Electric Boogaloo

Back in December I added a new member to my "Tiny Teslas" collection - a Model X (the white one):

(From left to right:  Tesla Roadster, Bumblebee, Model X, Model S, Model S (Matchbox - others, aside from Bumblee, are Hot Wheels.)

Then about two and a half weeks ago on May 31 I added this to my "collection":

(First look at my new car on delivery day.)

A life-sized Model 3 received two years and two months to the day after making my reservation on March 31, 2016.

Now that I've had the car for a couple weeks I thought I'd write up a few thoughts about it.  Note that this is not intended to be a review as there's plenty of those out there.  This is just some thoughts and impressions from some random Freak on the Interweebs who's never owned a Tesla before, let alone an electric vehicle.

The Old Car

First off, let me say a few things about my previous vehicle.  For a little over fourteen years I've been driving this:

A 2004 Chevrolet Cavalier, pictured together with a shot of its "final stats" - while it wasn't captured in the picture, there was about a quarter tank of gas left.  It doesn't really have a lot of distance on it for a fourteen year old car, but that's because I wasn't driving it every day.  It certainly served its purpose over the years and because it didn't get driven a huge amount it didn't end up needing a whole lot of maintenance - mostly oil changes and a few break pad replacements over the years.

I'd known for quite some time (since probably about twelve years ago) that I wanted my next car to be something "greener".  Back then this was just the vague notion of something along the lines of a hybrid.  Then, a little over three years ago, I read this article which sold me on the notion of a fully battery electric vehicle in general and a Tesla, if I could manage it.  As such, I made my Model 3 deposit on the day of the reveal (online, I decided not to make the trip to the nearest store, though kind of wish I had) and for the next two years I waited.  The wait wasn't necessarily a bad thing since, at the time, I wasn't in the position to actually follow through with the order.  Fortunately, by the time I was able to actually order the car I was in a position where I could do so.  Two years and a day after making my reservation, I confirmed my order.

The Delivery

The approximately two months after making the order and before getting the car felt, in some ways, longer than the two years between the making the reservation and the order - probably because with the order placed things seemed that much more "real" and imminent.  Regardless, the day of the delivery eventually arrived.

I took delivery as part of a mass delivery of Model 3's at the Toronto International Centre:

A bunch of Model 3's awaiting delivery at the Toronto International Center on May 31, 2018.



 I'm not really going to dwell too much on the delivery process, though it was certainly less than ideal and not representative of Tesla's normal delivery process.  I took delivery on the second day of the mass deliveries and it was fairly clear that they were still working out some of the logistics and were also clearly understaffed.  Apparently getting the green license plates from the government was also somewhat of a bottleneck and causing lots of delays (some of the Tesla employees claimed that they gave the government advanced notice that they'd need a lot of plates but, I suspect, they may not have given quite enough notice for the amount of plates they needed).  All told this meant they were running several hours behind schedule and it was rather late when I finally had the car and was able to leave.  On top of all this, when it was finally time to go, my ride to Toronto discovered that they had acquired a flat tire somehow in the time that we'd been waiting.  Fortunately, some of the Tesla employees were able to help them put on the spare which was nice and much faster than waiting for roadside assistance to come along and do it.

And while all this was a relatively minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, it certainly made the experience less good than it could have or should have been.  From what I've read they managed to improve the process during the following week's deliveries so I hope they remember the lessons they've learned from this experience for any future mass deliveries they may end up doing.

The Car

Regardless of delivery headaches, at the end of the day I had a new car!  I'm pleased to say that everything with the car seemed to be in good condition and has been working well in the time that I've had it.  This is the first electric vehicle that I've ever driven, let alone owned (though I have been in one on a couple of occassions).  The quietness (especially at low speeds) and smoothness of it still amazes me.  The regenerative breaking took a little bit to get used to, but I'd more or less gotten the hang of it on the drive home.  The car is definately quick when I want it to be, but I make a point of being easy on the acceleration most of the time so that I don't use more energy than necessary.  (I let my father drive it a little on the weekend after delivery - he floored it a couple of times and seemed quite impressed with its acceleration.)

