Babble, Babble, Babble

I'm working on my "comp II" (not right now, I mean in general) which I've mentioned before - it's one of those requirements for my PhD. Every now and then, I get stuck with a bit of writer's block. When that happens, I sometimes just start typing random babble, stream-of-conscious type of stuff, in an effort to try to get things started again, with varying degrees of success. If nothing else, it usually leaves me with something somewhat strange to look at for a bit.

Since there hasn't really been much blog-worthy stuff happening of late (though I should probably do a final write-up for the comic workshop), I figured I'd inflict a couple of the more recent stream-of-conscious eruptions on my one or two actual readers so that they can boggle at it. BOGGLE I SAY!

Here's one from a couple of weeks ago (or thereabouts - I don't timestamp them):

...while also being a contestant on Jeopardy!, but not Wheel of Fortune (which is for dumb people). There are two rules for every yard stick, most notably the inevitability of walls to be solid, at least when yellow. Foreasmuch as nine bricks forms a collection, there is a sparrow that drinks tea and sings ballads about walruses in tutus. There is nothing in so much as there is something, but when those notions become palatable, it is really for the best that they be shelved with the mustard. This I know for I have worn socks, but not because I have hands on my feet. That would just be silly. It is my esteemed thought that the whole of the part is nothing that cannot overcome the adversity which you now face, which is nautical.

And the most recent one, being the one from just before I made this post:

Content. Like a table. Flat and made of wood. Ergo: bording, dull, insipid -- you get the idea. Or do you? Idea's are, after all, rather ephemeral, you can't get them like you can get, say, a cold, or the bubonic plague. Not that you can actually get the bubonic plague these days either, but, well, that's really neither here nor there. It's over there. Maybe under. Like underground. Which is where you might be if you had the bubonic plague. Or after, I suppose. But I digress. Or perhaps regress. Or even depress. Although what I press, that's harder to say. I certainly don't work for a newspaper and there are no big red buttons around either. Not to imply the buttons are necessarily round. Or red. Or big. Big and red even, like a dog, except that I don't like dogs so I won't go there. But maybe over there. And there we are, again, back over there. What's so fascinating? Is it like a train wreck, or one of those trashy talk shows? Though how those work I couldn't say. I mean, you can't show talk to someone, after all, it's just sound -- it's ephemeral, like ideas. Unless your ideas are announced by a big glowing lightbulb appearing over your head out of nowhere. Maybe you've got word balloons floating over your head -- then you could show those to somebody. They might still think you're crazy, but it would be a start. It would be like you're at a race, or something, but what would you race? Stuff? Or things? And who would win? Well, I suppose that would depend on who had the fastest stuff -- zero to stuff in sixty seconds. That's a minute. Not minute which is to say, small. Well, I suppose your stuff could be small, but that's none of my business so I won't pry. I won't even try to pry, though it might be wry. Why? I won't lie... because I'm not really sure where I was going with that so I'll just let it fly. Like a house.

And that is that. I'll have to see about writing up a finale for the comic workshop in the next few days or so.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Ending With a Bang

The pencilling and lettering for the six page mini-comic are now complete, bringing things to their exciting (or not) conclusion. Not much to say regarding this so lets dive right in, shall we?

Here's page five:
And page six:
I'm probably going to add in some more background details for some of the panels before inking them. Speaking of which, I now have six pages that I have to ink by Tuesday of next week! Ack! I may not get all of that done, especially since I will be ostensibly busy for much of the weekend (though in practice I'll probably be sitting around for long periods of time so I may be able to get some work done on things - we'll see), but I'll do what I can.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

And so it Continues...

With the start of the new term, the comic workshop has resumed for its final four to five sessions. The homework is continuing to walk us through creating our mini-comics with this week bringing us up to about the first two-thirds mark for the pencilling and lettering. I did some extra work over the holidays to get a bit ahead of schedule, but for now, here are the third and fourth pages.

Page 3:And page 4:
I'll probably be adding a bit more detail to some of the backgrounds when I do the inking (speed lines and that sort of thing). Of note, the woman and daughter in the last panel of page 4 appeared in the first page of the original four page mini-comic where they overheard the g4m3rz abusing the English language (seems like the mother-daughter pair might become something of a running gag if I do any more of these.

We'll be talking about inking with a brush in this week's session after which pages 5 and 6 of the mini-comic will be posted (though I still have to work out some layout issues for page 6).

Freak Out,
-TFitC

More Pencils

I finished up the pencils for pages one and two of the six page mini-comic I'm doing for the comic workshop. There's really not a whole lot to say about them that I haven't already said about previous comic pages. I used the non-photo blue pencils for the roughs like I did with the one-page comic and, once again, when scanning in on greyscale, they magically disappear leaving only the regular pencils, so they're still working as advertised. So, without further ado, the pages!

Page one is basically a bridge from the four page mini-comic (links to page one, two, three and four, for those who are curious to review). Modified a few things from the thumbnails but otherwise not much to add, commentary-wise.

