Er, so the Minicomics Expo went very well. Jeremy Nguyen had a brief post about it over on SEQALAB.I neglected to bring my camera and so don’t have any pictures of my own, but you can totally see my leg in the far-right of this photo, lol. It is next to the red-starred commie bag. :P
Annnnd the following Sunday, the 28th, SOI had another gallery opening featuring one of my pieces. I meant to write about it and post some pictures, but then finals happened. I promise to get that up eventually though. D: In the meantime, after some 40-50 hours of work, I finished my Comics Painting final. It’s probably the best thing I’ve done all quarter and I’m very pleased with it.
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Tags: comic, mixed media, schoolwork, watercolor
Tomorrow, the Sequential department’s having a Minicomics Expo. I’d thrown around the idea of attending as a vendor but wasn’t sure if it’d be worth it because I don’t have any comics made specifically in the spirit of the mini and very few other works that I could print out and call a mini. But Duncan, the department chair, kept telling me a few comics was plenty enough so on Monday I told him fine, I’ll go!
So I spent a few hours last night prepping scans to print as books. I’ve never gotten duplex printing to work on the lab printers, so I just arrange all the pages manually myself in Photoshop. It’s tedious and probably a lot more work than I need to be doing, but it works out okay. Went to the printer today after class and printed off a gigantic ream of paper. I am so glad pretty much no one else was there… since I had to flip all the pages in the printer myself to print on all the backsides, it would have been hell if anyone else wanted to print something at the same time. >_> Look at how many trees I killed! (And all that toner, since all these pages are double-sided!)
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Tags: minicomics, SCAD
So February 1st was Hourly Comics Day. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very prepared. I had meant to do some practice comics to get a set style down for the event since I would obviously need to use a simpler style, but that never happened… So I lost momentum really fast when I dove head-first into the project that Monday morning. Things got sloppy and I was wholly unproductive for the latter half of the day for one reason or another. I really want to retry on a different day, though I don’t know when a good time would be. The last few weeks have been crazy and I don’t foresee that easing up any time soon. Hence why it took me so long to even get these scans. D; Anyway, here’s my terrible first attempt to share with you! A day in the life of Kiri:
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Tags: Hourly Comic Day, self portrait
Look at me trying to update with art on a semi-regular basis!
Here are a bunch of sketches from the last week and a half or so. Most are completely unrelated to anything I’m supposed to be doing right now! I really need to start focusing on personal projects that I can turn into something I could pitch or publish relatively soon, but some of my favorite personal characters are from projects that are still very, very incomplete and which seem to need endless amounts of work, despite the fact I’ve already put several years of thought into them. I guess that’s why they’re called labors of love. Or something.
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Tags: Dandelion Season, Niruphma, Qurai, sketch, Zacchi
So all my Japan trip assignments are done and over with. I really meant to post sketches or something, but I ended up not doing all that much sketching? I took two classes in Japan: Tokyo Seminar and Cartooning. For the former, my assignment was just to draw an 8-page, self-contained comic inspired by Japan. For the latter, my assignment was to draw eight BW daily strips and one colored Sunday strip related to Japan. The 8-pager is probably going in the next Sugar Ninjas anthology, so I’m not sure I want to put it online. (You can see the first page here though.) The strips feature the characters from my experimental, noncommittal webcomic, With a Grain of Salt, which I kinda sorta want to do as an actual strip sometime eventually, so I’m not sure I want to put those online either since having the strips done gives me a good buffer?
I dunno. I might cave and put them both online eventually because I’m desperate for attention!
In the meantime, I dug up some scans from my sketchbook in November when I was doodling my characters and random things from my NaNoWriMo novel. I’d meant to post them while the event was still going on, but we know that nothing went as planned that month… So here they are now? It isn’t much, but considering the incredible unlikelihood of the novel being in any presentable shape any time soon, this is the best you get!