The central screen seems to generally work pretty well and didn't take too long to get used to (I did find myself glancing down at the steering while and being slightly surprised to see nothing there on the first drive home) though there are a few controls that it would nice if it were easier to access by the driver (like selecting the music source).  These are things that will hopefully be addressed in future software updates.

The Model 3 is certainly the best car I've ever owned though as it is also only the fourth car I've owned (and only the second new one) that is perhaps not a high bar to clear.  But this is not to sell it short!  It's obviously an upgrade from my previous car.  I like driving it - sometimes kind of wish I had an excuse to drive it more than I do - it handles well and is quiet, like I said.  And it's got lots of convenience features that I simply didn't have in my fourteen year old chevy like a backup camera and basic cruise control (I did not get the autopilot feature).

Perhaps one of the best things I can say about the Model 3 is that it affirms my belief that electric vehicles are the way to go.  Even after just two and a half weeks with it I don't see myself ever going back to a gas powered car, at least not by choice.

Charging

I do want to say a few words about charging.  I currently live in an apartment and cannot charge at home so charging is basically the main "inconvenience" in owning an electric vehicle of any kind for me at the moment.  Even so, it's not too bad.  The Model 3 has plenty of range for me to get through a week (one of its big selling points for me, along with access to Tesla's Superchargers) - indeed I could probably get through two or three weeks before needing to charge, if I had to, and depending on how much driving I did outside of just going to and from work.  I try to do as much charging as I can at the public chargers in my area (there are some relatively conveniently located not too far from my dwelling place) and save Supercharger visits for weeks that I do a lot of extra driving.

Charging at a local charging station while I go rollerblading.

So far it's been working out fairly well.  Since it's summer, I'm quite happy to go for a walk or rollerblade (things I'm inclined to do on the weekends anyway) and generally have a leisurely morning oot and aboot whilst I do various errands while the car charges up.  That might change in the winter when I'm less inclined to be wandering around outside in the cold and charging batteries is less efficient, but I'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

The plan is to sooner or later move into a place where I can charge at home at which point charging will basically be a non-issue, but until then I'll be making do with public chargers and the occassional Supercharger visit.  (Tesla is supposedly building a Supercharger in my area before the end of the year, which will be convenient when it happens, but as anyone who follows Tesla knows they are sometimes overly optimistic with their timelines so we'll see when it actually happens.)

TLDR

In summary, it's a nice car and I don't see myself ever going back to gas cars, even if charging is a tad inconvenient for now due to my status as an apartment dweller, but that's a temporary situation.  Here's another picture of the car charging:

 

I may do some further posts about my experiences living in an apartment with an electric vehicle which I will try to tag with the label "teslapartment" to make them easy to find amidst my other assorted drivel.

Until next time,

Freak Out

-TFitC

Orthogonal Projections

Greetings interwebs.  Today I bring you an update on a couple of projects that aren't The Word Smith (with any luck it will hopefully resume early-ish in the new year).

First, that long running project - lets call it FR for short, if I haven't already - that I've commented on in my last couple of posts.  I'm currently about 3/5 of the way through the second draft of the outline.  The goal of this draft is to expand slightly on the details of the notewall draft, specifying some additional details without getting too deep into the nitty gritty.  This draft is being done the old fashioned way with paper and pencil.  A picture of a couple pages of my notebook is below, featuring my lovely handwriting.

Isn't it lovely?

The other project that I wanted to comment on today is a writing project, so no pictures for it.  I've decided to do some NaNoWriMo writing this year.  I'm not planning or expecting to hit the 50 000 word mark (which I did manage on my previous attempt - back in 2011) since I've got too many other things that a want (and in some cases need) to do that I'm unwilling to put on hiatus for a month.  Basically, I'm using this as motivation to do some writing and continue on with my previous NaNoWriMo project.  I've currently written about 8000 words and if I manage to keep up my current pace I'm hoping to make it to about 25 000 words by the end of the month.  We'll see how far I get and perhaps I'll write another update at the end of the month.

And that is all for today, interwebs.

Until Next Time,
-Freak Out

Getting Drafty

The Word Smith is still on hiatus.  Today we here at The Freak Report bring an update to the previous post regarding one of my long running projects.  In the previous post I showed off the start of a note wall that I had put together in an effort to help move the project along.  I am happy to say that the note wall is now complete!

