Eye Practice

Yesterday, I got my hands on Impact Publishing's "Fantasy Art," which they term a "bookazine" because it is over 200 pages and probably only got stuck on the magazine rack because it's Volume 1 and bound like a nice magazine and because the creators couldn't even decide on what it was (alas, that means it's exempt from most coupons). Plus, it comes with a CD with video tutorials, brushes, and reference images. Haven't gotten into them yet, but yay, references!

In any case, it's chock-full of tutorials and helpful hints on everything from painting portraits to designing architecture. Every now and then, I like to try something a little more realistic than my normal anime style, so when I saw the tutorial on digitally painting eyes, I decided to put the Popsicle pic on hold and give it a try.

This is what I've got so far:



Still not quite as realistic as I'd like, but not too bad. The eyebrow needs some serious help, as well as those lower eyelashes, but overall, I think it's a step in the right direction. And yeah, went for a red eye (can't completely purge my fantasy tendencies!). Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming...

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!

More Avatard Kit

And for all of you who have been wallowing in despair ever since M. Night's bastardization of The Last Airbender hit theaters, a ray of hope! Yesterday, Nickelodeon announced the greenlighting of an animated sequel series set in the Avatar universe: The Legend of Korra.

You can read the full press release and see the pretty promo picture here.

Now, normally I'd be worried about a sequel series, especially after what a certain director decided to do to one of my favorite TV series, but there is one very important aspect of The Legend of Korra that makes me really look forward to it: it's done by Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the creators of the original series. They have proven to put the quality of the story and the characters at the top of their priorities list. Perhaps just as importantly, they are willing to listen to their creative team's suggestions and use them to craft the best story possible.

They also have an excellent track record with creating strong female characters . I'll admit, I had a twinge of doubt when I read the description of Korra. Well, less of a 'twinge' and more of a bevy of alarms developed from years of reading urban fantasy, which is filled with so-called "strong" female characters who can be described as "hot-headed, rebellious," and "independent." None of which are bad traits, mind you. It's just that in the hands of a lesser writer, "strong + female" translates into a genuinely unlikeable character you actually want to personally drop off a cliff.

Good writers, on the other hand, don't think of characters as "strong males" or "strong females." They just think of them as "strong," without trying to figure out how they can try to play with gender. At the very least, a character's gender is not that character's defining trait. The Avatar crew probably could write books on how to create strong characters with depth and fully rounded personalities.

It's one of the reasons Avatar was so popular.

In any case, I have high hopes for The Legend of Korra. With any luck, it will stand alone as a good, high-quality story with more great characters and not be a shadowy imitation of the original.

Avatard Kit

This past weekend, M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender opened in theaters. For those of you who don't know, it's based on the completely and totally awesome Nickelodeon cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender. The series took place over the course of three seasons, each with their own title (The Book of Water, The Book of Earth, and The Book of Fire) and, unlike most American cartoons, had an overlying story arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Add to that characters that actually developed and grew over the course of the series, romance, moral dilemmas, action, adventure, and a serious threat to the world, and you've got yourself a winner.

Oh, and can't forget the humor. Lots of humor... so I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw the previews of a dark, joyless world in the grips of angsty melodrama.

I haven't seen the movie, nor do I intend to in theaters. I know, I know, there are some people who like it, but I'm having a real hard time reconciling some of the changes Mr. Shyamalan decided to make to the actual mythos of Avatar. Cutting things out of Season I to fit it all in a less than two hour movie, I can understand. Drastically changing the plot and the characters' personalities to suit his own personal vision? Unforgivable. And don't even get me started on the names. -_-;;

In any case, I did find something to help ease the anger over some self-absorbed director mauling one of the best things in the past ten years in some quest to make it his own: the Avatar: The Last Airbender Artbook. I spotted this in the bookstore Monday and just couldn't resist. Mike and Bryan (the creators) talk about the development of Avatar and how they got it all together, which is fascinating for anyone who is creating their own world, plus discuss the characters and the process and provide plenty of development sketches and conceptual artwork to drool over.

Yeah. This has made my week. :D

As for the movie? Well... we'll see what happens when it hits DVD.

