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Email the author at
qwanderer7+lgc@gmail.com
The Elves of LleuGarnock is Copyright
Irene Pitcairn<2008-2009. The Elves of
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September 18, '08
Wow, time has just flown by. I was quite busy on Sunday and now I'm like "it's wednesday already? It isn't time to write a late rant, it's time to write the next one!" I did some comic stuff. The new wallpaper is up in the gallery, and it's available as a poster in the CafePress store. I ordered one to check out the quality. I'll tell you how it looks when it gets here. Also up in the gallery is my first fanart by Dreamaniac. I've been helping him with his site and stuff. It's been fun.
The comics going up now are pure brush-pen. I started to ruin my first pen just by testing it out and learning to use it, so the style as I'm first using it is full of little thick choppy lines. I don't think it looks too bad with these characters, but I am glad I bought new materials and learned to work with them better.
When I bought my second brush pen I also bought a brush and some ink, saying to myself that before I bought a third pen I would at least try it the real way. The ink scared me, and I could never bring myself to open it, even when my second brush pen started showing signs of wear. Then, about two weeks ago, someone on the CG forums mentioned that they inked using a Chinese ink-stone and ink-stick. I remembered I had little tiny versions of those that I got in a brush-painting kit one Christmas. I got rid of the book and the teeny water bowl and ladle and the colored paint tabs, but I kept the ink-stick, stone, and brushes, even though I didn't really think I'd get back into painting with them.
That was a long time ago, before I really got into Anime or thought about drawing comics. So at that moment, when I had learned to use a brush-pen but was frustrated with its limitations, and had a brush I was comfortable with but was unsure about ink, was the perfect time to recall their existence to my memory. The ink work in the new wallpaper was done with the ink-stone, and it was very fun. I've also used it to put detail into one comic so far, and I think that's how it will stay for a while - I'll mainly use my second brush pen, but where the detail is too much for its slightly worn tip, I'll use the brush.
The comic page I'm refining in pencil right now is unique in its arrangement of panels - specifically, all the divisions are curved. I'm not sure how it's going to turn out or if I'll ever do it again, but I was really struggling with a vision of how the page was supposed to look, and these great arching curves are what resulted from the struggle. At the moment I'm pretty happy with them, but I'm worried about inking. I usually ink panel borders with a straightedge, and I don't have any french curves that are appropriate to their shapes. I'm considering putting the borders in digitally - I've done it before when I was being lazy.
It's been cool to have my new laptop to work on stuff, even though it's got color balance issues, and even though I've mostly been using it for games. I have been using it for coloring, even before I got it a mouse (gasp! I've been coloring with a touch pad!). Aside from the blue/green problems, the main thing is that I need to learn to look at the screen from a consistent angle. While I was coloring the new wallpaper, I kept tipping the screen forward to see what I was doing more clearly. Of course, when I looked at the picture on the big computer, it was so dark I couldn't see anything.
The comic hasn't exactly been progressing at the amazing rate I'd hoped for. It never does so consistently, but only in little jumps. I'm still confident that I won't fall too far behind. I'm fairly certain that once I finish the current comic (and all the coloring that needs to be finished) I'll have another fruitful week or so in which many amusing comics will be made. I just don't know when that will be.