Well, it would be more accurate to say that the first draft is complete.  Regardless, this still represents a notable step forward and is somewhat of a momentous occasion.  This draft represents what I think is the first complete draft of the game since its very early versions, but those early versions were so long ago that I don't remember how complete they actually were and I suspect that they may have been missing some details.  (I could probably still dig up my old notes and check but I suspect that may be an exercise that wouldn't really interest anyone other than me.)

There are two main things to do next.  One is to potentially revise the draft and tweak things and whatnot.  The other is that the above draft represents one particular path through the game.  I intend to make it possible to visit at least some of the areas in the order of the player's choosing so I need to create alternate paths through some areas as they may change depending on the order in which they are visited - this is the next task that I will likely undertake.

And now without any further commentary, here are close-up shots of each area, presented in the order that the current draft  intends them to be visited in.

 Until next time,
Freak Out
 -TFitC

Projections

The Word Smith is still on hiatus, for the one or two of you out there who might actually care (in much the same way that one views an annoying relative).  I have been meaning to do a write-up of one of the projects that was responsible for pushing The Word Smith onto the back burner, namely a 2D sidescroller:

However, that project has already received a write-up here so there doesn't seem much point to dedicating a full blog post to it.  I'll only add that the scope of the project was never meant to be a full game, rather it's more a coding demo for use in my job search and an opportunity to learn some new things.  At most I intend for it to be a single level, though how much further it goes might depend on how the job search works out.

Instead, today, I thought I'd say a few things about a much older project, one which I think it's finally time to try and turn into some sort of reality.  The project has been rather long running (though it has seen long periods in which nothing much happens on it) and to try and move things forward I've put together a note wall:

The goal of this is to help to visualize an overview of the entire plot and it also puts it somewhere where I can't help but look at it on a daily basis which will hopefully force me to set aside some time to work on it at least semi-regularly.  I made a similar sort of note wall for working out the plot outline for The Word Smith and it seemed to be useful.  Note that the creatively named "Final Area" is currently blank - that's one of the parts of the game that have never received much attention.  Whenever I resolve to make progress on the darned thing I always seem to start from the beginning which means that the first two or three areas have seen several revisions at this point with much less for the last couple.  Also, any resemblance the blue post-its have to the outline of a fish is purely coincidental; the individual post-its each represent a location and are arranged roughly geographically within each area.

Here is a close up of the "Terdain" area which is the game's first area:

So with any luck this setup will help me make some progress.

Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Ink Blots

So!  After a delay, the late page of The Word Smith is on the scene.

I thought I'd take a few moments to explain some of the inking issues that arose with this page.  It's actually not terribly uncommon for me to muck up the inking a bit.  Usually these are things like inking a line I shouldn't (construction lines or other lines in the pencil drawing that are occluded by something in the final drawing an, thus, shouldn't be inked), or drawing a line in slightly the wrong place (because I'm still learning the tools or my hand is a bit shaky) or a line just ends up a bit more uneven than I'd like.  These are all fairly quick and easy to fix up digitally after scanning and thus not a big deal.

However, occassionally I make bigger mistakes.  Sometimes I just royally screw up some part of the inking, maybe because the pencil lines were left rougher than they should be.  Sometimes I look at something after I ink it and realize that it's just off or I just don't like it.  Sometimes I decide things would be clearer if I did things another way.  Obviously it's preferable to catch these things before inking but, well, I'm still learning (that's my excuse, anyway.)  These sorts of things are usually not things that I would want to fix digitally, since I don't have a drawing tablet.  My general approach to these is to draw a fix on tracing paper (so I can make sure things line up), ink that, scan it and merge it digitally with the main page.  Here's some examples from Episode 8:

(From Page 2):  This was a small fix.  I was unhappy with how the hand turned out (hands are hard) so I redrew it and pasted the new improved one into the panel.

(From Page 3):  Sometimes fixes are a bit bigger.  Here, I decided I needed to redo the pose of the character on the left so I redrew the body and replaced the old one.  The head didn't change.

