Knit Squids

Au Contraire, the band that I’ve been playing bass with for a little over a month, has a gig on Wednesday, March 3rd at the Ella St. Social Club in Portland, Oregon!

This’ll be my first gig since high school, and my first paying gig ever! Woo!

I’m super excited. I know most of the people reading this are not on the west coast, but please send good thoughts my way in a couple weeks. Thanks!

So the penciling of issue one of Big Apple Monsters is actually coming along, despite the fact that it really doesn’t feel that way sometimes. I set my pencil down around the middle of page 5 today. The pencils are not complete in the sense that they’re totally ready to be inked, and I will definitely be tweaking and/or redrawing some of them before the ink stage, but it’s a really good start.

For this project I wanted to try to pencil all of issue 1 before inks go down both as a motivational tool and a way to even out the inevitable stylistic creeping of the art. In other words, having everything look very different on the first page than they do on the last.

I think I’m still on board with this pencils-first idea. I mean, I’ve never tried it before, but I think it’s going well.

So, with this project I’ve started a new process of laying out roughs for the final comic. It was inspired by Scott McCloud describing the process he used for his awesome alternative, black and white, sweet and charming superhero comic book, Zot!.

It’s pretty simple and very effective. Basically you get a stack of index cards, which when flipped portrait-style are roughly the right proportion for a page, and you draw a page per card. The really cool part is that you tape them together on the edges with them all facing the same direction, and then you can fold them accordion-style like a book and read for page turns or lay them flat and see the whole thing at once. Plus it’s a neat feeling of accomplishment to finish one and tape it to the growing stack.

The tiny size preserves all the important pacing information but keeps you from freaking out drawing tiny details. It’s marvelous!

Been catching up with some web stuff here, and I’m almost ready to unveil a new version of the homepage that this blog is a part of. It won’t change the blog’s theme, or anything about the LiveJournal theme, of course, so most of the casual blog readers wont notice, but that’s okay. I’m mainly rewriting it for fun and as a sort of electronic resume for prospective employers. Good times.

I took a lot of inspiration for the colors and type from this blog’s theme. I also used my first ever JavaScript on it, which is just a simple little “if” loop to hide and unhide some text. It’s cool effect though, and I like it. So that will go up soon, when I get some pictures pasted in and tweak the CSS a little more. Hooray!

Also, I may have some paying work soon, so keep your fingers crossed. (I’m trying not to think too hard about it, lest I jinx it).

Also, I whipped out another page of pencils for Big Apple Monsters last night, which had the first appearance of the character Paul. Might throw some scans of those up here just for the heck of it.

The two main characters for Big Apple Monsters, and some of their accessories. They’ve been taking up a lot of my headspace lately, as evidenced by the fact that Jon and I managed to stumble across doubles for each of the characters within a few days of each other on opposite coasts (I saw Paul and he saw Janie). We’ve got a lot in store for them, but I think they’re up to the challenge.

Some work notes: each character is preceded by some of the many pencil sketches done while figuring out how the characters looked and held themselves, etc. The finals are inked using a #4 watercolor brush (Windsor and Newton, if anyone cares) and Higgins Black Magic india ink. The watercolor brush is the weapon of choice for many of my favorite cartoonists and I was challenged by a friend to conquer my fears and start using one already. It was good advice. I’m getting to the point where I feel like I can control it reasonably well, though it still feels frighteningly big to me compared to the Crowquill.

The read somewhere that cartoonists were complaining about Higgins ink now being watered down swill, or some such, and I’m beginning to believe them. I may try the trick of leaving it uncapped for a few hours to let some excess water evaporate, because it’s really just not as black as I’d like.

Anyway, enough technical blathering. Enjoy! (You may embiggen any of them by right clicking and selecting “View Image.”)

Using the power of e-mail I recently got back into contact with many folks who I haven’t spoken to in a while, particularly regarding their prior interests in my comics and art doings. The general response seemed to be a desire to have a way of following my work as it happens. Now, if only there was some kind of web platform written specifically to track text and multimedia through time and present it to the world in one neat little package. Oh wait!

My belief is that the extra work involved in scanning some art and writing text updates will be negligible when compared to the excess of inspiration gained from having a loose-knit pack of fans and critics to present art to in real-time. So, with that I announce the reintroduction of the art-blog concept to this, my WordPress blog, and by extension, LiveJournal.

