For some unknown reason, I drew a new sprite for HoD. Being out of practice and tired and rushed, it really lost something when I inked it, but I rather like the sketch.

God I took my sweet time finishing this.

Upon request, I changed the legs, but I really liked the original so I just inked ‘em both and worked some Photoshop on ‘em to make the two seperate versions.

I’m kinda partial to both versions, and may color them. But first, dinner ain’t gonna eat itself. Also, I have two hours to get the next HoD done. Drat.

Something I’m working on at moment. Mal s so cute.

Something I photomanip’d for an upcoming HoD. (Yes, it’ll be one of those copout photo comics that take more effort than an actual HoD strip, somehow.) It was actually really easy, as I didn’t move the camera between shots. Hence, the only part that took any effort was cropping the left and middle shot together since they overlapped. Not having much time (the camera said the battery was going dead, and I wasn’t going to argue) I couldn’t fine tune like I should’ve, hence the left shot’s “bunny ears” are horribly off-target. At least I found something to do with my hands in that shot. After the finger and the goat, there aren’t many non-gang hand gestures, apart from the shocker (lame) and the superfinger (double lame).

I also regret that I’m wearing the same pair of jeans in all three shots, but I pretty much only own jeans, black t-shirts, and white t-shirts. (White t-shirts suck balls, but during the sumer, out on the asphalt at work, when Colorado’s bipolar weather switches from “sub-arctic” to “desert,” thin white t-shirts are a godsend.)

Click for full-res version

I didn’t feel like drawing in her other foot when I was prepping the sketch. And the shading is sloppy as fuck. And I’m pulling an all-nighter. But I like how this came out, and her design is more or less final.

The shirt logo was appropriate, I feel, both for the character and for the state I’m in at moment. And I learned how to warp an object so it looks right superimposed over the curvy bits on her chest. Still can’t get the camo pattern to appear deformed when I use a displacement map, but it looks close enough with shading and a little manual editing to stop camo blob thingies from spanning between her legs, thus creating the illusion of separate legs. Did I mention I’m not sleeping tonight?

Click for a slightly larger version wherein you can read my sloppy handwriting! Uncover the shocking truth behind my use of Photoshop lettering!

Hey, look at that, I can access my site again! Seems whichever machine handles my PHP was having some trouble… handling my PHP. Yay for the sloppy and decrepit way in which TENACITY was written, showing me that the problem lay with PHP and not MySQL (for once). Problem with shared hosting is that this happens more often than I’d like. The upshot to shared hosting is that when this happens, it is sooo not my problem. ^_^

Anyhow, colors and such: These are pretty much the final colors for this character, though her hair will be black. That purple was supposed to be used for highlights only, but I didn’t feel like fixing it last night, and I don’t have time to do so now. Maybe after work.

I also don’t forsee myself actually using the skully boots (with apologies to Aaron A.) as they’re a pain to get right and they would be, as seen in my scribblings above, “FER FANCY!” Normally she’d wear black leather combat boots, described above as “SHIN-AY!” Yeah, I was on a weird tack yesterday.

Anyhow, enjoy my oversight with the hair because it’ll only last for about nine hours. Ten million TIOLI points to whoever figures out what name I deleted from the image before posting it. Five million if you guess where it was. Forty million to whoever calls TIOLI on Friday and asks why I’m giving away TIOLI points. (It’s because the TIOLI guys cannot be trusted with responsibility of any kind.)

Click for bigger!

This is the first character design for TNP. I’ll color it and post that later. Probably.

God damn I fucking hate Mustek. I’m looking for a new power brick, as I’m worried that the power brick is going to burn my apartment down or something, and they’re charging $26 for a replacement. Plus $15 for shipping, minimum. So I’m looking at $41, or to continue using the brick that sounds like a high-voltage power line when it’s plugged in and arcs when I plug it into my surge protector. Thanks, Mustek, you’re truly proving to be the king of the lowest-bidder hardware. God I wish there was any other company on this earth that makes an 11×17″ scanner for less than a thousand dollars.

Click for the full screen cap, just ’cause.

I know people may be thinking, “Sprite comic? Where are the sprites?” and/or “Recycled art? Lazy!” So I thought I’d show what I have to do in order to get a new sprite. It won’t disprove allegations of laziness because those are, well, true, but it does allow me to say “well if I’m so lazy, let’s see you do it.”

If you’ve got a sharp eye, you’ll notice that all the art in HoD is recycled from the same set of templates. I have a “master” PSD file for each character which includes everything you see, plus the original sketch. The lines are a layer filled with black with a vector mask applied over it, meaning the lines are fully vector, though the mask means I can paint new colors and such on the lines themselves. Kind of a happy compromise. To make a new sprite from the template, I have to modify the lines, which usually involves adding things to the sketch with ye olde Wacom tablet, getting my vector on, and then painting and erasing the flat color layers to match. Once I’m finished, I merge all the layers except the sketch and the white background, apply a little bloom, copy it off to a new document, undo, move the eyes, and repeat. (The eyes, via a little simple layer and clipping mask trickery, can be repositioned so that she’s looking up, down, left, right, what have you.) Since I’m not saving my changes to the master file, I try and get every expression I can think of rendered down. The end result is that I have a folder full of PNG files for every different version of every character that I’ve ever used, and a few that haven’t been used yet. These are the sprites. They’re a much higher resolution than your average ripped-from-an-NES-game sprites, but game sprites would also be much higher resolution if the entire game industry hadn’t abandoned them entirely in the polygon wars of the late 1990s.

They’re watching a review of Clive Barker’s Clive Barker’s Jericho by Clive Barker.

Max isn’t being entirely accurate. If you just said “press button,” Zork would ask you which button. I bet if it just chose one at random, we’d have made damn sure to be more specific in the future. (As it turns out, in the future it’s a moot point since typing is a dead art.)

Pi, much like pi, keeps on going…

and going and going and going…

In other news, progress on the plot outline of The Next Project is continuing, albeit slowly. I expect to have the first rudiments of a script hammered out within the next month or two, and have the comic launched by the end of March, but officially I’m still saying “early 2008,” which gives me about 183 days total, of which I’ve already burned 8. (92 days if you want to refine “early” to the first quarter of the year.)

I sleep now.
EDIT: Gradient’d!