(From Page 2 - again, boy I really messed up on that page a lot):  And every now and then I replace an entire panel.  Fortunately this was a small panel and I seem to have not gotten around to putting in any of the background details on the old panel before deciding to replace it.  The reason I redid this panel was because I felt showing the two character getting on the bus would clarify the flow of action since they appear on the bus after a one panel flashback.

The main issue with the latest page was from the middle panel of the middle row:

Basically, I decided the pose needed to be fixed.  As can be seen, I didn't bother finishing the inking of the first version.  And while the pose could probably still be improved, the second attempt was better than the first.  There was also another bit in the first panel that needed to be fixed, but I decided it was small enough to fix entirely digitally.

So, that is that.  Hopefully the next page will be on time two weeks from today.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Punctuation

There are a couple of days remaining in the month and I have yet to post anything for the next episode of The Word Smith which my previous post implied would happen sometime this month.  I expect to get around to this some time over the weekend so as not to perjure myself.

In the meantime, here's some design sketches I did of a very minor character that appears in a flashback in episode 7:

The character is named The Punctuator and is, obviously, punctuation themed.  I was also trying to make his outfit a bit "spikey" because he, well, punctures things, after a fashion.

And that is all for today.  Watch this space for the commencement of the next exciting (exciting!  I say!) episode of... The Word Smith!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Booklog

It returns....

After an unexpectedly long hiatus, due in part to some unexpected real-life stuff that happened unexpectedly, The Word Smith will be resuming sometime in January.  When it does, the schedule will be something along the lines of "whenever I can get a page done" which will hopefully be no slower than a page every other week, on average.  We shall see.  Until then, here follows a couple of concept sketches for the Episode 9 title page:

Freak Out,
-TFitC

New Car Small

I bought a Tesla on the weekend - two of them even!  Here they are chilling on my bookshelf with Bumblebee:

On the left is a Tesla Roadster, on the right is a Model S and in the middle, disguised as a VW Beetle (and feeling rather old fashioned about it - and perhaps even a bit self-conscious given the recent VW diesel scandal thing) is Bumblebee.  It is probably obvious at this point that these aren't real Teslas (I don't have anywhere near that kind of money), rather these are the Hot Wheels versions which I found whilst doing some Christmas shopping.  Now, I don't personally care much about the Roadster (as it's not the sort of car I would buy myself even if I did have the money) but as there was a Model S available and they were cheap ($1 each!) I figured I'd pick up the pair.

Anywho, that is all for the nonce.  There may be other posts coming before too long...

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Processing Time

The latest page of The Word Smith is not quite done - it's in the process of being coloured (nearly finished!) and should be up sometime this weekend, but in the interim, I thought it might be interesting (for some definition of interesting) to talk a bit about my comic-making process, such as it is.

It all begins with a script, or something like one, anyway.  I do, in fact, have the entirety of The Word Smith planned out, in point-form, at least.  Before I start actually drawing an episode, I write that episode up in detail, on a panel-by-panel level.  Sometime I'm a bit lazy with dialogue and don't finalize it until I need to start actually putting it on the actual comic, which is a bad habit that I need to try to avoid.  Anyway, the script stage is all just typing into a word processor so I'm not going to dwell on it.

The first actual drawing that happens is creating thumbnails.  My thumbnails are pretty rough and (usually) drawn four pages to a single piece of (scrap) paper, like so:

Pages 5-7 of Episode 8.  The last quarter shows a couple of alternate ideas for page 6 - in particular it shows the composition I ended up using for the first panel, which was different from my original idea.

There are some artists out there who do pretty detailed thumbnails, but I keep 'em simple mainly for two reasons.  One, I'm lazy.  Two, as this is just a hobby and I try to get things done in a timely manner, I prefer not to spend too much time on something that's just going to get redrawn anyway.  Even so, I do view thumbnails as an important planning tool.  Sometimes I do change the final layout from the thumbnailed version (as shall be seen), but overall, I don't think I'd want to attempt drawing the actual final page without some sort of plan in place regarding how I'm going to do it.

After thumbnails, I move on to the actual page.  I draw pages on pieces of bristol board which measure approximately 28cm x 35.5cm.  My current batch of bristol board (which I started using as of page 2 in episode 8) is also made of partly recycled material, for what it's worth.  I start by drawing the panel borders, usually measured out using a ruler, though occassionally (as with page 7 below) I just draw them in roughly.  I do this if I'm not entirely sure what proportions some of the panels should be or if I'm still a little unsure on some parts of the layout.  By just drawing in a rough sense of the panel borders I feel freer to draw outside of them, if need be.

