[1110xx]

Well, November’s update a little early as I’m gong to be busy next couple weeks.

We’ve certainly got a lot of mileage out of boats this year. This is probably the fifth or sixth relevant update. I don’t really remember what prompted me to draw this series (obviously the boats did, but I’m referring to the fact that I basically never draw 4koma about “The Adventures of D and J”, regardless of whatever stupidly funny things we do), but here it is in it’s full three-page glory.

J agrees that, for the most part, this accurately depicts all the silliness that went with the first boating outing (except for maybe the “pew” on the propeller thing). I think J also agrees that the drawings relatively accurately depict the physical state of me and him…

Now while I have nominally labelled Nonsense Wars an “artblog”, I think I usually end up writing about computing and computers enough such that I think it could constitute a ghetto tech blog. Today’s update is no different; I last noted what I called my “hardware master plan” back in June, and, as this always go, I arbitrarily decided to “finally” execute on it.

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[110721]

Well, this is the backup drawing because I don’t have anything. The second drawing I was going to do currently consists of one 1/8th thumbnail and a blank page. In generally just had a lot of eBay stock to process this week, and I spent a lot of time puttering around. It doesn’t help that J’s been sick, so he hasn’t been drawing, which has definitely decreased my motivation somewhat.

Anyway, this is a Slick Wheels class locomotive drawn at the beginning of this year. The round windows are supposed to be like those found on some ships and some Japanese trains. Japanese diesels always seem to have the strangest wheel arrangements.

The rest of this post is dedicated to one year with the x200t.

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[110618]

This month on Nonsense Wars: J makes a post!

Anyway, I have to start grasping at straws now because I haven’t actually drawn anything substantial for the past half a year(!). Hopefully that’ll change soon, but when I read J’s “one post a day” comment, I lol’ed. I’ve been able to sit down and do some doodles recently, but just not much. At all. So at least for today’s post, no real new content. Since Pieces is finally completely posted, I’ve decided to compile and post my lovely Pieces storyboard.

The above picture is a (gasp) “thumbnail” that you can click. The actual thing is 50% of the real thing and still 1.5MB, so beware 56k’ers (if there are, God forbid, still any out there). The thumbnail is 33% of 50% and still 277K. There are 24 “pages” here; while the actual story is only 20 pages, the first two pages in each *.jnt file are notes for me to keep track of what the crap I was doing.

Looking back on this it seems that, for the most part, the actual pages more or less followed their storyboard counterparts to the dot… or were completely different. Not much in the middle. The worst pages (a46 ranks among the worst if you ask me) are apparently those that didn’t have anything concrete on the storyboard and just “this has to happen here” notes. Thus in general, the storyboard seems to have helped, but I suppose it’s more of a “knowing what the heck you’re going to do” helps.

That being said, I’m not sure what I’m doing next with regard to comic, but it’s not going to have a storyboard.

Changing gears a bit; yesterday I did a major cleanup and some equipment shuffling.

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[100718]

Last panel here also took forever. I like it a lot, though. They are supposed to be getting off a train, but my hoards of people blocked off what I was going to draw of the train. There’s cameos here too. This is the first time an Enigma class ship shows up in the comic since Starcrossed. This is the first time a Dogma class ship shows up at all.

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[100717]

The first panel of this page was one of those pages that just took forever. It’s not that it was particularly difficult and it’s not that it was particularly detailed, it’s just that there was so much junk in it that layering and layering stuff sucked up a ton of time. But I feel that doing these kinds of scenes with a number of “extras” really helps gives the story some depth, so expect to see more. Here and in the NW story arc… if that ever continues.

The two hardest parts about doing these layered panels are the laying itself and then the scaling. I need to put down like a rough outline for pretty much every figure in the panel, and in these panels, they overlap a lot. So it gets really hard to tell which lines are for which figures, and you get a bunch of areas with a bazillion lines going over it, and it’s all just very ugly and confusing. The heavy underlay also has a greater chance of leaving artifacts after I try to contrast it out.

Scaling is tough because I never know how much detail to leave in and how much to leave out. It’s particularly difficult to make anything look convincing when the thickness of your line is about five to ten percent of the thickness of your figure. I wonder if they sell like 3mm mechanical pencils and the appropriate graphite? There’s also less room for error because smaller wiggles in lines show up bigger relative to the size of the object, etc. Overall not very pleasant, but something I’m working on.

Overall this page pretty good. I’m kinda sad that quality really kinda drops off right after the first page, but I suppose it just means I need to try harder to make the pages less fail. Done up to page 6 though; that’s like just about a third of the way through!

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