Sourcey

Went to my last ever(?) parents evening at school last night.
Dom's art teacher was concerned that he starts too many things that he doesn't finish, and that he draws stuff he's made up rather than from source material.
This seemed a bit strange to me, as I've rarely used sources, except for the twisted stuff that lives in my brain. Anyway I promised I try and help, and we are having a "Draw off" this weekend using sources, and references and everything.

I did a scribble at lunchtime to get my hand in, and very quickly got bored of the reference and switched to making it up.
Dom wants to do some kind of Space octopus/cthullu creature in space for his final piece, so I thought we'd try and start a source and inspiration journey with some octopi, and move to Alien face huggers, DrWho Ood, Cthullu and such like to some eventual composition.

Sunday Sketch

I got Monday's Wychwolf page drawn and finished yesterday, making it either 6 days late, or a day early...
The upshot was I had a gap in the day, so I sat sketching monsters whilst Ali watched "Birdsong".
I toyed briefly with doing a Hellboy sketch, as Dom is thinking about possibly doing some comic stuff for his Final GCSE piece... and we chatted about whether they would allow him to pencil it & ink it in the real world and then colour it in Photoshop to get those glorious colours... I'm guessing not.
In the end I just started drawing, and this is what fell out of the pencil.

I'm planning to start scanning in at least the covers of all the books I've illustrated over the years, to put in the "illustration" section... the launch of iBook Author prompted me to think about converting some of the unpublished stuff to self published.

Distracted

I have an awful lot of revision to do for an end of module test on the 10th Jan, and I keep finding myself distracted by pretty much anything that means I don't have to get on with it.
I came down to my office to do SOMETHING, and instead ended up looking at the 10t sketch challenge - "Gremlins", reading the wikipedia article... briefly dreaming about Phoebe Cates, and then sketching Gizmo.

Happy New Year.

Rob

New year again

Last year I did a brief review of the year in terms of my Strange Biros life.
I'd been made redundant, and found a short term contract, which has since become a permanent post.
I'd written and launched wychwolf with the kids, we've since finished part 1, and Adam has taken over writing part 2, which started a few weeks ago.
I won another 10t sketch challenge, but sadly havn't found the time to enter much since then.
I entered an completed the 24 Hour Comic challenge, and even formatted the result as a kindle book.
I didn't enrol on any more drawing classes, instead I did a ten week class in TIG welding,  and am enrolled on the final year of an online BSc in Computer Science.
I used my new iPad2 to draw some stuff, and whilst the tools were ok, it wasn't precise enough... though the interface was a lot better than the equivalent tools on the mac.
I upgraded to Mac OS X Lion, which broke a lot of stuff... including my old copy of photoshop elements 4.
Eventually I coughed up for a replacement, buuut it still didn't work with the scanner, and crashes when I try to change fonts. All in all Lion is very much a PC user experience... poor.

So this year, I have Wychwolf part 2 to complete, I also have a good 15hours of study a week for the BSc, which cuts down on sketching time.
I have toyed with the idea of buying a Wacom Inkling to allow me to capture sketches done in biro, but to be realistic If I were sketching that much I could scan, or photograph the pictures.
I do hope to enter the 24HCD challenge again.
Realistically I'll be pleased to get anything much done this year...

#24HCD Exit through the Gift Shop

An exciting experiment in digital publishing,  starting around 10am on Saturday the 1st Oct, I've gone from story conception to publication in the Amazon Kindle store. in under 3 days.

I just bought a copy, and it looks fine on the iPad, will have a look on the Kindle when Adam gets home.
Perhaps I'll get round to drawing a prettier cover... maybe not.

#24HCD published to kindle

One of the good things to come out of doing the 24 Hour comic challenge is that I now have a neat little story that I can use to test the kindle store publishing process. I've often thought that when I complete the wychwolf story I'd collate it as an ebook, and put it on the kindle store.
It's clunky, and I had to use my windows pc,as the version of WORD I have wouldn't save in the correct format, and then the mac command line tool didn't want to convert the .htm file.
So aside from the usual frustration caused by using a pc, forgetting my admin password,it wasn't too bad, and I had the wholething done in under an hour and a half.
It takes a couple of days to get the book into the store, and I'll post when I get a link.
I put it up for the lowest price I could, which seems to be pegged to 99c.

In the mean time I've put the pics together as a .pdf

#24HCD reflections

I nearly gave up.
I was tired, I have always been very good at calculating workload over time, and when I reached over halfway without having done half of the work, AND had to get some sleep, I thought I was just punishing myself.
BUT I didn't stop.
I'm not sure why, I think it was seeing various tweets from people dropping out, that made me keep going.
I've looked at the finished article, and found only one typo, "Overcomes Gurads", should have read "Overcomes Patrol"
I realised I missed out a couple of pages, that would have made the total up to 24, plus a cover.
- The "Inside Jail" page should have been a separate page.
- The "Killer Leeches" should have been a separate page.

When I have a little time, I'll finish inking up the pages, and add some colour. I also aim to collate the pages into a kindle book, just to check out the kindle publishing process.

In theory I should crack on with a little more drawing this afternoon to get the final pages of Wychwolf done , but I may give myself the day off.