Rough pencils of episode 8, page 7.  Note the layout of the lower right corner has changed from the thumbnailed version.

After panel boundaries are in place, I do the rough pencils.  In theory, I actually put in any dialogue/text first so that I know that the text will all fit and I don't waste time drawing stuff that's just going to get covered up by word balloons; however, this doesn't always happen, especially if I haven't gotten around to finalizing the dialogue yet and sometimes it comes back to bite me.  Fortunately, I did everything in the correct order for this page.

Once dialogue is in place, I draw everything in pencil.  I generally start out fairly rough and then refine it.  For instance, I'll often use rough shapes (boxes, mainly) to position and size characters in relation to each other before getting too caught up in the details; some of those guidelines can be seen in the above pencils.  I currently use a mechanical pencil for the pencilling stage, mostly because I don't have to worry about sharpening it constantly.

When pencils are done, I ink everything using a set of inking pens (one brush pen and a set of pens of varying widths), erase all the pencils, scan it in and colour everything in Photoshop.  Colouring could really be its own post so for now it'll suffice to say that there's several annoying things about it.

Anyway, that's an overview of everything up until the colouring stage, at any rate.  Perhaps in some future post I'll go into the details on colouring.

Until next time,
Freak Out,

-TfitC

Unfaq Vol 4

And welcome to episode 7's edition of "questions nobody cared about in the first place," or, "unfaq."  I consider these to be a sort of "post-mortem" for the episode so let's get on with the rambling.

Episode 7 - Revenge of the Waitress

So you might ask, "who is this waitress and what's up with her?"  She was a minor character from episode 1 - a waitress, as you might expect, and certainly not a Sith Lord - who worked at the Street Meet Cafe.  The Word Smith kind of trashed the cafe a bit and now she's out for revenge, more-or-less.  I don't recall why I decided to bring her back, I suppose I wanted to tie back to the first episode at some point.  Some may also recall the waitress from an interlude during episode 6.

I did a number of design sketches when working out the title page:

From the looks of it, I more-or-less went with the first sketch (upper left) though I used a different pose.

If you ever asked yourself "where exactly does The Word Smith take place?" this episode should make it fairly ambiguous.  Page 1 starts off with an exterior shot of the PAC at the University of Waterloo, page 3 shows an interior shot (technically the fencing scenes are also interior shots though I wasn't working from any specific reference photos for those) and Waterloo Town Square forms the backdrop for pages 5 and onward (minus the flashback page.)

In this episode we also finally get to see The Pen in action for a fencing match, even though she was first implied to be a fencer way back at the start of episode 2 (some fencing periphenalia is also visible in her room in episode 4).

On pages 1 and 3 we can see what I referred to as "the cheering squad."  They're basically a few friends of The Pen who, at this point, don't have actual names.  I did a couple of design sketches for them:

Page 2 is the first of two flashbacks, this one showing some of the events of episode 1 from the perspective of the waitress.  Once again we see a pair of hitodama floating above the waitress in the final panel - these are things one sees periodically in anime and manga.  The "memory cam" thing is meant to indicate that we're seeing things from the waitress' point of view and that the recollections might not be 100% accurate.

On the first panel of page 5 we see the business woman and her daughter who have shown up periodically through the comic (we haven't seen them for a few episodes).

Random trivia:  the combination of the waitress' "Prepare to be served!" on the first panel of page 6 and her Tray Volley attack makes me think she might play volley ball.

And speaking of page 6, one might notice that I drew in the whites of the waitress' eyes on that page which isn't something I've typically done (at least not since episode 3 probably, I think...)  I decided to not bother with that on subsequent pages.  The only one who routinely gets the whites of his eyes coloured is The Word Smith, and even then only when he's wearing his mask.

Page 8 is the second flashback shown partly from the point of view of a shadowy figure who has been seen before.  The sequence in the middle tier was meant to be similar to that at the end of episode 3.  Dun, dun dun.  Things might be afoot.