How to Develop a Twitch

Step 1: Run an older version of Photoshop on Windows 7.

Step 2: Compulsively save your work after every action for fear of the dreaded "Illegal action/Not enough RAM/You just lost half an hour's work!" pop-up.

*headdesk*

It's not a big enough problem that I'm going to shell out hundreds of dollars for a newer version of Photoshop. For one thing, I actually really like the version I have. But it's random spazzing at inopportune moments? Yeah, that I could do without, especially when I have to restart my computer every time it happens.

Needless to say, there's a reason this week's page is going slower than I'd hoped. However, it WILL get done! *strikes a pose of DETERMINATION!*

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Behind Again

Man. Take a creature of habit out of its habitat for a few days, and watch its little life spiiiiiiral out of control. It doesn't help that Wimbledon's currently going on - whenever one of the tennis majors hit the screen, Kit's productivity takes a dive. The worst one is by far the Australian Open, when anyone in the States who wants to watch live tennis needs to stay up to greet the morning light. With Wimbledon, I just end up staying up late, watching Wimbledon Primetime on The Tennis Channel (yes, I am that much of a dork, and yes, I did watch the epic Isner/Mahut match).

In any case, I have yet to reign in my wildly fluctuating sense of the temporal, so that doesn't help. I suspect I'm in the middle of another CBP, which always puts a dent in my personal timetable. However, I am determined to have a comic page done this week. At the moment, it looks like it'll go up sometime tomorrow evening at the earliest, but at least it's started!

*listens to the slow, sarcastic clapping of a single person*

... Yeah. I'll just get back to work now. :D;;

This Week in Movies

I have watched an inordinate amount of movies in the past week. Some good, some bad, some really bad. Some, I'll even watch again. Here's the run-down of what I've watched recently.

• Children of the Corn - My sister-in-law has been broadening my horizons by introducing me to all sorts of bad 80s horror, including a jaunt with He Who Walks Behind the Rows. While I'm fairly sure Malachi's actor did indeed grow up to be a secret sociopath and/or the older brother in The Adventures of Pete and Pete, I think the most terrifying part of the movie was the idea of Bert and whatsername riding around with a dead kid shoved in their trunk for hours.


• Dune, circa 1984 - Dune is one of the classic books of sci-fi/fantasy. It is the fantastic journey of a young man from the pampered son of a duke to the religious leader of insurgents with a death grip on the throat of civilization. It's got political intrigue, deep characters, strong leading ladies, action, adventure, mysticism...
  
  The movie? Not so much.
  
  Sure, the effects and costumes were great for the early 80s, but that doesn't excuse their butchering of the plot and massacring of the characters, especially the women (What's that? You mean Chani actually spends time outside of Paul's bedchamber in the book? Nooooo...). Toss out the plot, add in rampant internal monologues, some epic rock power ballads, hip-thrust-activated blasters, random face-bleeding, and Sting, and you've got... something completely and utterly headdesk-worthy. Only watch it if you and your friends love to MST3K things. Otherwise, skip it and watch the SciFi Miniseries.. Or, better yet, read the book.


• The Spirit - ahaha, where to start... What can I say about a superhero who has an Oedipal complex for his city and gets stuck in a toilet seat in his big introductory fight? This is one of those movies made to be bad, but more often than not, it was the movie equivalent of nails down a chalkboard bad. This is what happens when you've got a mentally unstable vigilante whose only power is that he can't die. Too bad that whole transformation process didn't add a few IQ points, huh?
  
  Of course, I do have to give it credit for one thing: "THIS IS FOR MUFFIN!!!"
  
  You go, Spirit. You go.


• The Seamstress - What happens when you've got a serial killer of children, a desperate mob, and a psychic school teacher who keeps leading people to the bodies? Well, for starters, one dead school teacher and her unlucky husband. They set about haunting the island until a group of college grads show up 20 years later, all in support of their friend's search for her obsessive mentally ill father, and just lookit that body count rise! Lesson here: True friends stick together. Idiotic friends get themselves killed by wandering off on their own.
  
