Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Buffer of Despair!

I've waited this long to start posting because I wanted to have six months' worth of comic done and in the can before I started updating. And while I'm not quiiiiite there yet, I do have the art and basic scripts done- it's pretty much tweaks and image cleaning at this point- and I have August pretty much wrapped up shiny and uploaded already. I'm on schedule! For an artist.*

Which is great, and I'm proud and all, but...well,drawing a comic is a massive learning experience. If I were a better artist heading into the thing, it might not be such a pronounced curve; but I'm not, and it is.

So already, half the stuff I have to post is Old Shame. I look at it and think "Argh, I could do so much better than that!" and I could. And the urge is to just redraw those first-done pages...

Except at the end of that I'll be way better again. And want to redraw the work I'm doing now. And it would be soooo easy to get into an endless cycle of improvements and tweaks. It's a way of ducking the scary part, really- if I don't show anything until it's !perfect!, then I never show anything at all, and I can skip the whole Artistic Performance Freakout. Hurrah!

But then I go back in the Valley of Despairing Laziness, where the crushing weight of guilt at having not accomplished anything prevents me from trying to accomplish anything, and the only thing to eat is Envy Weed Salad, seasoned with bitter spite at all the damn producing artists out there who put their work on display and get audiences and have accomplishments and stuff. And I have to wear the Shirt of Self Loathing, which has a big ramen sauce stain on the front. And I don't even eat ramen.

So I will be posting as planned, and grinding my teeth as the older pages go up- and probably be grinding them into dust when no one even notices that they're less adept than the newer stuff...



*I'd have more loaded, but there's some weird fuzzy artifacting thing going on with my posted images, and until I can sort that out I really don't want to load all those comics.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Seriously I'd Sell My Kidneys First




Yes, I'm finally really truly working on The Comic. Already I've got the art for 4-6 weeks of updates done. I'm not saying Now comes the scary bit: lettering.

I am Not Good At This. Yes, I could bully Letterbot 5000 into doing it for me, but the thing is, I'm also not good at writing-for-lettering. I am myself a fairly verbose and long winded sort; writing how I speak works wonderfully well in text, where a generous portion of descriptives and a fondness for emotional intensifiers can have room to grow. But in a comic every place text is happening is a place images aren't. I'm not shy of walls o' text- one of my favorite comics ever, Thieves and Kings, uses that technique a lot- but I want it to be a technique I use on purpose, not just the default state for my comic.

So I've been playin' with fonts (thanks, Nate Piekos of Blambot!). And I've realized I just cannot get used to typing in the standard all-caps effect of comics, so I'm using Mighty Zeo 2. If I were lettering by hand, maybe I could manage it; but computer lettering, even with nifty fonts, already takes away a lot of variation, and I can't make myself give up the lowercase option.

I also can't tell how my strips are going to read with different platforms and different hosting sites. Hence, I now begin the dance of mad experimentation!