The cheque that The Word Smith is writing at the bottom of the page is presumably to cover (at least some of) the damage he caused.  This is meant to (hopefully) make him seem a bit less of an ass, especially since insisting that The Pen leave her tournament (as he did in this episode) is rather jerky.  I think he's a well meaning individual, he just gets rather hyper-focused on language related issues at times.  I had a bird fly off with the cheque because, well, it amused me.

And that brings us to the final page!  Nothing too much to say here as it's  just wrapping things up for the episode.  The waitress realizes she didn't really care about that lousy job after all and she and The Pen call a truce while The Word Smith continues to do his own thing.

Anywho, that's all for this episode's unfaq.  As mentioned previously, episode 8 will mostly like start sometime in January so in the mean time,

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Jupiter Power

I was going to write up the episode 7 unfaq today, but I was skimming my sketchbook this morning and realized that there were some design sketches that would be good to incorporate into the unfaq.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time to scan them in this morning so instead I'll post the unfaq tomorrow or maybe later tonight (probably tomorrow.)  Instead, today I'm posting an interlude.  Here is the sketchbook version:

Whilst it is a bit late for Hallowe'en, here we have The Pen cosplaying as Sailor Jupiter.  You can tell it's Sailor Jupiter because of her choice of footwear, or by looking at the colour version.  I suspect that The Pen would be more likely to cosplay as Malie C, if she were to dress up as one of the Senshi, it would be Sailor Jupiter because she is clearly the most awesome one.

Anyway, that is all until tomorrow's unfaq.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Cleaving Vans

I have recently returned from a short trip to Vancouver for a short conference.  The conference itself was ok:  there were some interesting talks and some not so interesting talks and some talks that could have been interesting except that their presenters were not.  On the whole, I find sitting through two days worth of talks to be rather trying to the patience, regardless of how interesting the talks actually are.  My overall take away from the conference was, I think, that I'd like to have the chance to go back and visit Vancouver again for an actual vacation wherein I'd actually have some time to do something other than attend a conference.  That will, however, have to wait until I have the budget for it.

As it was, I did have some time to walk around the downtown area a bit - I went through Gastown and walked along the Waterfront a bit.  Nothing too exciting, but it is what it is I suppose.  I would have loved to have gone hiking somewhere but there was, alas, no time for that.

The trip back from the airport to my humble abode was... interesting, for some definition of interesting.  I took one of the out-of-town shuttle services and ended up in a vehicle with just the driver, an elderly gentleman who was otherwise retired, and one other passenger, an elderly lady, also retired.  And O. M. G., they were both stereotypical cranky old people.  Well, cranky might not be the right word, but I ended up listening to about an hour of nearly constant "Young people today and there things..." so, yeah, stereotypical old people.  Also, super awkward.  (None of this was targetted at me, I should say, but still...)

Anywho, I shall cap off this post with a few pictures that I took around Vancouver.

A couple of views along the waterfront.  There's actually a nice bike path along there with places to rent bikes that I would have liked to have had the time to take advantage of...

A plaque along the waterfront that amused me.

The Water Street Cafe in Gastown.  I include this since I used a picture of the cafe as the model for the Street Meat Cafe in episode one of The Word Smith - I hadn't realized that it was in Vancouver originally, I was just looking for a picture of a "street corner cafe" or something to that effect.

This is another picture from Gastown.  Featured (in theory) is the steam clock which is some sort of landmark or something.

And finally, here's a building downtown on Robson Street that's associated with UBC in some capacity.

Well, that's all for now.  Work will resume on The Word Smith in the near future, though there's no set timetable at the moment.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

A Post Rises From the Grave

The next page of the Word Smith has snuck unto the interwebs at the usual location.  Notes from this page:  drawing action sequences is hard and gymnasts are freakishly flexible.  Very much so.

In other things, here is a picture from a recent hike:

And that is all for the nonce.  Tune in next time for the continuing, exciting and somewhat odd adventures of THE WORD SMITH!!!  (dun, dun, dun)

Freak Out,
-TFitC

A Page Approaches!

