It has been a darn long time since I last popped in! I don't know if this will become a regular occurrence or not.
I updated all my links on my house. I'm on tumblr and tinychat the most now, and commissions are open!
Well, since my last post, I went to some anime cons, won some scholarships, went to school full time, rented my first apartment, worked part time to pay for said apartment, animated a short film, organized a gallery show with 2 classmates, graduated college with an art degree, printed a new minicomic, opened an online shop, went to Great Britain, became lactose intolerant, and started training to run a 5k. And did a whole lot of drawing. I've got a second mini and a long term webcomic project in the works.
So what has everyone else been up too?
I have an art blog / tumblr thing! This is probably going to become where I spam most of my stuff now!
http://stuffae
Wow, it has been a while.
I will just leave these here. They are quite fun and helpful.
http://www.pix
http://website
I finally filled up my first life drawing sketchbook. It took over a year, although 2/3 I filled in the past three months. And the best part is the honest-to-good
I've got another sketchbook I started in September that I want to fill up before my last final this semester. I'm halfway through it. Tomorrow I'm planning on going to a basketball game and sketching. Athletes are good for gestures, spectators for somewhat more detailed sketches.
Rough Pilgrim pages are still going up on my DA, check it out if you're interested. http://aeacomi
Figure drawing professor wants me to stylize less (totally understandable since I'm still struggling with proportions and anatomy)
Animation professor wants me to stylize more (understandable because I don't exaggerate things as much as I could)
So I drew a moe moe desu~ Rae face with biiiig eyes. Haha. And then Bleach Rae, chibi Rae, Disney Rae, Final Fantasy Rae, normal Rae, and Rae twisting Gareth's arm behind his back. Still, that's all pretty close to comfort zone for me. Gotta try something different.
PS doing Artist Alley at a con in the middle of the semester was not the brightest idea I've ever had. I'll be at Anime Nebraskon this weekend, the 5th-7th. Come say hi if you're gonna be there!
PPS Oh, and it's November so that means NaNoMango time. I've got a folder for it set up on my DA (http://aeacomi
PPPS Remember to do your life drawing today (and everyday)!! 8D
It makes me go D: when my classmates look at me like I'm insane for drawing from life outside of class.
D: D: D:
Watch it. It's adorable.
http://www.you
by three students from Taiwan University of Arts.
I was thinking, before all this crazy flooding, about being in art classes and my peers and teachers and all of that. Since I turned 23 this week, and 13 was about when I got into comics.
And I really wish that 10 years ago someone had said to me, "Hey kid, you're awful. Stop trying to stylize things you don't understand and learn how to draw them from life first."
I would've thrown a fit, but I think I would have started to do more life drawing earlier. When all you get are compliments, it's easy to get a big ego and plateau out. When you don't understand how the thing you're stylizing looks in reality, it usually comes out looking wrong.
Anyway that's what happened to me for a long time, and I think that's a mindset that a lot of my classmates still have.
But then again, those same students make going to class hilarious every single day. It's their style, and anyone who dares question it is just jealous.
P.S. Life drawing. DO IT!
Forget the rainboots, I need a pair of goddamn hip waders.
At 8:30am Thursday there was just a little bit of water, the usual flooding we've had all summer. Four hours later it was everywhere. The creek must have started rising 2+ feet per hour. My friend and I watched the water come up SIX INCHES in about 20 minutes. They were using boats to get people, pets, and belongings out. My mom managed to flag down a guy with a truck who was willing to drive her through the water so she could grab our cats and a few other things. It was a scary afternoon, watching debris float by and not knowing if our home was flooded or not.
Friday the cops let us back in. Luckily the apartment complex was specifically landscaped so the buildings are above the floodplain. They became little islands when the water finally crested. The mobile home park across the street looks like it's been completely destroyed, and several other homes flooded.
Water's down about a foot now. I want to go look around and take some more pictures.
Flash floods: don't fuck with 'em. Get what you absolutely need and get out.
Bought rainboots because of the crazy wet summer we've been having here. Something like 1-3 inches of rain per week, all summer, along with a bunch of intense thunderstorms. Wettest summer in 118 years as of a month ago. Anyway, they came in handy when I had to get my car out of rising floodwater at 2 AM the next morning.
Still researching for Pilgrim! Learning some interesting things :)
Whoa back to school next week. Crazy.
I dreamed about a man walking through a forest. He came to a tree and plucked a fruit from its branches. Then the tree reached down and ripped out a clump of his hair. He had a sword and was about to strike the tree, but thought better of it, apologized to the tree, and went on his way.