  Not a terrible movie, but not something I'll feel the need to sit through again.


• Boogeyman - Now, this is my kind of horror. Low gore, an unreliable main character, and plenty of playing with your head. Barry Watson gives a great performance as a guy who, after years of therapy, has finally been convinced that he's got no reason to be afraid of closets. Then, his mother's death forces him to go back to his childhood home... and see if those therapists were right.
  
  If you want the full effect, watch this one at night, when you're all alone in the house. Or maybe I'm just an easy target for what's just out of sight in the dark...


• Boogeyman II - Again with the "kid witnesses traumatic death grows up" theme, although this particular kid ends up in a mental hospital, in group therapy with agoraphobics, cutters, germophobes, and whatnot to try to work through her boogeyman issues. Cue the Boogeyman killing them off one by one.
  
  ... Yeah. This one lost all the psychological horror and tried to replace it with gorn. Did I really need to see maggot infestation and reverse lipo? No, no I did not. Do yourself a favor and just stick with the original.


• The Phantom - Hello, update! The Walker family line has a new addition in this two-part "movie event" from SyFy. This one was actually pretty enjoyable, and I do have a soft spot for parkour chase scenes. They probably should have rethought their casting, however, when the 5'9" hero's sidekick(ish) person is a 5'10" woman... in 3" heels. Kiiiinda makes him a little less intimidating when they stand side by side. Overall, a pretty good flick, and the ending leaves it open for sequels or even a series... and yeah, I'd definitely check them out.
  
  And yes, I was ecstatic that our hero refused the wear the purple unitard. There are some traditions that just need to be left in the past.

So, there you have it: what I've been watching in the past week. Now, on to Wimbledon!

Back from Vacation!

Yep, just got back from a trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We hit Mackinaw (City, not the island this time around), St. Ignace, Bay Mills, and Tahquamenon Falls (yeah, I'll give you a few minutes to figure out how to pronounce that one). Weather wasn't spectacular - I think the highest we hit was 65F, and at one point ended up buying a new hoodie just to ward off the cold while shopping.

Some trips are just destined to have problems. We figured that was the way this trip was heading when my mother dumped a hummingbird feeder full of sugar water all over herself before we even left the house. The trip went on to include: more roadkill deer than I've ever seen in my life, salmonella-licious chicken and a saladless salad bar at the casino restaurant, a screw-up at the hotel regarding the reservations, and everybody's favorite combination of a dead car battery and no cell reception.

But there was a lot of great things about the trip. For one thing, I made enough off the complementary tokens at the casino to cover my shopping spree at Mackinaw Crossings and my favorite store ever. For another, the falls were beautiful and I got a ton of great photos, which will be appearing in future posts once I downsize them from GIGANTIC. I'll probably adapt a few of them for my Zazzle shop and maybe in an "Other Things to See" segment on my Mackinac Island lens.

I'll talk more about the trip and what absolutely made my day next time. :D

Things That Make Me Go "Hee... ^_^"

It happens every now and then - say, slightly more often than once in a blue moon: I'll be surfing along through deviantArt, just checking out whatever catches my interest, and all of a sudden I'll come across something Strawberry Syrup-related. An icon, maybe - not TOO terribly surprising, since I've got a pre-made selection of SS Icons over in the Fun Stuff section of the site (although that reminds me... I need to get some of those up for the Dwayne fans out there). Always makes my day.

Well, yesterday, I came across two. And not just icon users. They've also got Strawberry Syrup plugs in their sigs. One's even got a link.

... Yeah. I'm still downright giddy. :D

Maybe it's different for webcomickers with bigger audiences and it's more commonplace to stumble across things. I don't know. But at last report, Strawberry Syrup's got about 90 steady visitors, so when I come across something related to the comic, it definitely still gets an "omgSQUEEEE!" reaction out of me.

Personally, I hope I never lose that reaction. I do, however, have to work not to exhibit my total dorkness by doing something like glomping them through their comment pages. ^^;; Yeah, cuz that wouldn't completely shatter any illusion of cool I've got going.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to hunt down Koni, show her, and resume my Happy Dance of Squee.