So...  the next page of the Word Smith can now be found in the usual place.  The page was actually finished back in the middle of next week, but I kept forgetting to copy it over to my laptop so I could upload it.  Not that I necessarily need to upload it from my laptop, it's just habit 'n stuff.  Also, it's looking like the posting schedule for The Word Smith is likely going to be every 1.5-2 weeks which means it's going to take longer to finish the whole thing, but may be more doable overall on my end.  We'll see how things go.

And because I haven't posted anything from the sketchbook in a while, here's a thing I don't think I've posted yet:

Other than that, everything is fine.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

And We're Back!

We now resume the regularly scheduled episode of The Word Smith!  New page found here.  Of course, when I say "regularly" I most likely mean "sporadically", but what can you do?  Whilst I'm going to try to get back into the once-per-week update schedule, it may be a more "it's done when it's done" type of thing.  Not, I'm sure, that there's anyone waiting with bated breath for the next page, but whatever.

In other things, FASS is over again for the year.  I had to wear a suit and tie as my costume this year which was quite traumatic, considering I haven't worn a tie in six or seven years and it's been even longer since I've worn a full-on suit.  As a result, I felt the need to draw the following, warning of some of the many perils of wearing a tie:

It was quite cathartic.

Whelp, until next time,
Freak Out

-TFitC

Recap Episode

As part of gearing up to resume The Word Smith, I put together a short "recap" of episode 6 so far which at the typical place.  Of course, one could just go and reread the previous episode pages, but whatever.

Since this week is FASS week, there probably won't be any new pages for The Word Smith for another week or two yet as I get back into the swing of this whole semi-regular comic update thing, but things should be resuming in the near future.  And there was much rejoicing...

Anywho, here is the pencil version of today's recap:

And here is the pencil version of the previous interlude:

And with that,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Re"mark"able

Freak here, just popping in with another interlude whilst the Word Smith is still on hiatus (hopefully it will resume in February of the new year!)  As with the previous interlude, this one was also inked using marker (hence the horrible, horrible pun in the post title.)  You should go look at it!  And by you, I mean the person reading this sorry excuse for a blog right now!  Don't ask why, just go!  Exclamation mark!  (Anyway, the interlude can be found here.)

And after you've gone and looked at the interlude, here is the original pencil version:

The character in the interlude does not appear anywhere in episode 6.  For the excessively curious (or terminally bored), I suggest checking out episode one to see the previous (and only) appearance of the character (she appears in four panels, plus the title page.)

I've also, as may be apparent, done some tweaking of the original character design for this character:

Anyway, that is all from the Freak.  I don't expect to be posting again until next year which, of course, is not that far away, or thus it would seem.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Up For Air

Things (by which I mean school) have been a bit busy of late with various deadlines coming and going.  Having just recently done my second (of three required) PhD seminar talks I have a bit of a respite before diving back into the next deadline (a paper submission for a conferece) which is about a month and a half away so not immediate but still all too close.

The draft of the script for the rest of episode six of The Word Smith now exists, though it may be a while yet before work resumes on it in earnest - likely after the aforementioned paper is out of the way.  Hopefully, though, there'll be an interlude or two up in the interim.  One such interlude is currently in the works, pencil version below:

And with that, dear Freaks, I bid the until next narf.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Lateness

Due to me being a bit more procrastinate-y over the long weekend than I'd intended, this week's page of The Word Smith will be a bit late.  It should be up either something this evening or tomorrow.  I'll make another post when it happens.

In the mean time, here's the pencil version of the episode six title page that was posted last week:

There are two things to note about the pencil version of the title page.  First:  it was based on the third of the concept sketches that I posted at the end of the episode 5 unfaq.  Second:  I changed the pose of the central character at some point after scanning the pencil version (I might even have done that change on the traced version, I don't recall.)

Anyway, that's all the excitement I have to dish out for now, otherwise it would probably just be too exciting.  Or not.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

EXCITEMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Word Smith Resumes

As promised last week, the title page for episode 6 of the Word Smith is now available for your viewing pleasure - it's very literary.  Will page 1 follow in a timely manner?  Tune in next week to find out!

I was going to post the pencil version of the title page for comparison, but I seem to have forgotten to copy it over to my laptop so it'll have to wait until next week.  Instead, here's a bored freak:

Now back to preping (read: procrastinating) for today's lab tech talk.

Freak Out,
-TFitC