The second one’s been all over Livejournal by now, but still!
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Archive for ‘Blog’
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When I was a teenager, my best friend and I had this ongoing injoke that you shouldn’t look porcelain dolls directly in the eye or they’d suck the soul right out of you.
Also, if you’re a fan of Octopus Pie – and really, who isn’t – you’ll dig the second cartoon.
Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.
All I Want For Christmas Is The Octopus Pie Christmas Special from Meredith Gran on Vimeo.
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Those of you who are tuning in from the RSS feed will have no doubt noticed entries showing up from Flickr in your reader along with updates from the blog and comic here. I’ve taken advantage of Feedburner’s magical powers to include the flickr account so that subscribers can get bonus artwork and sketches. I’ll try not to flood you with uploads (which is kind of a comical notion in and of itself, given my rate of output), but if it does become obnoxious, please speak up. The idea here is to have some kind of interesting content to make the week-long periods between new pages a little bit more tolerable.
One of my goals for the year is to sketch daily, so you’ll know if I’m being good or not if you see a new sketch in your reader every day. You have permission to yell at me if I’m not keeping up.
And if you’re not a subscriber and would like to get in on this caper, you should absolutely subscribe right now.
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Some excellent resources for making comics on the internet
on January 5, 2010 at 11:08 amPosted In: Blog, Tutorials and Resources
Webcomics.com went subscriber-only earlier in the week, and if you follow webcomics news at all, you probably don’t need me to tell you, since it’s already been reported and commented on by every major source all over the internet.
I have no strong opinions on the subject in either direction, the idea of a paysite for tutorials isn’t totally alien to me, lynda.com, nettuts, and 3dbuzz all charge a premium for access to their content and they seem to do okay for themselves, so what Guigar’s doing isn’t an unproven strategy. If you’re broke, though, there’s still a lot of useful information on the subject of telling stories with words and pictures if you know where to look.
Here’s some of my favorites:
Comic Tools is an excellent, if sadly neglected blog on the craft of making comics, but if you dig through the archives, there’s a lot of information there that is still very relevant. I especially like the articles on drawing and using dialogue balloons, a subject that tends to be an afterthought.
One of the things I’ve always found to be very instructive is to look at other peoples’ process, and there are a number of people who’ve documented theirs to share it. Kazu Kibuishi was kind enough to post a three-part series of how he makes Copper, and it’s just wonderful.
And there are of course the old standbys that seem to make the rounds about once every year or so: 22 panels that always work and Disney’s comic strip artist kit. If you haven’t seen them, there’s also a neat set of instructional drawings by osamu tezuka on how to draw manga. All the instructional text is in Japanese, but you’ll get the idea.
Many of the articles on Animation Meat can readily be applied to comics. there are a series of lecture notes and internal memos circulated to animators available on the site. Of interest especially are the notes on work habits, thumbnailing, drawing, and storyboarding.
Finally, it seems like everybody and my mom are running their comics on the wordpress/comicpress value meal combo, and if you’re one of them, it behooves you to take at least a little bit of time to optimize your wordpress setup. Lifehacker ran an article earlier in the year on doing exactly that, and the article itself is an excellent springboard into other useful WordPress-related learning tools.
If you have your own favorite resources for making comics, be sure to leave a comment and link me up, I’d love to hear about it.
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You know what’s awesome? Is when people keep posting excuses for not posting.
My plan was to blaze through the current story and have it finished in time for Further Confusion but it’s starting to look like that’s not going to be the case. This is just a really crazy time of year for me generally, mostly owing to con prep, but I also just recently changed jobs (last day at old job was last week on Friday, new job started yesterday), and there’s been other craziness going on too.
Good news is I’m a lot further ahead of myself as far as con prep goes than I normally am, with lots of stuff matted and framed and ready to hang in the dealer’s room and lots of stuff to sell at the table – keychains, prints, stickers, pendants, etc. I’ll be at table 105, alongside Higginsdragon for most of the weekend, and on Sunday at 1:00pm I’ll be giving a demo and q&a of Manga Studio 4, which I hope to be able to record and share here for those of you that aren’t going to be at the con.
So between now and then I’ve still got to bang out a plan and maybe do a rehearsal or two of my panel (though I’m not stressing out about it too much, I’ve been to enough of those panels to know that a presenter who shows up prepared is pretty much some kind of miracle worker), and finish assembling/printing/framing the goodies.
And if I can get two pages of comic done between now and then, well, that would just be pretty fantastic. If I can get three done, that would be amazing.
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Tee up for vote – The Night Flight
on January 15, 2010 at 10:42 amPosted In: Blog, News and Updates
Hey cats – I’ve got a tee shirt design up for vote in the Shirt.Woot derby this week, and if you’ve ever purchased anything from Woot before, you’re eligible to vote it up. I’d appreciate it hugely if you did!
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Jordan Crane, an artist I really, really dig, recently launched a webcomics anthology site called What Things Do, and there is some excellent work there that I just can’t say enough nice things about. Go see, go see.
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It’s an official Dawn Chapel holiday. I made it up just now and I’m in charge and there’s nobody can tell me to not to.
FOT part 1 from alex dron on Vimeo.
There are four parts to the FOT series (so far) and you can find them all online by clicking through to the Vimeo page. (And that is the voice of the gingerballs dude from Flight of the Conchords, yes.)
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I’m probably not going to shock or scandalize too many of you with the revelation that I have a thing for the furry animal-headed people, and whenever something representative of that school of picture-making shows up and shows us what can be done with them in the right hands, it makes me want to hand out a million high-fives to all parties involved. Funny Animal Books is a comic I’ve been reading for the last little bit and the things that that dude can do with a brush and ink, it’s just delicious.
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