Seriously, NHB, put some of this shit up for download. I’m beginning to suspect that Damon Fibraio (holy shit, I spelled that right!) wants me to drop out of Mario and make a mad dash to open Audacity and get it recording my Wave Out. Because that’s what I did, so now I at least have a WAV of that Mike Ellis song with most of the first verse cut off. (I would have everything except Damon declaring the song to be about Mike Ellis if I’d thought to just have Audacity open and ready. And really, the chorus goes “He’s still Michael Ellis to me,” so it’s not the end of the world if that’s cut off.)

This has been What Was the Point Theatre™, brought to you in part by Slave Labor Graphics™. (I haven’t been paid for this plug, but that’s more than they seem to have paid for binding my Serenity Rose book. Seriously, pages should stay within the book, preferably attached to the spine somehow. Curously enough, I didn’t have this problem with my copy of JTHM…)

This isn’t the final version, I plan on coloring this. I just hate posting shit with a white background, as it royally fucks with the eyes on this dark website. This is one of the rare things that doesn’t suck when inverted.

As I said before, this is the Sandpaper Orgasm album cover for “stable.” The only difference here is that I’ve cleaned up the sketch enough to use as lineart. I was trying to keep it pretty rough, though. Still have no idea how I’m gonna handle the background stuff… Ah well, I’ll worry about that later.

Hopefully this will be resolved sooner than the last quick question. That’s right, ed, I went there.

I’m looking to buy a stand for my keyboard, and my question is this: would I be wasting my money on an On-Stage stand? Bear in mind no matter what I do, it’ll be one of the cheap brands, but I found one that looks promising. On the other hand, I borrowed an On-Stage mic stand from my dad, (which is currently collecting dust because I have no preamp and my vocals suck out loud) and I’m a little less than impressed. It works, no question, but that said, if this is what I can expect from their keyboard stands, there is no way in hell I’m setting my keyboard on it.

On the other hand, I could always build one, it’s not like I work in a fucking lumberyard or anything. Ten bucks worth of wood would probably hold up better than a $100 stand anyhow.

I don’t know if I’ve actually mentioned this before, but I’ve had this idea in my head for a long-ass time now. It’s the cover of a Sandpaper Orgasm album titled “Stable.” I might get it inked and colored tonight, but I’m gonna try coloring the sketch first.

WHAT THE CHRIST, IT HAS A TAIL!? Fuck, it’s even more disturbing to me now. And it was pretty hard to top “Kisses now!”

I broke down and inked this by hand, because fucked if I could wring anything decent out of Illustrator with my Wacom. And when jumping to Heart Shaped Skull for the color references, I was repeatedly reminded that Aaron A. owns my sorry ass. For the uninitiated (and those who ignored the last post) this is Serenity Rose, from the comic of the same name.

Also, I think I did a fair job with the eyes. Not as good as Aaron, but I think I did a fair job of porting it over to the way I draw eyes.

Also, I will kill for a link to an MP3 of the “Still Michael Ellis to Me” song that they play (but not enough) on NHB automation. Or at least a heads up of when it’ll come up so i can record it myself.

5:58
Ugh, I have a damn headache. I blame caffeine, or the lack thereof.

I have been doing stuff, just nothing easily visible yet. I’m still working a bit on the Scary Girl script, and plan to get it going sometime soon. I may actually start working on SEP some more while I’m doing the script.

I’ve also been getting back into music some. I hijacked my keyboard from my dad, and am slowly figuring it out. (I can’t play piano, but I can manage a little on a keyboard. Kinda.) I also borrowed a mic (fuck you, Firefox, “mic” is not misspelled) from him, with the intent of doing some vocal stuff. As it turns out, my sound card doesn’t have a preamp for the mic input, so most decent gear is off limits without a mixer or at least a standalone preamp. I do have a cheap little mic that came with my parents’ old computer, and long story short, you will not be hearing any vocal work from me anytime soon. I will try and get something written (never my strong suit) but that’s pending me buying a patch cord to get my keyboard to play nice with Audacity. I’m also thinking of borrowing one of my dad’s guitars and finally teaching myself to play, because A) I don’t like synthesizing guitars on principal, and B) my keyboard is a (pretty nice) consumer-grade model, so it doesn’t have any decent guitar voices anyhow. (There are a lot of downright amazing voices, though.)

7:18 (If this isn’t less than the normal time people spend on blog entries, it should be.)
But I haven’t actually drawn anything lately, so I’m not sending this along until I have something sketched out. This may take a while.

7:28

Um, yeah, I have no idea where this came from. This is what happens when I try to do something with no purpose: a dude with a carrot-penis. I think it’s a safe bet that openCanvas should not be used for this. Where’s my pencil?

7:42
So, I’m drawing Serenity Rose. It promises to be decent, because it’s fucking Serenity Rose. And I started drawing eyebrows. You’d think I’d have remembered that witches sorta don’t. (Right side of the last panel, you lazy bum. i know how you do.)

8:26
It’s disturbing how quick I can sketch out this one-off stuff, but how it takes me forever to do just one panel of a comic.

I’m gonna stick this in Illustrator and see if I can’t get a nice lineart and add some sort-of color.

Nothing done tonight, yay me. My new MobilePro came in today, so I’ve been getting the thing on it’s feet. I’m still having trouble with my WiFi card, seems Windows doesn’t want to play nice with it. I might track down a nice Linksys card and palm this one off on my roommate, since I’m giving him my old 790, and this card works like a charm on that one. So far, though, I’m liking the thing. It’s got a beefier processor and more memory, and a USB port, so I can plug in a mouse or pen drive I guess. The better hardware and updated OS (and bundled apps) makes web browsing less painful, and PocketDOS runs a hell of a lot quicker.

For those of you playing the home game, I don’t have a Palm or PocketPC because those don’t have a keyboard. I don’t need a PDA, I need a portable word processor. Unlike a laptop, which has to boot up as normal, a MobilePro comes on instantly, in whatever state I left it in. (Also, the thing only weighs like two pounds and is less than half the size of a laptop.) And unlike all the PocketPCs and Blackberries with those half-assed “thumb-boards,” the Mobilepro line has a touch-typeable keyboard, about 92% the size of a normal keyboard, or so I’m told. In other words, it’s a portable device that I can write on. I’m glad we had this little talk.

(I think it’s apparent I didn’t even come close to getting anything drawn tonight.)

I have the oddest ideas at work sometimes. I also wanted to try and get a flame that could serve as a standin for Sera, but that’d probably be pushing it. It’s from this page if you haven’t read Serenity Rose. Kelton saying “whoa there” is still one of my favorite bits in that book.

I kinda like how this one came out, despite how incredibly sparse it is. As usual, click for the obscenely huge full size image. There was a lot less Photoshop work in this one than usual, but I think this benefits from the “less is more” approach. Wallpapers and the raw renders below:

I also had a chance to fool around with MakeHuman, it’s not too shabby, though I can see some places where the UI could stand to improve. But I doubt I’ll be using it for much more than a reference, it’s a royal pain to pose a character. There’s a lot of joints that have to be moved individually, and I don’t have a proper rendering engine to plug it into anyhow. (I suppose I could get the original version, some sort of plugin for Blender, but Blender ain’t exactly easy to use either.)

Eric Burns of Websnark needs your money, and is selling a few of his RPG books on eBay. Check it out, and send him some cash if you’re into tabletop RPGs. (Seriously, how can you not bid on a book titled “Cute & Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters?”) If you’re not into RPGs, I think he’s still got a paypal tip jar, or you could buy some ads via Project Wonderful.