I've also been doing some general research to lay proper groundwork for Pilgrim. Now I've got a better sense of what I want to try and model the different countries on, and I'm almost ready for more specific research.
con in less than five days, ffffff.
Just got back from seeing relatives, think I might have picked up some illness from the cousins' little kidnicks. One aunt/uncle have 10 grandkids, all girls; another have 3, all boys, with another (gender unknown) on the way.
Chapter 1 needs editing, chapter 2 is half written after about an hour. There was a lot of groundwork to lay in the beginning, but I wonder if it's too much. Might need to spread that out a bit, so it doesn't turn into walls of text and talking heads.
Need more research on the historical time frame I'm basing their little continent on. I think I'm calling the country to the west Port because of all the natural bays and harbors. It's capital, Port of Crowns, is near the ocean on one of the harbors. It isn't a big country, but it does a lot of trade and has many colonies.
The country to the east is still nameless and having problems with two warring minorities after one tried to form their own country. The ruling majority thought it would putter out quickly, but several years later it's become an all out war.
The country to the east of the east is full of ambitious bastards who want to create an empire.
The country that the story starts in needs a name, but the capital is named Sonia after the first Queen. They do not recognize the little country to the north in the barren foothills. It used to be their land, but they were fine with a minority group struggling to live there until gold was discovered. They've been fighting on and off for 100 years, and the gold is pretty much gone now. Port got most of it, since they share a small stretch of border.
Little north country needs a name and capital. They used to be obscenely rich, not so much now.
North of most of those countries is a mountain range, with an arid steppe/grassla
Yay worldbuilding!
One and maybe a quarter of a scene to go for Pilgrim chapter 1 script. My scripts are pretty much just the dialogue with a few notes flung in, yet still somehow take ages to write. Thumbs will be done this weekend, maybe?
Ah hah, oh the students in this art program. "I think X artwork is the best in this chapter because *insert a laundry list of subjective reasons with nary a mention of a single design principle or visual element.*"
Head, meet desk. I get the feeling we will become close friends in the next year and a half.
Whoa, hah. Failed NaNo big time. I ought to know better by now than to try and fly by the seat of my pants, I always fall flat on my ass. I sketched 18 pages, then scrapped half of it, so what I posted a few weeks back is the stuff I'm keeping, with some fixes.
BUT! Pilgrim seems to be heading in a good direction, so hopefully things will start moving more smoothly. More and more excess is getting trimmed out, and it's interesting to see in what areas I'm reverting back to REALLY old bits of plot. Tentative restart is probably going to get pushed back a bit. Need more research.
Caught a cold, bleh. But running a light fever always seems to get the gears clanking, so I dreamt up another idea for a potential comic. Dunno if it's any good yet. Thumbnailed 25 pages of it, while it was still vivid in my mind. I guess I will dub it "Dude who fights jaguars" and file it away with "Girl who talks to birds"
Need to work on Pilgrim thumbs.
Wow, it's been a while since I made a wiki.
NaNoMangO
Now my wisdom teeth meds are knocking me out, so I need to get to bed.
Damn, the animation class I was going to take this summer was canceled because there weren't enough students enrolled. Now I'm going to have to switch around my fall schedule.
At least this will give me more time to get the first chapter of Pilgrim ready for SogenCon at the end of July. My goal is to get it all finished and either print them on a copy machine (wasn't too hard last time), or have the local print shop do it, depending on what they quote me. I just bought a long-arm stapler, so I can assemble them myself. The size of the minis should be about 5x8"
Remember, NaNoMangO is in June! 30 penciled pages, 15 inked, or 10 finished! You can always shoot for more.
Here's the livejournal community http://communi
I'm following along with a bunch of others on GaiaOnline
Pilgrim chapter 1 thumbs are FINALLY done :D 30 pages long, provided I don't alter anything. And I'm about halfway through the script for chapter 2. A bunch of characters got trimmed out for sake of simplicity, but it turns out a lot of it was my problem with trying to shoehorn things in just because.
And the crits I was getting often mentioned how slow the pacing was, so I wanted to speed things up. 30 pages per chapter, at least 2 chapters per year is the goal. While I'm still in school, anyway.
Well, tomorrow morning I get all my wisdom teeth removed, so I think I'll marathon Lord of the Rings and keep plugging away at the chapter 2 thumbs.
http://www.you
Made by animation students at a school in France. I love well done 2D animation. <3