I’ve been terrible at keeping the blog updated lately so the plan is to do a mass image spew of progress and then start a regular practice of updating work on the blog. That’s the plan… The last progress entry was early January 15th. Since then…

Character designs continue. This is Paige. Paige is one of the characters in my graphic novel in progress.  I’ll probably make a seperate blog entry at some point with all the different character sketches I’ve made so far. But for today, you only get this.

A drawing of Jutta, my partner. I drew her nose a bit too big. But the rest is okay.

I drew this while reclined on the couch and too a photo, uploaded to Instagram, and got a really good response. I’m pretty happy with it seeing as I didn’t do any pre-planning or sketching in pencil.

More character designs (and some scribbles)

Planning. Looking at how long I have till I want to have this done and working out in ‘artist mathematics’ how much I would need to produce in each phase of creation to meet 100, 200, 300, 400 or even another 500 completed pages. 500 would be great but I should really be drawing six and a half pages per day. Not an easy task! 

By mid January I’d Some thoughts I had on a kind of HUD that would show up around the characters at times. Don’t know if I’ll continue with this but its got some possibilities. the question would be whether such a device would add to or detract from the story. It’s been used to great effect in books like Scott Pilgrim vs the World, but it needs to be in keeping with the context of the world I’m creating.

The 23 pages of digital layouts I’d done as part of an informal 24 Hour Challenge in October 2015 were taken to the next level in December with Copic markers and ink pens, and digitally lettered and laid out in InDesign in January. I talk about the process here.

I now have a pretty good workflow of digital sketching in Manga Studio/Clip ex 5, then batch exporting to PSD. These PSDs are plugged into an InDesign template, which updates automatically every time I make changes in MS and export. Its a handy workflow, and lets me easily produce viewable PDFs as I go. This is part of my current folder hierarchy for Life in the Gutter. Room for improvement…

This isn’t really related, but Mailbox is about to close down. I’ll have to look for another Mail aggregator now. I’ll miss the intuitive swipe functionality and the mailbox zero capacity. Hopefully there’s a suitable replacement available.

I’ve also been preparing for teaching. In particular, a course for Honours students. I’m pumped, it should be a lot of fun. Some super talented kids in the group. Looking forward to it.

The 2014 Diary Comics are now compiled and look great. I’ve learned heaps about using Adobe InDesign doing this, and I’m confident the next one (2015) will be much quicker.

Lastly, for now, this is what’s happening re-publishing. What a process.

That kinda brings us up to speed. More to come, in more depth, and more frequently.