Verdaia

Haven't been reading usenet…
Haven't been reading my livejournal friendslist…
Have a nasty head cold.

So of course I have a convention coming up this weekend.

I so don't feel ready for even socializing, let alone this networking thingy I'm supposed to be trying to do.
I'm going to go anyway, of course.

And on the plus side, I did get three good writing days in (book is now over 5000 words long), so maybe my mental condition is improving :crosses fingers:

And I have done a lot of stuff on Black Flag, even though none of it is actual pages. (I was a hairsbreadth from getting back to doing pages — got the space armor working… Yay! — and my 3D modeling program decided to go all wonky. Grrr! So I've been building characters and continuing to work on the website while waiting for some tech support.)

Oh, and the Scent of Spring sketches continue to go well. I'm on chapter six or seven or something like that.

I haven't been doing all that great health-wise, so mostly I've been working on very low energy – no thought stuff like website updates. I haven't done reader comment based revisions on the first two chapters of Eyes yet, and although I did attempt to start on the next Asolde story (tentatively titled Building with Flames) the wordcount to date is not particularly impressive.

On the other hand, my daughter in e-school had standardized testing this week, so while sitting at the testing center I had nothing to do but work on Scent of Spring. I am now almost finished the thumbnails for chapter three. (It goes slooooowwwly, but when you consider that it's be worked on on top of Black Flag, which is on top of my novel writing, I can't say that I'm all that displeased with its progress. I have given it a one year pre-write estimate and a five year production estimate in the website updates I've been doing — same as Flag in Flames, even thought it's less than half as long. That may not be a very accurate guess, though, I'll have to see how much drawing time I find during the summer.)

Side note: I have occasionally worried that coming from a novel-writing background might make me a little too word focused for graphic novels, but I just put together three pages in a row without any words at all. 🙂

My sister had the good timing to arrive for a visit while the kids were off school because the weather was too dangerous to travel half a mile in. My sister drove about 900 miles to get here, but that's beside the point and we won't go into it.

The kids had three snow days in a row, and then a two hour delay, but now they are back at school again finally, and it's now my social duty to entertain my sister. (Since I'm quite obviously capable of avoiding social obligations that I don't want to fulfill you may all safely assume that I enjoy spending time with my sister.) 🙂

This morning I told/read her Scent of Spring. Got lots of giggles. It is wonderful having a receptive audience. The kids don't “get” romantic/comedy of manners type humor much yet (their only interest in that particular story being the toddler character and the cute little doggy), and Boyd doesn't want to have his first reading of a completed story “spoiled” by too much interaction with it while its still in progress.

Did not do any writing today because Boyd took me shopping (besides the kids are home, and although it's easy enough to get them used to me writing when they are always home, it is nigh impossible to do it when they are “on vacation”).

Unfortunately me going shopping means me not doing that great health-wise (which is why Boyd takes me instead of me going myself). I hope I can write tomorrow, I've got a climax to do.

Oh, well, whether I can or not, I now have empty page protectors again, so I have somewhere to put thumbnails for Scent of Spring, and thanks to a gift card from my parents-in-law, a bunch of art supplies to play with, so I can hopefully figure out how exactly I'm going to go about making “finished artwork”. Work on that one has recently come pretty much to a halt because it was driving me nuts that once I finished a page of sketches I had to either tuck it away somewhere where it couldn't be seen, or cover up some of my earlier sketches. (Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that this reveals something unfortunate about my personality?)

My younger son decided he wants Captain Blood on his Christmas tshirt, so that shirt is done, and my middle daughter decided to do her own tshirt, so we are down to my shirt and then I can go order them all and finally get back to work on Black Flag and Chaos Circle. I'm feeling a bit sorry for the other Black Flag characters, though, Blood has been getting way more attention than anyone else.

has mentioned in her livejournal that she is looking for an inker for her artwork. I often think I wouldn't mind a collaborator of some sort myself. Alas, I can't afford to pay anyone anything, and if I can't pay I don't like to even ask in a general way if anyone is interested. (If someone just volunteered out of the blue, that would be different, I'm not trying to take advantage of them in that case.) I think if I could afford to pay someone the first person I would want to find is a 3D modeler to help me build the Black Flag universe. And the second person on my list would be someone who could to help me arrange my music. These choices amuse a little though, because at the moment I have no serious plans for making money off either, so why are those the things I think I would be willing to pay money to get help with?

…I am taking a Christmas break.

So, um, I just finished the script for Scent of Spring.
60 handwritten pages.

