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It has been concluded that March is a horrible, horrible month with far too many deadlines. I think I will stay at home and work tomorrow so not to waste two hours on the bus, especially as there won't be any classes.
Because really... I need to get that Malmö Fria thing done by Friday X(
On the other hand... the two comic pages I plan on using will be added to Think Ink's new fanzine, and it's Red Planet related so I know that once I get started I'll enjoy it. I just don't like having the deadline just around the corner.

The dryad story now has a good and proper name - Dryspell. Enough double entendre to amuse me, but not silly enough to ruin the mood. There has also been progress (thankfully). I've finished 7 out of 11 pages and gotten some serious work done on the others. Hopefully I'll manage to finish the rest this week so that I can ink and greyscale in peace next week.
Friends (and myself for that matter) have concluded that it is far too easy to make bad jokes and silly omakes for this story. I think I could make a small fanzine with the ideas offered so far.

Back to work...

So, the second term at Malmö Comic Art School started a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I seem to have misplaced my inspiration somewhere in December...

Yet I'm working on a couple of comics at the same time. It makes it more difficult to actually finish anything but easier to find something I want to work with.

First and foremost there is the nameless Dryad comic for a sexanthology, which I want to call 'Knock wood' just for shits and giggles but it wouldn't really suit the mood. Boo. Deadline March 1st, and... I have zero inspiration.

I've done a couple of pages for The Red Planet (that Space 1889 comic that I keep talking about but never seem to actually get to work on) for a class assignment. We were given a feeling which we were supposed to convey, and I got 'ensamhet' (loneliness) which suited Jerker oh so well. So I did the first two out of four-ish pages of a dream he has. I was really surprised how easy it was to draw considering the difficulties I've had with the Dryad comic.

Another class assignment was to brainstorm a bit on humorous comics of some sort, so I continued with Grumg'nesh. Four new ideas that I like, and I've inked and colored one of them. One of the two secondary characters seems to be developing on her own, and suddenly has an ickle paladin running after her. It's always nice when the characters know what's going on when you don't.

I've also started the coloring of Myths of Mars, the 24 hour comic that I did in November. Just the basics so far as I'll need to test-print them to see how the colors look before shading. I would hate to have to redo everything because the printer messes up the colors (it tends to mess up green and add a shade of brown to everything for some reason).

Furthermore, the newspaper Malmö Fria (well, technically all (city of choice) Fria as they publish in other cities as well) have made a deal with the Comic Art School, and so we students will be granted one page every Saturday for our art and comics. Each student get one page each, or half a page if they feel more comfortable with that. I have a vague idea of what I want, but as I'm part of the group organizing the whole mess I really ought to get a move on. To set a good example or something.

Christmas approaching

Regular as clockwork... or something...

Time off for the holidays as of... last Friday. I've already gotten a bit restless, and it's just Monday. Lazing about and reading comics online is fine enough but it feels wrong not to sit and draw for 6 hours or so a day.

So instead I've spent my day trying to sort out the horrible Space 1889 mess of a plot, or lack of plot rather, that I've avoided dealing with so far. I think I'm beginning to get a pretty good idea of the Big Plot, but there's still a few chinks that I need to work out. Some scenes are very vivid to me already, and then there are a few black holes of horror that I need to explore. What gives me a headache though is the character development. How much to keep, what to rewrite, which parts to remove entirely and how will that affect the interactions and later character developments? The same goes for characters, their pasts, their motives and whatnot.

I've managed to finish all the lineart for a good four pages though, which makes me happy. Unfortunately it's pages smack in the middle of the story (well, part one of the story) so I still have the horrible fighting scene in the very beginning to deal with. In medias res and all of that. Bothersome, to say the least. But aside from that first chapter of horror I'm pretty much done with the script for the first half of part one. Progress, at last!

December...

This teeny weeny thing? Not so tiny in real life.It took two A3 papers to get all 14 of the Airbitch crew and the 2 Very Important Women in one single picture. Still not entirely satisfied with the coloring but I'm going to let it be for a while as the deadlines keep clustering.

We did the 24 hour comic exercise last week, and though I didn't finish I did a whole lot better than I've ever done before - 20 complete pages, out of which I am pretty satisfied with 14. It's a small Space 1889 thing, semi-related to the actual project but only in the sense that the captain appears in it (at the age of 8-10). I like it though, and hopefully I'll be able to finish it by Christmas.

And the deadline for the third class fanzine is steadily approaching while I'm slaving away at horrible, horrible backgrounds. Victorian houses are not my friend, that's for sure. At least NaNoWriMo is over and completed so I don't have to stress out over that too, just... Christmas now, I guess.

Ahhh...

That's my official sigh of relief.

J-pop con 2009 is over and done with, Stronger (the Naruto doujinshi) sold surprisingly well. I was surprised at any rate, my friends were not. The cosplay went well too (the Black Lagoon group which I participated in won Best Music), and overall it was a very enjoyable event.

Also, I finished the Grumg'nesh strips (aka "Grumg'nesh the one toothed orc's magnificent adventures") for Sydsvenskan. Keeping it simple was quite a challenge, and I couldn't resist shading, even though coloring it took twice as long that way. It didn't help that I had no choice but to work with it in photoshop rather than paint shop pro which I know how to work with... but finished it is, regardless.

We'll see how that goes. For now, I finally get to play with those Space 1889 characters without feeling guilty about it. Well, aside from all those NaNo words I should be writing...

Holy shit...

All three comics are done, not a single deadline missed. A whole 7 minutes before midnight I finished the two year old Naruto doujinshi.

The vast majority of the art is old, but when I found it again after two years and didn't hate it and it was almost completed it felt wrong not to sit down and finish it now that I have the time. Sort of. Perhaps "now that I'm supposed to be drawing comics" is a better way to put it.

It will be coming along with me to Jpopcon this weekend where hopefully I'll sell enough to feel that the hard work was worth it.

NaNoWriMo

And so begins NaNoWriMo 2009 (which stands for National Novel Writing Month), my 8th NaNo total. 50 000 words or more shall be written during November, no matter how many cheap tricks I have to pull. Random dares? Flash backs? Cookie recipes? Excessive ramblings? Not leaving the house for a full week to make up for lost time? All is fair in the battle for those 50 000 words.


In more comic related news Think Ink's Mangazine is now available, and in it is Royal Games, finally completed.

All the inking on the doujinshi is done, so I'm left with the coloring of the cover and back and adding the greyscale... which I sincerely hope will not take too long because I have a bad novel to write. And a cosplay to sew.

I've also cheated a bit and started sketching on Space 1889... and to my horror realized that one page every three days will not be enough, because somehow I underestimated how many pages I need for every chapter. I'm fantastic like that. Three of the pages will definitely be done for December, as the class fanzine group decided that 'snusk' ('filth/smut') should be the theme and that really doesn't work with the vampire story. It does, however, work fabulously for my pirate captain and his beloved girlfriend when they meet at the Captain's Bounty, an inn/brothel in Karkarham where she works.

The strips for Sydsvenskan are also underway. I have eleven strip ideas with Grumg'nesh the one toothed orc, out of which I like five. But I do love the way that deadline is smack in the middle of the second week of November, which is about the last days when the writing is easy. Why oh why can't the world just stay on hold for November so I and the rest of the rabid authors in NaNo land can write in peace?