Compost

I have decided to hold off on starting to post episode 4 of The Word Smith for a little while (hopefully not too long) so that I can get more of it done before starting and hopefully not have to pause in the middle of the episode.  Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I know, but that's stuff for you.  (It's like stuff.)

I'm still sketching though so I'll continue to inflict my sketches upon the internets, like so:

This is a couple of variants on a design for Ellaire (or is it Elaire?  I don't remember how it's spelled...), a minor villain from the Kyoujo RPG which I have a feeling I may have mentioned in this blog once or twice.

In completely other news, I took down my balcony garden last night (/sadface).  Partly because of the storm (though we seem not to have gotten much of it, comparatively), but also because the tomatoes and basil have been looking rather sad of late.  Indeed, the wind over the last several days has stripped the basil of pretty much all of its leaves.  I did, however, harvest another seven (unripe) tomatoes of decent size before sending the plants to their doom, which will hopefully ripen in my kitchen.  I also plucked off another handful of jalapenos.  My parsley is still looking relatively lively, however, and I'm thinking of looking into freezing it or something.  As I think I mentioned in my previous post, I consider the garden experiment to have been a reasonable success, and now I have to figure out how to use up all these tomatoes and jalapenos I've got.

Well, that's all for the present.  Until next time,
Freak Out.
-TFitC

Combing the Desert

The exciting (or not) conclusion to episode 3 of The Word Smith is now available.  I am going to try to keep plowing ahead with episode 4 at the same schedule, though I expect there will be some inevitable pauses due to life and the universe in general.

I think I'm going to post a couple of sketchbook pages today, drawn from my current sketchbook and not from the archives like last week.

 A quick sketch of Gillin, one of my FR characters, in mid-stride, who hasn't appeared on this blog in a while.  I misspelled her name on the sketch label (fixed in the sketchbook, but I didn't notice it until after having scanned it in) - I used to spell her name with only one "l" but at some point switched to two.  How's that for some useless trivia?

This is just a bit of a desert landscape.  It started with the swirly spiral in the upper-left and I thought "hey, that could be a hot desert sun" and what does one find in a desert but disembodied robot arms?  There's also some Tim Burton-esque things happening in the background with that one sand dune.

Anyway, that's all for now.  Until next time,
Freak Out

-TFitC

Drawing on the Past

So, it seems that page 5 of the Word Smith, episode 3 is now on-line in the usual place.  Tremble in fear, o mighty interweebs!  Or just go read it, whatever.

In light of last week's sketching exercise, I decided to dig up my original sketchbook an marvel at its terribleness.  It was pretty terrible and I shall spare the internets the terror of it all for I am a magnanimous Freak.  Also, I'd be pretty embarassed to put that stuff in what is basically a public forum (even if there are only a few people who actually read what I choose to vomit onto the internet - how's that for imagery?)

Suffice it to say, my early forays into drawing were somewhat, in retrospect, not good.  I had no sense of proportion at all, or at least very little, and it was all kind of laughably bad.  And whilst I make no claims of being particularly good or anything now, I'm certainly rather better than I used to be, which is a good thing, I suppose.  Yay for progress.  At the very least, I can cobble together stuff that I don't think I'll be terribly ashamed of ten years or so down the line.  Of course, part of the whole purpose of this is to practice and get better.  At least there seems to be some tangible evidence that it's all paying off, at least a little bit.

Even in that first sketchbook one can see some progress - towards the end there's a few things that I don't think are completely terrible.  In fact, I picked one to show in public:

In fact, I think it looks kind of neat, though it probably helps that it's not human.  I'm not 100% sure what this was meant to be (aside from some ridiculously complicated contraption) though I suspect it may have been an idea for the Super Computer (from my FR project).

Until next time,
Freak Out

-TFitC

Sketchy Business

It appears, curiously enough, that page 4 of episode 3 of the Word Smith has found its way onto the interwebs.  Rejoice?  Or not.

In other news, I am running another comic workshop this fall.  It is a follow-up to the one I did last year using a follow-up book to the one we used last year by the same authors.  Our first meeting, in addition to all that fun organizational stuffs, we to talk about the usefulness of sketchbooks and do some time doing some free sketching.  I figured I'd post my sketchbook page since I've, you know, been doing that for a while now.

It's all just assorted random sketchy stuff which was one of the points of the exercise (though certainly not the only way to approach a sketchbook page - I primarily went this route because it's not how I usually approach sketching).

Anyway, stay tuned to next week for the next page of the Word Smith and more random babble on the interwebs.

Freak Out,
-TFitC