Because I plan to draw this one rather than use 3D, I have been getting a great many books out of the library on how to draw comics, (also Scott McCloud's “Making Comics” which is very, very cool, but has more on how to figure out what needs to be drawn than it does on how to draw). Of the current selection my two favorites are How to Draw Manga: Getting Started, and How to Draw Kung Fu Comics. The author of the Kung Fu one's occasionally irritates me by saying things like “the female palm and fingers are thinner and longer, and more elegant” — Oh, yeah? My female palm and fingers are short and stubby, so there! But I do like the art even if it even if it is stereotypical and sexist — it's also pretty, and dynamic, and kewl…

…I'm particularly fond of those lovely elaborate outfits with all the wrinkles and folds. :drool:

Anyway, I've been learning a lot, which is always neat. 🙂
I went over my Flag in Flames layout sketches, (which I now know are usually called “thumbnails”), and have discovered that I typically sketch figures with “6 head” proportions. (I didn't know there was such a thing as a 6 head proportion when I was doing the sketches, but I used it amazingly consistently anyhow.)

I'm currently trying to get a handle on the thing that has has always bothered me about my own drawings… the faces just aren't consistent enough that they look like the same person twice in a row. I read somewhere that the way you fix that is draw your characters over and over and over again in umpteen zillion poses and at every possible angle, so I'm getting started on that now.

:wanders off humming “Witness' Waltz”:

Twelve thousand, half million, million and more
Pieces of sketch paper litter my floor…

Scent of Spring is giving me trouble and its all my own fault.

I liked the way Part One fell rather tidily into four chapters of pretty much the same length because with that title obviously I have a seasonal thingy going, and it was working — yay, and all that. So I tried to force Part Two into the same structure and the result was a severe case of too much blathering and insufficient scenery (which is not a problem I'm prone to complain about in a novel, but this is supposed to be a graphic story, so the scenery is pretty much the point of it all.) In retrospect I think it should have been obvious to me that Part Two was going to need to be at least twice as long as Part One. I'm pretty sure I've been trying to squish everything that needed to be said into half as much space as it needed to be said in. Urk!

I'm going to have to dump everything I've done on Part II and start over, but I've been dragging my feet on that and spending a lot of time trying to re-image things before diving back into writing things down. Which may not have been a waste of time, actually, but I'm starting to get impatient about getting pen in hand again. 🙂

I also did some work on Chaos Circle yesterday. I finished putting together the character “Tate”. Which means I can do the next strip, finally. I may make her a character page first… I know she's a Cynthia McQuillin fan, but I'm not sure what her favorite filksongs are yet.

Pavane in Pearl and Emerald
Word Count: 85426

The title picture for Flag in Flames progresses. I managed to paint flames on the flag that look somewhat like flames, but I didn't get that “yeah, that's it!” feeling. Boyd thinks that the flames themselves are okay, but they're distributed wrong. For the lack of any ideas of my own, I will probably try his suggestions and see if I think it's an improvement. I also appear to have done something funky with the texture on her hand blaster. In the test renders the blaster was small enough that the funkiness of the texture didn't show up, and at this point I'd far rather postwork it than re-render anything. Other than that, I think I just need to do something with the title text, and then I'm on to modeling Tortuga Station so I can use it on page 2.

I haven't been getting any work done on Chaos Circle, which is theoretically my current alternate graphics project. It seems that I don't mind switching from modeling something to working on a different picture, but I can't convince myself to switch back and forth between two different pictures. Interesting.

I have also started a new project. (What's that I hear? Cries of “good grief, not another one”? But I have a good excuse, honest!)

Ever since I finished the Flag in Flames sketches I've missed having something to work on when I'm not on the computer — like when I'm rendering something and its going to take at least six hours, and anything I do on the computer at the same time will slow it down. So I decided that that other idea I had that wanted to be a graphic novel but that I had been ignoring (mostly) because Black Flag had priority, would get its turn far sooner than anticipated. It's just this little romance I dreamed up (literally), that I'm currently calling “Scent of Spring”. I'm going to draw it. That is, draw it for real, and not just sketches.

The drawings will probably be disastrous — especially if my five year old keeps coming in and jogging my elbow — but it'll be a fun learning experience anyway, right?

I've been reading “how to” books and some talk about setting up a studio, and I'm thinking yeah, right! I'm going to be working in bed –or if my kids are in my bed because they wanted to use my laptop to play Sims2 or multi-player something and didn't bother moving it elsewhere, I might be working while reclining on the couch. I need something that is portable, and non-spillable. Which means, no nib pens and india ink, nor a lot of other stuff they recommend either. Current plan –> colored pencils.

So far this week I've done twenty five pages of handwritten script. (Only it's really more like twenty three because of all the scribbled out bits in the most recent part.) I'm about half way. 🙂