Just some art

Heavily into writing my novel right now, but then I suddenly made this picture of the main characters having a vaguely not fun naked time. I think my paintings get better the less frequently I do them. Some next level contrarianism huh.

Update Jan 14: I did manage to polish off this one of main character #3 that's sat around unfinished for years.

If you could make your hair do that you would too

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Yes, the comic is one week late this week. I probably need to push myself harder.

I have a story about that, actually. How I hurt my back rediscovering the thrill of life:

I've been walking the forest trail next to my house at night for a while. Trying to make it a regular thing, for the exercise. It's two kilometers of twisting dirt path, covered in pine needles. No sign of human life if you go there at 2 AM. I find it pleasant. This night, some ten days ago, I decided to take my exercise to the next level: Light jogging. After ten minutes of breathing hard I saw the first sunlight hit the crowns of the trees and felt fine, except my legs were burning with the effort of holding my speed back to the minimum I judged I could handle to keep it up through the whole trail. So I went faster.

Before I really thought about what I was doing, I was running as fast as I physically could, desperately mindful of the ground right in front of me to place my bare feet away from roots and pinecones. I was keenly aware of how easily I could seriously hurt myself - one time I have found broken glass on the path, and since I went over 110 kilos I have felt I could as easily break my ankles as twist them. And I was able to find some kind of steel under all this fat. Steel that once upon a time let me walk a slack rope five meters over the ground, let me sit down and untangle my foot when caught under water and out of breath, let me make decisions faster than I could think at times when I had to save life and limb.

I had almost forgotten how easy it is to be in this state of genuine fear. Everything's so clear, everything fits together. The faster I move, the better. You can see how one could get addicted to it. I now have to weigh my motivation to get in shape against my fear of addiction.

But anyway, then I couldn't sit straight for the rest of the week.

So, notes on the comic:

*Anna Regn's hair has probably grown more than can be justified by moving the air around it to give it volume. I just like drawing it.

*The twins tend to stand in this order: Leon left, Anna Regn right. They started doing it just to keep people from mixing them up, but there's probably some symbolic significance in the particular order they choose. 

*The existential conflict between the lasting and the ephemeral is probably not going to cause as much drama as it could, despite the twins's fundamental difference in artistic doctrine. 

*Anna Regn clearly can't help herself from pointing fingers at the camera at the slightest provocation. Stop it. Nobody likes a foreshorteninger. 

*I still don't have a real model for how these characters should look. In fact I don't even know how their noses work. But at least I have a vague system for word balloon shapes to convey voice. And those faces in panel 8 are p. great. If I may say so myself.

*Leon's on like four or five levels of irony when she quotes Monica Geller's catchphrase "I know!" Kids watch old TV shows in different ways than we did. But I mention this just so you can hear it in that voice.

PS. It's come to my attention the comic may appear shrunk on some monitors. This raises several questions, and having done everything I can to answer them my conclusion is: I miss having websites that would only put code in your pages if you wrote that code, and if you're not seeing 1000 pixels wide comics try clicking on the image. (This should take you to imgur, where you have to click the image again to see it in full size.) (Sigh.)

Progress update

My bones feel like old fiberglass, except for the base of my spine. It feels like broken actual glass, and keeps me from drawing. Based on past experience, I'll probably be able to put together the next page before the end of the week. I really want to, which makes a difference. But in the meantime here's a peek.

I hope you appreciate how self-conscious I feel showing you this, dear reader. If the finished comic is like baring my body and soul this is like showing my body, my soul and a MRI displaying their inner workings in detail I don' even understand.

Easy there Grabby, that camera was her birthday present

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I feel like I've learned a lot in drawing these three pages. It would be such satisfaction to go back and start over. Like so many times before. Maybe this time I'd look up how a videocamera looks.

But no. Let's keep moving forward.

(She said, before noticing she forgot to color any hair on page 2.)

Everything Changes 2: Judgment Day

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Industry wisdom (or at least a thing Mr. Warren Ellis said once) suggests you get three pages to hook a reader on a comic. So why don't I spend the whole second page trying to pull off foreshortening, perspectives and a sense of fluid motion and doing nothing to convey plot or characters? Well, almost nothing. There is a chance some nuances of body language and facial expressions come across, I guess.

So the hardest part of this page, aside from the constant struggle with the demon Perfectionism, was thinking up this series of mid-air poses and the angles from which to show them. She's trying to do everything at once, but awkwardly, still finding her, uh, air legs. As one does when one suddenly can fly.

Also, when drawing full body shots of airborne children there's no cheats and no shortcuts. You have to know how tall they are. How long both of their legs are. There's no other way to make their proportions consistent. Identical twins makes this twice as scary.

I expect many readers here wonder what identical twins I'm talking about. See now how cleverly I've used my artistic ineptness to pull you along to the next page, dear reader.

How to make business associates and influence people

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And scene.

Paradigms of human memory

Oh boy that's ugly.

But I wanted to show you, dear reader, what I have accomplished this week as I'm trying to regain that momentum of the webcomic that this site is ostensibly about.

Yes, this entire damn week I've struggled to open Photoshop. I have searched through drawers and folders for bits of page 10 I thought I had made back in April, and I have laboriously taken myself into town to get new pens because to my surprise my ink pen that I like to hand-write dialogue with had dried out, and I have written the dialogue and scanned it and even used Photoshop to touch it up a bit, and I have given up on the Windows 10 computer I bought last year when I got a small inheritance and returned to using my old Win 7 one that's actually much nicer (Windows 10 is such garbage fire) and can use my old tablet just so that working in Photoshop would be that little bit less of a hassle, and now, very early on Sunday morning, I have finally managed to put lines on a page.

Just this little pointless sketch, which I'm showing to you because I'm amazed at how I managed to do it while in the middle of an ontological breakdown because it turns out in the six months since I last drew anything I have forgotten everything about how to do it. Just this existential dread at the discovery that all of the rules I have discovered and internalized for the process of putting lines together into shapes like the ones in my head are complete gibberish and I have to work it all out again from the beginning. I'm just trying to draw some comics and my entire, unraveling mind is shoving itself in my face and demanding that I completely rethink how and why I think, what my thoughts are for and what they look like.

I probably have to make a serious effort to draw something every single day for a while just to get back some of the skills I had. Well, Inktober is coming up so that's a nice excuse to flood the blog with any pictures I can make and fuck perfectionism and lack of confidence.

Feel free to share any drawing prompts you may want to give me in the comments.