Tried to do some fancy perspective stuff to start off page two, but it's definitely off - not something I'm particularly experienced with. The cars are also out of proportion with respect to each other (at least) which is another thing I need to work on (and relative proportions of things in general.)

Anyway, with the comic workshop done for this term, there probably won't be any more comic-related things until we resume next year, though I'm going to try to get a head start on the next two pages over the holidays so that January's a little less busy.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Comic Filler

On the previous meeting for the comics workshop, we talked about panel composition and various considerations (conscious or otherwise) that go into laying out content within a panel. Comic artist Wally Wood came up with "22 Panels That Always Work" (or see video version here) as a sort of visual shorthand - of course, theres more than just 22 ways to compose a panel, but it's a nice reference if one is stuck for ideas.

One of our exercises was to re-design a panel from our mini-comic thumbnails based on our panel composition discussion. Here's the one that I did (from page 6):And the three alternate versions:
We've also been talking about developing characters, both in the literary sense and in regards to approaches and techniques to designing the visual look of a character. Even though I did the character design for my major characters in The Word Smith over the summer, this still gave me the opportunity to design the civilian attire for the hero and his sidekick and the new set of villains.This is a set of concept sketches exploring possible designs for The Word Smith's civilian look (I went with the middle one), with a more detailed model sheet below:For The Pen, I only did a set of concept sketches (because I was being lazy) with the final design that I used being a mix of the first and second sketches.Finally, I did a single sketch for each of the villains (basically fairly closely based on how they were drawn in the thumbnails) and no detailed model sheet since they're just one-offs, basicallyThe fact that there's three of them (like there were in the first mini-comic) is really just coincidental. Three just seems like a good number, though I could probably have cut one of them out without much difficulty.

Anywho! That's all for this time. The next post will probably have the pencils for the first two pages of the mini-comic.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Word Smith Take Two

So, that comic workshop I've been running has still been going, even through NaNoWriMo and stuff has been happening. We're in the final stretch, though the workshop is going to run into January since we've skipped a couple of weeks due to people being away and will be adding 2 or 3 extra weeks of material related to figure drawing and perspective when all is said an done. But that's not a bad thing! It gives me some extra time to get ahead on my homework, and I might need it. After the one-page comic, we've started in on the final sequence of homework assignments which tasks us with creating a 6 page mini-comic. I've told my workshop participants to do anywhere from a 2 to 6 page comic (and they're all doing 2 pages) but as the leader, and because I'm a little bit crazy, I decided to do the full 6 pages. Hey, why not?

In order to make things a bit easier on myself, I decided to do the next episode of the 4 page mini-comic I did over the summer - it avoids me potentially starting yet another project that I might feel tempted to do something about at some time in the future and avoided having to spend too much time coming up with a new idea whilst I was embroiled in NaNoWriMo. I was a bit hesitant to just follow-up the summer mini-comic though as it seemed like I'd be short circuiting the character design process a little bit, but in the end I still have to do character designs for peoples' civilian outfits and the new set of villains.

The first task, as before, was to create thumbnails. I did my thumbnails at 1/4 size on two sheets of paper (conservation ftw), pictured below.

Of course, the small size (and my handwriting) probably means the dialogue's not terribly legible, but I'll be posting thing full version as it gets completed. The current goal is to have the first two pages fully pencilled and lettered by Tuesday next week (currently have all the roughs done), so they'll be posted sometime after that; some character designs might go up between now and then.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

NaNoWriMo Post-Mortem

It's been nearly a week since I completed my NaNoWriMo project and the thought of it no longer turns me into a mass of quiver goo which means it's time for a post-mortem of the whole experience. Isn't that what you were waiting for? Sure it was. So lets go!

This was my first time participating in NaNoWriMo, though I didn't sign up on the official website as I didn't feel it was necessary for me personally. I did see on a blog somewhere that previous NaNoWriMos have had about a 20% success rate, though I don't know what the results are for this year. Food for thought, I suppose, or some indication that writing 50 000 words in a month is no small feat. Anyway, on to my personal experiences.

As I said previously, this was my first writing project of any significance outside of FASS since... oh, well, I'm not sure, really. For my writing adventure, I picked an idea that had been rolling around in the back of my head since sometime in 2004. Overall, I enjoyed the writing process, though it definitely started to feel like a bit of a slog at the end. I think that succeeding in NaNoWriMo requires a certain amount of discipline and pacing; I was able to stick to my daily writing schedule and that certainly helps. Even though I never really wrote much more than the minimum each day, it was still enough to let me finish a day early - a nice reward for sticking with things, I guess.

