[7/15/2008] Sam seems tsundere in this comic. Also, 518 shows off moar panel-breaking powers this time around…

Hmm. How does 518 put on that shirt, anyway? I assume the left arm-hole was torn to a larger size…

[080711]

So, two pages again. Will possibly update with a painting again. It’s almost done. No more comments for now.

[7/8/2008] Late again, yeah, I know.

So, it’s back to 518 and Sam~! Looking back on it now, the dialogue is pretty awful. Gah~. Anyway, I get the feeling that last part of the dialogue is very Inuyasha-esque (thinking of the first volume/episode here). Speaking of which, the series finally wrapped up. I stopped following it long ago though — I’ve got no real patience for things that just drag on and on. (Neither did the animators, apparently; they just stopped to wait until the manga finished.)

In other news, the first episode of Strike Witches is out! Mecha musume fans everywhere, rejoice! They’ve even got official english subtitled versions, produced by the animation company! Woo~!

Okay, I’m going to watch now. Bai~!

[080707]

Yes folks, today I’m posting four comic pages. The catch is that they’re pages of the part 2 remake and therefore somewhat shoddily put together (though at the same rate that meant I was able to them very quickly whenever the hell I did ‘em). I decided that 2 remake pages was worth 1 regular comic page and since I didn’t put up a comic page with the last update, I figure I’d post the equivalent of two standard comic pages… so four remake pages. Right. Great logic. Ok.

So the remade part 2 doesn’t really add anything new to the story, it just sets up better for the direction in which I’m ultimately taking this thing. When I first drew the original strips that became part of part 2 (and at this point I might want to mention that part 2 doesn’t really mean anything because there’s no “official” part 1; the assumption is that part 1 is all the little bits and pieces of whatnot before the actual story started) I didn’t really have the ending I have now in mind. Hell, I prolly didn’t even have an ending planned by then – I’m guessing I was still planning to use more of Pier 666 and the DeLorean, etc, etc. For the most part we just leave out a lot of what I think was ultimately useless information.

This remade doodad is like just under twenty pages (forget the exact count and I’m not on my main machine – I’m once again typing this during a break in class) and about two thirds of those are all new pages. The rest are taken from the end of the original part 2. I think I’ll just post the pages that are new and leave the non-redone pages unposted (well, technically they’ve been posted already, just real long ago).

That the story is flowing again pretty much means that I finished working out what I wanted to work out with the plot. I was prompted to take a look at it after one of my friends said that they were totally lost (after an update just like two or three weeks ago), but after going through al the parts again, I didn’t think it was too confusing. part 3 and part 4 compilations have only had 3-5 lines re-written, each. part 5 (still incomplete, really), has had a significantly higher number of lines re-written. I can actually reupload those and they will show updated versions in the archives.

I tried to make some of the explanation parts more obvious (they always do that in anime; I guess there’s a reason) and some parts now sound kinda cheesy (granted some parts are already cheesy to begin with). Hopefully it worked. I wish I had something like a beta tester or something along those lines XD. The entire Part 2 will be packaged and all once I post it all. Maybe sooner if I feel like getting the main part of the story going again sooner.

That all for now.

[080702]

Well, again, best time to write these entries seems to be during lunch breaks and stuff. Here’s number one of two paintings I’m planning to do this time around and it’s the first “formal” painting I’ve done on the TC4200 as well. The second one will prolly go up for next week and hopefully I’ll feel like taking care of the story mess before the update after the next.

So really, the TC4200 might be the best art investment I’ve made since buying my original Wacom (The TC4200 was $50 more expensive, but as far as inflation and the devaluation of the dollar goes, it might as well have cost the same XD). Seriously, it is just that much intuitive to be drawing lines where you can see them, rather than on a standard tablet and looking at a screen. Whether or not this makes a significant improvement in art quality is still to be seen.

In general the TC4200′s not an extremely powerful machine and at least in general drawing, XP Tablet edition seems to give me a bit more lag than my Intuos 3 and my old 500m. Furthermore, it doesn’t do a great job processing those really large brush strokes either, and image manipulation (rotating, resizing, blah blah blah) take significantly longer than on the D830. Ah well. Pentium Ms are still cool in my book.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. My paintings starting from C071120 have been following this trend of increasing brush sizes and especially with the last series of paintings have been looking – for lack of a better word “impressionist”. C080126 is pretty much the pinnacle of this trend. After considering it a bit, I’m really against this trend, so I’ve brought the brush size back down to 10-15 ish for this illustration. Not that the TC4200 can happily render anything much bigger than, say, 30px. Small improvement over the 500m.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve also reached the conclusion (and I don’t really know if I concluded this in the past) that it is much harder for good color to make up for bad lineart than it is for bad lineart to make up for poor coloring. Like in the case of Yuki I think the lineart was pretty fluid and it made up for the whole “impressionist” mess, but with Fate here, I feel like the lineart is pretty stiff and the painting (which I consider to be slightly superior) doesn’t do as good a job of covering up. Maybe just me though. Next painting is going to move away from my current lineart tracing strategy, though there doesn’t really seem to be a good fast fix for improving the quality of linearts in general XD. If only, if only.

Some other annoyances with painting on the HP. When you flip the thing into tablet mode, the screen covers up both the keyboard and the mouse. You don’t really need either of these when you’re doing the actual painting, but they’re nice to have. Keyboard moreso than mouse. A lot of times with the Intuos, I find myself keeping my left hand on the Ctrl + Z combination for quick undos. I’ve set one of my tablet hotkeys to do an undo, but it’s really annoying to keep reaching over to it. External keyboard you say? All my keyboards are PS/2 and the TC4200 is too new to accept such stone age devices.

It’s really annoying trying to keep the screen clean as well. I end up putting a square of tissue or paper towel under the side of my hand when I write/draw on the thing so as to prevent smudges from getting on the screen. One reason I really don’t like standard touch screen devices, all you’re gonna do is get smudges all over that freaking display.

Ultimately a tablet pc seems a nice thing to have for art. Maybe I’ll consider upgrading to like an X60 or X61 tablet somewhere along the line. The lowest X60 tablet I’ve seen has gone for an amazing $650, down from like $950 when I was looking for the TC4200. Prolly when the battery here starts giving out (Which seriously may not be long considering how heavily I’m using it).