Popsicle Process

Yep, didn't exactly get it finished yesterday - an impromptu round of WoW with the brother and sister-in-law demanded my attention. Several hours of traipsing through the Barrens later, and it was back to work.

In any case, the lines are done and the base colors are all set on the girl. Which means it's time to start on the background. I'm going for more of a city scene. Or, at least, a town. Not something I do a whole lot, but practice is a good thing. Little trellis thing will hopefully be a cafe, and the further background will be done sans-lines, I think. Stick some city-bound foliage in there... I don't want the background to dominate or compete with the girl for attention.

Coloring this is going to be... interesting, to say the least. We'll see how it goes!

Home Improvements

This has been an interesting month. Terrible for blogging and doing anything productive, online-wise, but still interesting. We're in the process of making a few home improvements - specifically, new vanity tops in the bathrooms and, for the big one, new floors through much of the ground floor. Seeing as I'm from a family of packrats and clutterbugs, this means a LOT of packing things up to relocate them during the installation.

Exactly HOW I fit so much stuff into such tiny spaces, I do not know. I'll have to take some pictures.

Anyways, my goal for today is to get one more finished pic up in my deviantArt gallery, so I snagged one from a recent sketch session to try and get that done. If not, I'll have a fresh pic for August, then.

I figured this one was a nice, summery one. Girl eating a Popsicle - nice variation from the typical girl-in-a-bikini pics that usually show up when someone wants to do something summer-like. It's half-inked right now... and outlining in Photoshop takes forever, but it gives me a smoother line than in MangaStudio. I'm still not sure what I'll put in the background, but we'll see what shows up!

Okay, back to work!

Pressure Sensitivity Problems Solved!

Sorta. Turns out Manga Studio 3.0 is nooooot quite compatible with Vista or Windows 7: the pressure sensitivity just does not work. After spending some time checking out help forums and whatnot, my brother finally suggested we try the demo for Manga Studio 4 to see if it was still a problem them... and lo and behold, pressure sensitivity was fine.

Fortunately, it's just an upgrade, so it cost me $130-something instead of $300. Oi.

Anyways, I opted for a physical copy this time (my last copy was a download), so I've got a little time before it arrives. Alas, I found out AFTER that that the demo doesn't allow you to export. In the mean time, I decided to make sure Photoshop wasn't having any problems and did a quick little experiment in a different style than usual:



Not my best work. I was trying for something. Didn't quite get it. But I'm actually happy with the lips for once, so that earns him a posting somewhere. Basically, I wanted to do something where I could use a few different brushes, do some smudging and blending, and not spend a WHOLE lot of time on it. Character's name is Erich, btw... older brother of one of my RP characters, hence the unusual hair color. I dunno, I've just never liked drawing completely random characters. Gotta have some sort of story there.

The Comic Process, Part I: The Thumbnail

Alright, so by now you're well aware that I have a weekly (heh, supposedly) webcomic, Strawberry Syrup. Here's how I come up with each page.

First up: the Thumbnail.

A thumbnail is basically a very quick sketch meant to help me figure out what elements I want on the page and where to put them. By 'very quick,' I mean no time spent on detail. Here's the thumbnail for Page 20 of Chapter 4:

As you can see, very quick, very sketchy, and not exactly an architectural blueprint here. There are three key things I need out of my thumbnails. 1) Where are the panels going? 2) Who's in each panel and what position are they in? 3) Where are the speech bubbles going? It doesn't take a whole lot of detail for me to tell any of those things, especially when most characters have some identifying characteristic. Dwayne's got his big ol' wizard's hat, Sammy's got glasses, Ferdy's got his cape... Not real hard to tell them apart.

Now, here's the important part: the thumbnail can change. They're not set in stone, and I'm allowed to change them, as you will see in Part II. By sketching it out nice and fast, I can see how it does or doesn't work, how another panel arrangement might work better, and what content might work better in each panel. If I weren't lazy or on a weekly schedule, I'd probably sketch out those variations, too, and pick which one looks best.

As it is, I thumbnail once, then wing it. Do not follow Kit's example there, kids. Ideally, you'll have each chapter thumbnailed well in advance. Trust me, it's easier that way.

2009 Summary Meme

As I was finally going through the massive pile of deviations stacking up in my devArt inbox, I stumbled across a new meme: the 2009 Summary Meme. I think I'm actually going to do this one. I mean, what better way to end the year than to sit back and take stock of everything you've done over the past 12 months?

It helps that for once, I had pretty decent artwork every single month. In fact, for the first couple months, I'm going to have a hard time picking. In March, for example, we had both The Centaur Kiraz and Attempt 02, my second attempt at drawing one of my DI characters in a realistic style (namely Astarte, who turned out rather fantastically). At the moment, I'm leaning more towards Astarte, but I am still hella proud of how Kiraz turned out, too. And let's not even get started on February...

Also as an end-of-year type thing, I'm working on a another doodle page, done on the old paper again. Why? Because that's how I started the year. It should be an interesting comparison, seeing how my style has changed over the year, assuming it has at all. Considering my so-called "style" seems to be in flux from one piece to another, it would be a miracle if it hasn't.

Here's a sneak preview from the doodle page:



Yeah, there's more than a few *ahem* character interaction exercises on this sheet. I've got about a week to finish coloring things in, which I will get right back to as soon as I get something done for Strawberry Syrup this week. It's Christmas - gotta do something!