dollar store toy gun lying around somewhere which will one day teach me how to draw hats and guns properly. I'm beginning to steal suit jackets off of my dad and brother for reference also Comic Progress:  Same as the last time I posted it  '^_^