Due to one thing and another (and epic laziness) I haven't been keeping up with dA or producing much art lately. Shame on me. I shall attempt to go back through my watchlist shortly.

The other day we printed out Booze is Delicious; it's about a couple of metres long, gloriously impractical even for hanging-scroll.

Anyway, I expect to be in eastern Tennessee for about a month and a half, slouching about, hiking in the hills, getting married to =Isquiesque and hopefully doing some drawing while I'm at it; however, I won't have access to a scanner and will be on dialup, so I'm unlikely to get very much finished stuff submitted (though I've got any number of scraps that might get uploaded at some point, should you give a toss). With any luck TN will be a better environment for working in, though, so I hope to get an assload of drawing done.

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Still fiddling about with the rapidographs, but it's kind of frustrating after the swift and imprecise joys of super-soft pens. I love tending to the rapidograph's little quirks, but it gets kind of wearing when the inkflow slows down yet again just when you've got into a groove.

Trying to scheme on some short writing projects. My brain cannot think in terms of short-arc stories. It is troublesome. In any case, if I do finish anything I doubt I'll submit it here; I'm really cagey about my serious prose.

Also in the offing is some kind of comics collaboration with (don't go there - there's virtually nothing up there. Go here). The man is brilliant. Even if he is inclined to the occasional magical vanishing act, he appears to be under the illusion that I can write, and I don't plan to disillusion him. Have an idea or two simmering over, and should probably jot down some rough outlines.

Also, I am operating under a join-any-community-that's-vaguely-relevant-and-still-alive policy - I can always pare down later if things don't turn out to be useful. (Suggestions for other communities which fit the bill would be welcomed). So:
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Slowing down in the aftermath of the passionfruit comic; fiddling about on minor bits and pieces, trying to work out what to do for the next sequential piece.

Trying to find some worthwhile communities which would be worth watching and submitting to. It's not easy; dA has no real support for user communities, no directory (up-to-date or otherwise), and most communities seem to die once their admins lose interest. At least as far as comics go. The most active and relevant I've seen so far has been ~Scriptorium, and it's hardly as if lettering's my primary focus, fun though it is.

Part of this is that I'm a self-created minority. Most comics artists either work in the anime style or the Western superhero style, neither of which I'm particularly wild about. I mean, I don't reject 'em out-of-hand, and there are things I like in both styles; but I'd infinitely prefer to see you draw your own ideas than yet another Naruto or Spidey, and I have no interest in a community effectively dedicated to these things. I think artists develop better when they're not spending all their efforts on consciously imitating a style. Yeah, I know it's where all the money is. Yeah, I know it's natural that people will try and do the same sort of stuff as introduced them to the medium. Yeah, working within imposed constraints can produce unexpected and interesting ideas. Nonetheless.

Okay, whine over. Continue as before.

God, I'm so much happier when I'm doing montage stuff and can just let my brain wander around between interesting visual ideas on a vague theme, rather than having to depict coherent sequences of events (all with the same subjects, colour scheme and so on). I guess this is why Silver Age superhero comics are so full of such utterly random crap.

I'm working on a new oneshot comic (14 detailed panels, about 6 done) which is basically just me randomly waffling on about stuff; and for the first time in forever I've got a workrate which I'm not guilty about. Chances are I'll slow down a touch before it's finished, but for now - muahaha.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The issue I'm most unhappy with is lack of narrative clarity. It's particularly bad in page 5 (what's going on) and page 8 (motive, intent).

I mean, I don't particularly want people to have a perfect idea of what's going on in the red flashback stuff on page 6, but I'd like it to be more obvious that page 6 is a parenthesis and doesn't mean that the action on the preceding pages is over. Part of this may be that people read the pages one at a time, and thus had time to get a bit vaguer about what was going on.

My natural tendency in comics is to write far, far too much. With Oxbridge Pissheads, the art was really just a vector for the delivery of the text, and sometimes reflected the text thematically or added nuance to it (but it didn't matter too much if the reader didn't make all the thematic connections). F'rinstance, in OP 7, a character says "Leadership is sociopathy" in front of a frieze of naked Greek athletes - some of whom are female, hence a nod to Plato's Republic - if you get it then you have a better idea of where I'm coming from, but if you don't the basic message isn't lost.

But, mrf, in action stuff the visuals are what's important, and the text is there to clarify motive and intent and association and so forth; if you have to use it to explain what's happening, then your visuals are failing. Page 8 is thus a better candidate for a text-only reworking, since you can see what's going on, but there's some confusion as to why (and why it's a conclusion). But when I introduced text, in page 2, there was really far too much of it for the available space, so I overcompensated for the rest of the series. Feh.

Anyway, things are pretty enough, particularly when I take time over 'em (most of this is a lot scrappier than I could be doing, but I've been trying to work fast). But the lesson is: action is a harsh mistress, and it's not my natural forte, so in future give it a lot more consideration.