"I'm drowning in nothing

"Nothing real
Nothing left
Nothing
I'm losing myself
Sinking deeper down"


Man, it was hard to work this weekend, between Rock Band, Christmas trees, ect. I layed this page out over the weekend and penciled it Sunday night. It should be finished before morning today as long as I don't get distracted or something bad happens.

That was hard to type and understand; I had to think hard about the days. It's Tuesday morning right now. I penciled that Sunday night. But, to me, Sunday night was last night because of how I slept. Monday afternoon is right now and Tuesday morning isn't going to be until after I've slept tonight, which will actually be Tuesday night.

Geez, hopefully I can explain the next part better than that.


I pieced this together earlier today because I was curious, and also because I thought it would help illustrate what I'll be explaining. I think this was pretty much the only panel I could do this with because I don't think I have scans of anything else at every stage like that.

This is for you Randall, as I don't think anyone really reads this much, and because no one else will know what I'm talking about (pretty much same as always).

But here's what I think I decided without really thinking about it. Or, rather maybe, why I decided what I decided.

I'm sure you've heard me explain it, but here's a visual. I lay it out in the blue, refine the layout with pencil, ink right over the pencil, then scan and gray it. The specific problem that was bugging me was that this process holds you back a lot. Or at least me. Pencils usually have a lot going on. Shading, gradients and general ideas for the inkers and colorists. The page is usually pretty much covered in pencil.

Because I'm inking straight on the pencile
d board, I have to be very minimalistic when it comes to penciling it, otherwise, it looks horrible; example- like Tana's right leg and shot gun here, except all over the page. I mean, you can go all out with the blue, and I do, but it's essentially colored pencil, and there's only so far you can precision things with clumsy colored pencil. The point wears down really fast and the lead's thick, so you're bludgeoning indecipherable blobs of blue onto the paper before you know it.

The two ways to go around this are digitally inking and printing the pencils in non-photo blue and inking those. I don't want to digitally ink, and although I would love to print and ink with the non-photo repro's, I can't afford it and I'm not even sure how many states I would have to drive through before I hit a print shop that did it.

That was pretty much what was bugging me. That I wanted to do this to mostly get better at penciling but the whole process turned out to hold the penciling bac
k.

But I think I decided to stick with this, because I thought it would be OK to get better at shapes, faces, architecture, the whole nine yards before getting further into detailing. Getting better at drawing the circle, before shading and shadowing it.

Hopefully that made more sense than I think my day/night explanation did.

And then there's this. I found this scan in a folder somewhere on my hard drive. I think I lost the actual drawing. I don't know, it made me laugh and there's nothing else to do with it, so here it is.

And just to clarify, that's a light bulb.

Also, I've changed a few things and rediscovered my hate for html coding. It sucks that I'm more adept at actionscript and I've decided to not rely on flash.

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