A Narf A Day

Page 1 of The Word Smith, episode 4, has been posted.  I did some computer-based toning for the page but I don't know how long I'll keep doing that since it didn't seem to be a whole lot faster than colouring...  I'm really just experimenting with things to find out what reasonably fits into my time constraints.  Anywho, episode 4 takes place in the evening of the same day as the previous episdoes.

And to fill out the sketch book quota for the week, here's another page of hands:

This was drawn on Hallowe'en which explains why one has been severed.

Anywho, nothing else really exciting to comment on.  The pantomime I'm in got off to a good start so I shall take that as a sign that the universe approves of it.  Or something.

Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Once More Unto the Weeb

Well, I didn't manage any further progress on episode 4 this week, but I said I'd start posting it this week so that's what I'm going to do, gosh darn it, and with any luck I'll be able to make it through to the holidays without any delays.  In any case, the title page for episode 4 of The Word Smith is available at the usual haunt.

I thought it might also be mildly interesting to show the pencilled version of the title page:

For the final version, I decided that I wanted the Word Smith banner to be a bit more prominent so, through the magic of tracing paper, I lowered the central character and then copy-pasted the banner from the episode 3 title page into its final position on the coloured version.

Anyway, that's pretty much it for this week.  The pantomime I'm in opens later this week, so I've been sequestered in the theatre all weekend and have had/will have dress rehearsals last night and tonight.  I'm looking forward to next week when things mostly go back to normal - there will be shows three nights a week, but no rehearsals.  Yay!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Splorg Splorg Revolution

Last night was the pantomime I am in had their first rehearsal in the actual theatre space that we'll be performing in.  There was a set.  It was actually made of wood!  This feels like a big step up from cardboard.

Anywho, I'm still not quite as far along as I would like to be with episode 4 of The Word Smith before starting to post with it.  If I'm not by next week, I'll just go ahead and start posting it anyway and concede that there will be gaps in my posting schedule or whatever.  In the meantime, here's some design sketches:

This is an evolving set of design sketches for a monster known as the King of All Splorgs that appears briefly in episode 4.  Haven't settled on the final desig yet, but I've got a little while yet before I have to decide.

This was actually done as an exercise for this term's comic workshop - a comic with no characters.  I used it as an opportunity work out a bit of location design for episode 4 (which will start showing up around page 3).

Anyway, that's all for the present.  Look forward to the start of episode 4 of The Word Smith next week.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Not the Face

So!  More stuff from the sketchbook this week.  To start off, I've drawn another page of the New Adventures of The Freak in the Cape:

Along with this comes the usual disclaimer that more of these will be drawn if and when I have the time, motivation and inspiration to do so.

And to fill the Word Smith void, such as it is, here's some character design for a couple of characters that will be appearing in episode 4:

One of these characters is important, the other less so, but which is which shall become apparant at some undisclosed time in the future.

Until then,
Freak Out
-TFitC

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

Prepare Yourself

The Word Smith episode 3, page 3 is now up on my sorry excuse for a website.  It is also in colour and seeing as we're now half-way through the episode, I'll probably just finish up the whole episode using colour.  So, yay for that?  This page includes some gradients so it's kind of fancy.

From the sketchbook, today we have The Pen in fencing regalia:

Of course, she should really be wearing a full fencing mask rather than just her visor, but that would hide her face so I took some liberties.  Drew this whilst at the first CTRL-A show of the term and had a small audience for part of it which was, different, I guess (they were quiet so it didn't bother me much).  Can't imagine it was overly interesting to watch me draw, but who am I to judge?

Until next week,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Flattened

Page 2 of episode 3 of the Word Smith is now available.  As fate would have it, I ended up colouring this page too, due to continued insanity.  Actually, I downloaded a couple of plug-ins that handle some of the more tedious aspects of doing the flatting and they sped up the process considerably.  They're not perfect, mind you, as you have the same basic problem as flood filling:  if there are any holes in the line work, the colour for an area escapes into connected areas.  This means I have to go and make sure there are no gaps in the linework which is still a tedious and error-prone proccess, though still faster than flatting by hand to the point where it's at least twice as fast.  This means I may actually be colouring a lot more pages than I had intended - or, at least, I'll probably do episode 3 fully in colour now (I have page 3 nearly coloured already).  Adding shading is still laborious though, so I may just use flat colours in the future to save time if I decide to keep colouring things, unless I come up with some better way to handle shading.

Here's how the flatting for page 1 looks like compared to what I did by hand:

It doesn't really handle hand-shaded areas very well and can produce lots of little areas, but still faster than doing things by hand, at least so far.

The sketchbook has, sadly, been a bit neglected of late due to my focus on the Word Smith stuff, but here's one of the more recent sketchbook drawings which may have some relevance to page 4 of episode 3:

Those are suppose to be swimming trunks, by the way, not boxers.

Anywho, that's all for now.

Freak Out,
-TFitC