thepenmonster: Name on the left, man in cap on the right (Default)
An old friend was cleaning up his basement and in a dusty corner he found a folder. Inside was an assortment of art from the 1990s.



This guy is the only half original one of the character designs I'm about to share. I did a romance comic and he was the supporting character/ enabler. He was the only person in the comic with a remotely stable adult relationship.

The rest of these were all drawn n a haze of geeky fandom. Derivative. I spent decades trying to put comfortable distance between myself and these retreads of other people's ideas.



So we were ripping off Dragonball Z back in the 1990s. It's part of the reason why I lack interest in just about every action anime & manga folks go nutty for these days. Been there, done that.

Or maybe I just grew out of it?

rawcans0004

No memory of these. I assume they were TTRPG characters I drew for other people but they could be anything.

Ooo! A giant sword. How original! Even 30 years ago that was played out.


I still write comic scripts this way. It works for me but it means a lot of wasted paper when I decide it needs a rewrite... or binning.

______

Looking at these I will say that I feel energised to finish up the ll digital comic I'm currently drawing an get back to ink on paper.

Jan. 2nd, 2025 04:44 pm

Bufferin'

thepenmonster: Name on the left, man in cap on the right (Default)

So yeah, this week and, hopefully next, I'll have gotten enough comic pages done to rebuild the buffer I squandered this past two months.

In my defense, I was suffering from a nasty bacterial sinus infection that was dripping gunk into my lungs through most of September to the end of November.

"Why didn't you go to a doctor earlier?" you would be right in asking.

I didn't want to sit in a walk-in clinic for three or four hours with a hundred other sick people while I was struggling to breathe, is the answer. Masked or no, a weakened immune system is a weakened immune system.

Now, I was busy being artistic that entire time the buffer ticked down. It was a lot easier to stare at a piece of paper for a few hours than it was staring at a monitor so developing new ideas was the order of the day. It's just that a bunch of rough sketches (I use my sketch books for sketching. Not for finished art I try to pass off as a sketch.) and concept notes don't make for art people care to see.

Also, I'll need to get a job this summer so anything creative needs to get done now.

thepenmonster: Name on the left, man in cap on the right (Default)


I'm running a webcomic right now. I'm doing it because I needed to stay busy as I lived off of my life savings seeking medical help for my chronic back pain. Also to prove to myself that I could still make a comic despite a decade and a half of not doing so.

I've proven that I can still make a comic. That was great. Not so great: The Nova Scotian healthcare system has basically told me to fuck off and come back when my back is injured enough to put me in the hospital. I guess I'm supposed to self-medicate too? What a failure of a system.

As our political parties intended. Gotta make sure that tax money goes to our precious oligopolies and monopolies.

Complaints about the gutting of the Canadian social safety net aside... Every day I come into the den, grunt in pain as I sit down at the Wacom tablet, and open Clip Studio Paint. Digital comics for the ease of colouring. For the ease of adding dialog. For the ease of fixing mistakes. Ease. Easy.

It's not as satisfying as getting it done on a piece of paper.

The comic I'm running will end in about ten installments. Once it's done I plan to abandon both a regular update schedule and Clip Studio Paint. There's no point in tap dancing for an audience that vastly prefers the types of comics that I don't make anyway. The only logical path is to work for my own satisfaction.

Right now that satisfaction is on paper and shared whenever it's done.
_____

This will probably change after the fifth time I spill ink on my page.

thepenmonster: Name on the left, man in cap on the right (Default)
You're unlikely to have an editor. And you're just as unlikely to have patient folks in your life who know enough about art to help you pin down what isn't working. But if you do, use them.


This is a small thing that a reader probably won't notice, but you can't rely on that.

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