Drinks and Glasses

I think people are pretty much used to the idea of webcomics as "comics on the web". Which they are.  But webcomics are different than print comics. They're easier to distribute, cheaper to color...and oh yeah, they have about eighty billion more options for presentation.

For people who know what they're doing, I bet that feels freeing. For me, an art gonk who's just about figured out how to post pics on LJ, it's mostly panic inducing. When a page doesn't load, or looks too big, or is all fuzzy,  I have to check every variable I know-- and that leaves eighty billion minus five reasons the pic might still be screwed up.

So if, for example, all my pictures are wretchedly fuzzy over on Smackjeeves? I got nothing.


***
There's no getting around it- my pictures are loading all fuzzy on Smackjeeves. I have no explanation, no reason, no solution for this. I fear it may be because the original files are Painter-based; if all other options fail, I may have to print, scan, and re-digitalize my digital art. Stupid, but if my work's going to fail, I want it to fail on its own merits, and not because of a platform/file dispute I'm not even wholly privy to.

In my search to get around the problem, though, I've rediscovered Webcomics Nation, my first hosting site, now much improved! I'll be working on prettying the site up over the next month, but in the meantime, if you want to go look at my work in a rather nicer package, it's at

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/carapace/sevenhands/series.php

And I'm happy with it if only because I can use my chosen background colors. Hurrah!

Granted, the fuzziness issue remains. But at least I'm posting my images in 1980 for some reason! Yes, that's right, I'm sending back comics from...  THE FUTURE.

I'm totally telling 1980 Carapace to invest in Google.

Testing, Testing...

For some mad reason, all my images have been coming up fuzzy in SJ. Now I don't know yet if it's just some confusion between my monitor/browser and the sight settings, or SJ doesn't like art made in painter (but as a PSD and saved as JPG, darn it!), but it has driven me to, alas, make a tech check here. So, a quick image done in PS:

And one done in Painter:

...Huh. Here, they both look pretty much the same. Back to SJ to double check the look!

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.

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!