A new thing

Actlab vid-ay-o

(I worked 14 hours in a hat store yesterday)

Dumbchuck

Donut-Man on the move

Been trying to get this pose right for quite some time now. As an unconventional superhero, Donut-Man doesn't quite fit with your typical heroic poses, so I've been hard pressed to come up with good promotional images for the man, but I think him hurtling over a wall or the ledge of a building (he is NOT breakdancing) is pretty appropriate. I scanned this in HUGE but I've been reducing my pictures to 72 DPI/PPI for the web as per the directions of the Webcomics Weekly guys, now when you click on that link you can actually see it at a reasonable size. I have never understood why the hell when you click on a link to an image file on blogger the internet browser can't resize it. ANYWAY, so I'm working on DM and ST, hope to have the website soon, over and out.

Transistions

So I've taken a pretty long break since the end of the semester. Mostly I've just turned my brain off for that time period, but lately I have been trying to make some steps toward getting a website and some comics up. As a gesture, I put some ink on paper and came up with this: a ridiculous conversation between my comic avatar meeting his own new characters. Robot-tree the journal comic is on break right now, as I'm trying to decide whether the new project will work in the paper, and if not, whether I can manage producing Skiptown consistently and Robot-tree strips on the side. Eesh.

So what's up with Skiptown? It's a more plot-based strip which tells the story of post college graduates stuck in the college town they don't have a real place in anymore. Ally returns as a character alongside Joel, who has be retooled since his days in my OU comics. I'm rather attached to James and Porkbucket as characters, so I think they'll find their way in there as well, as well as some new characters. I'm still doing a lot of the planning and plotting for the strip, so I can't say when I'll actually get around to drawing strips. I also have to conjure up a website before then, ahh.


I'm thinking that the 4 panel layout is a bit much. You'll notice that Robot-tree varied in its dimensions wildly, which was unwise for anything designed for print, so I'm trying to fit Skiptown into a template. I think the size above is good, but I think forcing myself to work in 3 or 4 identically sized frames is unwise.

The last couple Daily Cartoons

So my editor didn't bother to tell me when he quit needing cartoons for the semester, so I kind of quit drawing them.. Here's my feeble attempts to continue the bumper nuts plot line and a total non sequitur:

IRON MONGAAAARRRR

I've been trying to improve my black and white shading techniques, so I've been setting up action figures in front of strong light. Here's Iron Monger!



I can tell that I messed up his legs (they're complicated!) but I like how I managed to get some things right on accident, like having the left edge of his body be a field of black. I wish I had put his hand over his chest with a halo of light around it, but I'll just have to remember for next time.

rooftop ahoy! Donut-Man 11

Okay, I have been doing my homework! I've picked up Eisner's Sequential Art and The Best of the Spirit. Did it make any difference? I dunno, I actually was extremely basic with the panels today, but I did use a first person POV for the bottom row, which was Eisner influenced. Hopefully I'll start messing with more stuff in the future.

Oh and also this:

Social action

2.
1.

In a weird bit of synchronicity, J-Ro has resurrected the topic of Bumper Nuts the same week i decided to address them. Apparently they are trying to outlaw them in Florida, which is both noble and a ridiculous waste of legislature. Let's not get the government involved people, let's make this a grassroots thing.

Donut-Man 10 Director's Cut

I had some troubles with this one. I've realized that in a comic defined by shadows and noir aesthetics, I don't know how to shade. The version below is the one I sent into the paper. I decided to go back and add some shading and backgrounds to the page, arguably making it better but still far from perfect. I need to get in some more practice and work on my shading fundamentals.

And when I'm really upset I watch Transformers and drink until I can't feel the stupidity anymore

Today's strip, as well as yesterday's, is about anxiety, which is serious! But I need to joke about it sometimes. I'm no harder on myself and my foibles than J-Ro is in his absurd, very-much-what-I-base-mine-off-of, journal comic. But I digress. Comic-Donovan is in all ways a more exaggerated caricature of myself, and thus his eccentricities take on more intense, "wacky" proportions. Let's watch as he gets the help he needs, or does something really funny we can all laugh at.


Also, a couple art things. I've starting using the hunt quill for everything. This is good and bad. Good because I can get the flowing thick and fat lines I could never master with the brush pen. Bad (maybe) because it makes my work way sketchier and wilder, and (definitely) because it bleeds through the printer paper I draw these on so I'm going to need to buy better stock. Also, you can sort of only make downstrokes otherwise it sticks. This makes things that change direction like Donovan's nose and hair...wisp?... especially difficult. Also, I'm using a hella-ton of ink.

Laughin' at myself and edited Donut-Man

So I picked up a copy of the paper and was shocked to discover that I had made more mistakes in Friday's DM than I thought! I scanned the inks on the printer at the Daily office, which always provides a much rougher, dirtier image than I'm used to and I can't figure out the right way to change the dern settings. So while I was working on it and moving portions around and erasing with full white, the background was actually a dull gray. For some reason I couldn't see this on my crappy, 6-year old laptop monitor but it was noticeable to show up in print. First of all, wow the printers used for the Daily Texan handle grays well, and second, damn! It's hella ugly. Anyway, I went back and edited the image a bit and I've ensured scientifically that the white background is all white this time, so here you go.
The Robot-Tree for the day looks at my own crippling internet addiction. This arc is going to be serious, folks. Serious.*

*Not actually very serious.


And the final item of business is some totally myspaced pictures of mah new head hair!


Fauxhawktastic! Haha, I'm so vain and glorious.

Donut-Man page 9

Get it? Glaze? Ham? Glazed-ha oh forget it, the punchline really didn't work in this one. I tried messing with the formatting at the urge of others, but i think I goofed in putting the title at the right side of the top. Not smart.

I really like the art of this page, but not the writing or the formatting. But HEY I finished it in 3 hours, ON CAMPUS. The whole thing! I'm lucky my ink bottle didn't bust in my bag, hmm. Expect a somewhat refinished version of this up soon, I think.

Hair raising

Hair puns are harder to come up with than you might think.

Talk to the ham

You want to know why Hamfisto is great? Here's a bulleted list:

• He is literally a ham-fisted crime-noir thug stereotype.
• He has a list of ham and meat puns that someone probably made up for him once and which he committed to memory. He's not very good at making up clever phrases, so he just repeats these 3-4 zingers.
• His real name is Al Hamboni
• And there's one more yet to be revealed!

Anyway, I love this idiot. There are some other rogues in the DM gallery which make me laugh just thinking about them, and I'm impatient to get to them, but all in due time I suppose. I wonder if this is how Chris Hastings feels all the time.

And now some shop talk: I decided to put on my big boy pants and try using the hunt quill pen again. I don't know why I quit using it for so long!! The only danger is that using one makes you automatically start shading like Rob Liefield, little scratchy lines everywhere. I went back and filled in some of the shadows to make it more consistent with previous issues. More experimentation in the future.

EDIT: 4-12: I wasn't satisfied with some of the background elements in this one. Since I want to print this one day, I see no reason why I shouldn't go back and fix the strips to my liking. I'll probably edit most of these before print, but here's my final version of page 8:

The madness continues

Alright, the art in this was meant to be really ambitious, but over half of it was drawn on the bus and the last panel was really rushed. So, to make up for it, I have lovingly shaded it in extra detail just for the blog. You get not one, but TWO lens flares! To imagine what the paper version looked like, just pretend there're no grays. Hideous, I know. Tune in next week for more stupid hair nonsense.


And this is the sketch I made at the beginning of the week when I thought up this ridiculous arc. Fa fa fa fa fa fa fashion!