I have many exciting ideas for how to keep content flowing, including posting pages from the abandoned Grettir story (in an attempt to get myself to finish it) in a vaguely web-comicky-type format. (I may even experiment with a ComicPress theme to accomplish this, but I’m not sure). All the while you’ll be receiving updates on the new project, including samples of work. There will probably be mostly penciled pages at this stage, which serve to create an air of mystery around the work simply because they’re so difficult to scan.

Let’s start off today with catching up on my prior self-published work, a nice little rag I had photocopied at Hampshire’s duplications department. If you didn’t get a physical copy, or if you want to read it again and are lazy, here is the .pdf file.

Stay tuned for more! It may be useful to list me as an LJ friend or grab the RSS feed if you are worried about forgetting to check the blog.

I recently watched the original unaired first episode (which is being referred to erringly by the general public, including myself, as the “pilot”) of Dollhouse and it only made me disappointed. To me it felt more like a Joss Whedon production than any “actual” episode of the series. The disappointment was mostly because the it was really smart and well-written, addressing a lot of questions that I had while watching the whole first season. It started character development in motion that just completed stagnated for almost the entire rest of the show. I believe if that episode had aired first I would have been in a much better position to appreciate what came later.

The disappointment also had to do with my (increasingly) poor opinion of the “average viewer.” Or perhaps this poor opinion is better directed toward the Fox Network, or television networks in general and the way they handle content. The reason the first episode of the show was scrapped was reported to be that test audiences found it “too confusing and dark.” This baffled me, because although the first episode was very dialogue-heavy and had a lot of heavy themes (but also a lot of strong feminist themes), I found it very straightforward and a great introduction to the main characters and the world.

The episode it was replaced by, in contrast, was felt rushed and jumbled and had more than one long unnecessary-feeling action sequences with lots of guns and explosions. It was also, in no way, less dark, the main plot of it being that Echo is programmed to negotiate with a serial kidnapper and rapist who sexually abused the woman who her personality was modeled after. But this all falls in line with our general values in movies and television, in which guns, explosions and violence against women are all PG-13, but we get offended if you make us think.

So Candice and I decided to watch the first episode of season 2 on Hulu, because it was easily available and because I was bolstered by having watched the original first episode into thinking that maybe the show could turn itself around. Well, the long and short of it is that I am not going to bother for a while, perhaps ever. The first episode of season 2 had a certain amount of attempted character development, shoved in alongside an Echo-Ballard plot that was just incredibly dull. The Topher/Saunders scene was somewhat interesting, but it felt like they were trying to cram a seasons-worth of development for two characters into one scene. It just didn’t work for me.

Bleh.

This post exists only as a test. Readers in LJ-are not yet aware that my blog moved (along with my whole personal site) and is now being hosted for free by a friend. Yay friends!

If anyone out there is trying to configure Alpine (or probably any other pine variant) to work with Gmail and is getting errors about certificates (unable to validate local issuer certificate, or something similar) there is a lot of help out there for you on the internet. Unfortunately much of it is very technical and difficult unless you are already an SSL whiz.

If you’re like me, you know enough to understand how certificates work and why they are so important, and you may have even been able to locate the directory where OpenSSL stores your certificates and found it empty (as I did). Um…why is it empty? Isn’t that bad? I suspect that the OpenSSL package on Arch Linux does not ship with certificates because certificates change and it doesn’t want to give you old ones, as this would bring you endless headaches.

So where do the certificates come from? Well, having spent a few hours (luckily spread out over several days) in research, I’ve found loads of instructions for retrieving the certificates by hand from various trusted servers on the internet. I was in the process of trying to piece together several different How-Tos in order to get Alpine the certificates it needed to verify Gmail’s server, when I stumbled across references to a CA-Certificates package in Ubuntu: a package maintained by Ubuntu of certificates from Equifax, the trusted company from which Gmail gets its certificates. So before doing anything else, I decided to see if Arch kept an equivalent CA-certificates package in the pacman repos, and voila!

So, if you at wit’s end wading through certificates trying to configure Alpine with Gmail on Arch Linux, do yourself a favor and type:

# pacman -S ca-certificates

And then start up Alpine. I think it’ll work.

This blog, and indeed, all my personal pages have been annexed by the benevolent hive-mind that is THE MOGUNATE. I have been allowed by my gracious overlords to maintain my sentience and sense of self in order to keep blogging and designing web pages. Also I’ve been given free web hosting. ALL HAIL THE MOGUNATE. ALL HAIL.