[10/09/07]

Hi everyone! Sorry the comic is late yet again! I had some sort of mental malfunction and decided to do my homework first. *gasp!*

Anyway, today’s comic is a bit … weird. I was thinking of something like this, but I’m not sure it turned out exactly the way I thought it would. mostly the blending from image to image isn’t nearly as smooth as I would have liked. Ah well. Adding to the already-frequent wordless plot advancement in Sandstorm.

On another note, please take a look at the “Editor” entry for clip #11 here. w00t.

[10/2/2007]

Hey, sorry this is late. I had a Physics exam on Monday, and was up late studying.

So, I finally caved in and watched Haruhi. It was good. However, I was wondering about some of Haruhi’s actions after

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.

Episode 6. If she put her hair up in a ponytail because Kyon supposedly likes them, why doesn’t she wear it that way after that episode? D claims it’s because Kyon said it looked good on her. I don’t quite think that makes sense in what I’ve understood of Haruhi’s disposition thus far, so I was trying to figure out what else could have caused her actions or change of mind.

SPOILERS END HERE.

While I was pondering this thought, I smacked into one of the doors on MIT’s Ralph Landau Building. That’ll teach me to overthink anime.

In other news, I finally figured out that the hat the sunglasses-wearing policeman has is called a combination cap. I’m also starting to figure out how to draw them correctly.

As for the ribbon-like stuff around J-san’s wrists in the last panel, that’s cuff-tape, as inspired by Dominion Tank Police. Think hard plastic heat-seal packaging bands used as handcuffs.

[9/17/2007]

Today’s comic bothered me when I was creating it. Panels 1 and 3 specifically. Those poses were annoying. Panel 3 returned again when I realized it was difficult to tell that the bullet was hitting the side of the wall that’s not visible in the panel. I wound up having it go through the wall, something I hadn’t originally wanted to do.

Anyway, the police chief is an interesting character. He’s kind of fun to draw, but it’s hard to draw him consistently, mainly because of his face shape and hairstyle. Also, annoyingly, the “POLICE” chevron on his shoulder seems to only show up at those angles where it reads “ICE” or “LICE”. Gwah~

[9/11/2007]

Hi everyone. Sorry the comic is late again; I was working on it late at night, and then I wasn’t able to use the scanner because its owner had gone to sleep.

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with the export settings for the comic. Today’s comic is a jpg, whereas most of the recent Sandstorm comics have been png files. I’m not sure that there’s an appreciable difference between the two; Just for comparison, here is the jpg version and here is the png version. Personally, I don’t see much different except for the file sizes. Heck, I don’t even really see a difference between “high” and “medium” quality jpgs.

One of these days I’m going to output a test file in a whole bunch of different file formats at different settings, and do a gigantic read-up on all the image formats to see how they work …

And then still be equally confused afterwards, having spent several hours on this task.

[09/04/2007]

Hey everyone. Sorry about the delay…

Classes at MIT start tomorrow. This means I’ll probably be running about frantically until I figure out how the system works. Ah well.

Today’s comic looked totally awesome before it was inked. Then it lost some of its character. This always happens; I need to find some way to keep the character of pencil art while keeping the clarity of inked art. I think I will buy some 6H pencils just to see how well they work …