A plan also helps. This is one area where I could have used a bit more work. I had done a little bit of background writing over the summer and made a short outline to get me started, though it turned out to be not quite enough. The outline got me through the first six chapters (about 38 000) words with the last two chapters being made up as I went along. Ordinarily, I'd have stopped, thought about things a bit more and then continued, but NaNoWriMo doesn't really accomodate that very well. Fortunately, by the end of chapter six, things had enough momentum to keep going. Though I'm not too sure how much a significantly more detailed outline would have helped as unexpected things kept happening, things happened in ways I didn't anticipate and characters developed in ways I hadn't originally thought of. But that's good! I like that about writing and I think it's part of how I do these things, so having an overall premise in mind (which I did) while coming up with an outline in chunks and then filling in the details as I go and changing the outline as necessary seems to suit me. Naturally, others' clickage will vary.

Of course, a lot of what I wrote was probably crap, but quality is not the point of NaNoWriMo. The point, for me, was just to force myself to write something, regardless of quality or anything else. I've been wanting to try to writing a novel for a long time; it's one of those things that I keep thinking that I should do but never get around to actually doing so NaNoWriMo was, for me, the metaphorical kick in the pants to do some writing. And I think that the ideas I came up with whilst writing are usable - it just needs a lot of polish.

So what's next? Well, I have to step back, look at what I wrote, and figure out where I want to take the story (I figure it's maybe a quarter or so complete, but we'll see). Assuming I decide to pursue this project further, I'll have to, obviously, do a lot more writing and a lot more polishing.

And I also need to make a map.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Qapla'!

It seems this post brings me up to one gross (ewww!) in total and with it, news of my successful completion of my first ever NaNoWriMo! One day early, even! Yay me!

Here's the breakdown of the "final" stats:
Words: 50 602
Paragraphs: 911
Characters: 281 012
Pages: 88
Chapters: 8

I put final in quotes because I might add one or two things tomorrow while it's still officially NaNoWriMo, but I am otherwise finished.

I'm probably going to take a day or two to decompress and then post some thoughts on the overall exerience.

Until then,

Freak Out
-TfitC

Fifty Percent Plus One

No, this post is not about referendums. Rather, it is an update on my NaNoWriMo progress, now on the 16th day, which is one day past the half-way mark.

So far, things continue apace. I am still on-track and currently sit at about 27 000 words (including what I've written so far today) spanning 48 pages, which is actually a little ahead of schedule. I'm still enjoying the process (though it is quite the commitment, forcing myself to write at least 1667 words each day!) and unexpected things keep happening in the story itself. So as long as things continue as they have been, I should have no trouble reaching the 50 000 word goal and may even hit it a day or two early.

The story itself won't be anywhere near finished at the end of the month as at the half-way point it feels like it's only just getting started. While I don't have a detailed outline or anything, I did do a very rough overview of the early parts of the story and I am nearly to the end of it, though so much has happened that is either different from how I had envisioned it or which I hadn't anticipated at all that I think the outline (such as it is) is kind of moot at this point anyway.

Overall I'm fairly happy with how the story seems to be progressing, though I don't think it's as humourous so far as I'd like it to be, though I am of course putting funny or silly things in where I can. At the moment, I'm just focused on pumping out my daily quota and don't really have the extra time to stop and make it as humourous as it could be. That's something I can go back and put in via editing, I guess! Because it's naturally going to need editing when all is said and done.

I think it also goes to show that humour is hard, especially continuous, consistently maintained humour (though there's also nothing saying that a basically humours story can't have its serious moments as well). It's one of the reasons why I admire Weird Al so much; having a 30-year plus long career based on being funny is no small feat and I often think he doesn't get the credit he deserves for it.

Anyway, that's enough ramblings for today. I'll do a wrap-up post at the end of the month (or early next month) to review my NaNoWriMo experience.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

One-Page Complete

The comics workshop continues apace. Since the last post on the subject, the one-page comic series of homework has been finished. This was done in two steps: penciling and then inking.

Above are the pencils for my version of the one-page comic. I penciled directly over the non-photo blue rough work and scanned it in using the greyscale setting on my scanner. As can be seen, the non-photo blue lines have disappeared, no further work required.

The next step was inking the art work, with my results shown above. Unlike the mini-comic that I did over the summer which I ended up inking largely with the brush, this was inked using a nib pen, which was the aspect of inking which the workshop covered last week (we'll be doing brushes later on). I used four different nibs for inking, one for each row of panels. In reality, I'd probably use different nibs for different parts of the drawing, but as I'm new to this, this was a way to try out some different nibs without having to worry too much about specifics. One thing of note, I forgot to draw in the pattern on the father's vest in the last panel - how I missed such a large detail, I don't know, but oh well.

The nibs themselves were interesting to work with - easier to control than a brush, but more flexible than a normal pen, plus they make an interesting scratching noise when drawing.

I should probably also note that I didn't erase the rough work before scanning, which is mostly visible in the word balloons and the lettering guidelines (created with an Ames lettering guide).

The next series of homework walks us through the creation of, in theory, a six page mini-comic. For the purposes of my workshop, I'm suggesting a two to six page mini-comic, depending on how ambitious each participant feels, or how much time they think they have. I'm still not sure how many pages I'm going to tackle, but I'm hoping to try for at least another four page one.

Well, we'll see how things go.

Freak Out,
-TFitC