Green Thumb

A non-drawing post today, but there is still a picture.

I started a balcony garden a little over a week ago.  It's something of an experiment as I've not tried to grow anything since, well, I have no idea, really.  It's going to be an edible garden with some vegetables, fruit and herbs, if all goes well.

So far, my tomatoes have started sprouting.  The first one to appear is on the left (though blurry) and on the right I am now up to four tomatoe seedlings, so things seem off to a good start.  I'm probably going to have to transplant the tomatoes into their own pots before long.  The first (and so far only) of my jalapenos is also starting to poke above the surface, but it's not particularly interesting to look at yet so no picture of it.  There's a few other things in the works, but they were planted a bit later than the tomatoes and jalapenos so nothing to show of them yet.

It's all kind of exciting, really, and I'm looking forward to having some home-grown stuff this summer.  If all the tomatoes turn out, then I think I may be making some salsa...

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Under My Thumb

I just noticed that I forgot to commemorate my 111th post. Fortunately, since it was my previous post, it served to point out something suitably bizarre for such an auspicious occasion.

The point of this post, however, is not to dwell on interesting numbers. As I have mentioned previously, my PhD research is related to comics and, as such, it seems that trying my hand at making a comic would be a useful experience. I wrote up a short script back over reading week and this week I have undertaken the first step on that journey - namely, creating the layout thumbnails. Here are the results:

Basically, thumbnails are meant to be rough sketches showing the layout of the panels and also of what will go into said panels. The level of detail in the thumbnails seems to vary widely from artist to artist. The above page of thumbnails shows four comic pages. I hope the division between pages is relatively clear, otherwise the image might seem a bit confusing. (Top left is page 1, top right is page 2, bottom left is page 3 and bottom right is page 4.)

The thumbnails don't include (much) dialogue, so it probably won't be immediately obvious exactly what's going on, though I have sketched in where I think the speech balloons will go. Each page took about an hour to create the thumbnails.

As might be obvious from the thumbnails, the characters look a bit generic at the moment. That is by intent since I haven't actually gone and done any character design yet. I didn't want to be tempted to put too much detail into the thumbnails. So my next step will be coming up with some actual character designs, which I'll post about when they're done (hopefully in a week or so).

So far I'm enjoying this little project. I haven't really done much drawing since when I was doing my Master's degree and it's nice to have something to motivate me to do some drawing again.

Until next time.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

And Now For Something A Bit Different...

Yay, it's experiment time! Click for the full-sized version. Oh, and my apologies in advance for making everyone read my hand writing.
Probably should have taken some extra time to ink it. Well, I'll keep that in mind if I do this again.

Chocolate Omelettes

I had an omelette for dinner this evening and took the opportunity to try a little experiment. You see, a while back, when I had some chocolates (rolos, I think, but I don't recall exactly) on hand and was making an omelette, I had the temptation to dump a couple of chocolates into the mix to see what it was like, but I did not follow through at that time. I've currently got some Hersey's Kisses on hand and decided to drop a couple into my omelette this evening to see how it would turn out.

The results were inconclusive. First, I think I need more than two piece of chocolate, and second, I probably need to melt them a bit before hand so that they can get distributed more evenly throughout the omelette.

Something to keep in mind for next time.

Freak Out,
-TFitC