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Tags: NaNoWriMo, sketch
Yay! I’ve finally uploaded most of my Japan trip photos! You can view them all here! I was originally uploading them to Flickr, but I hadn’t realized they had a 200 photo display limit. You can upload more than 200 photos, but it won’t let you access, edit, or sort anything past the most recent 200, which I think is pretty stupid and annoying. :\ So I Googled around for a quick php-based photo gallery I could install and manage myself. It isn’t perfect, but it’s elegant enough and easy-to-use so there it is.
The only pictures I have left from Japan are those from various museums and Ueno Zoo, which I’ll add when I get a chance. For now, I’ve also uploaded some of my other, older photos to the archive, including some I had had on Flickr. Taking so many photos in Japan was really great though, and I definitely want to get some decent photos of Savannah before I leave this place (for good?) in the spring.
So, the original plan was to update at the end of every week in November with a progress update on NaNoWriMo and my novel-writing endeavors. This obviously didn’t go as planned.
See that chart? Sometimes, people have charts that flatline and have weird jumps because they forget to update their word count for a few days. I never forget to update my word count. I obsessively update my word count. I’ll update my word count every 200-500 words or every time I take a break, whichever is shorter. So when my chart flatlines, it’s not because I’ve forgotten to update, it’s because I’m not writing. But similarly, when my chart has insane jumps in word count between days, it isn’t because I’ve forgotten to update, it’s because I seriously wrote 20,000+ words in the last twenty-four hours.
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Tags: NaNoWriMo, Tokyo, travel
Eight days in and I have 16,063 words. NaNoWriMo has these nifty widgets that keep track of your live progress, but this image is saved manually so it doesn’t change and serves as a record.
So shortly after I wrote my previous entry, I spent a few hours writing to myself in Notepad, trying to psych myself into some kind of plan. I wrote to myself dissecting all the reasons I did and didn’t want to pursue my various half-baked ideas and ranted to myself about how I ought to be writing a novel instead of writing about why I’m not writing a novel. This went on for a good two thousand words and two or three hours until it was past five in the morning. I roamed around the NaNo forums and browsed through their “adoptable” topics: Adopt a title! Adopt a plot! Adopt a subplot! Adopt a name! Adopt an opening line! An ending! A place! A secret! A quirk! A plot twist! And so on. Many were ridiculous, but if nothing else, they force you to kick around some new ideas.
So for all my sleep deprivation and some weird Adopt-a-stuffs inspiration, I eventually started writing just before dawn and crapped out some five hundred words because I told myself I wouldn’t sleep until I got that much. Unsurprisingly, the novel’s working title is currently “Five-Thirty in the Goddamn Morning.”
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Tags: NaNoWriMo, progress, writing
Yeah, so my roommates and friends are all out running around Savannah (one of the most haunted cities in the US) in costume. I am home by myself working on a half dozen miscellaneous projects and putting off thinking about NaNoWriMo even as the hours tick towards midnight. For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — is an open challenge to write a 50,000 word (or longer) novel in 30 days during the month of November. This will be my seventh year participating. I’ve “won” twice in the past by reaching 50,000 words in 2006 and 2007. Of course, all you win is street cred, bragging rights, and a pretty certificate, but I like occasions that force me to put down the words because that’s always the hardest part.
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Tags: NaNoWriMo, writing
The reception for the SOI Monster Show was 6pm-8pm, but it turned out that Karen, my ride, needed to be there earlier to help set up, so she came over around 3pm and had a cupcake before we both jumped on her motorcycle and went off to the mall. Since she was dressed as a traditional, swashbuckling pirate and since I was dressed as some kind of lazy modern pirate (I looked like a mafia thug, honestly), we dubbed her bike the Pirate Ship.
Monster Show gallery entrance.
All the pieces had been hung the week before, but the decorations in the window needed to be straightened up and all the food and such for the reception put out and set up. There were only two people there when Karen and I arrived, the mall director person (?) and the president of SOI, Darci. Karen and I set off to help by doing such glamorous things as ironing out the table cloths, turning on the tealights inside the jack-o-lanterns, and straightening frames. This took a surprisingly long time and when 5:30pm rolled around, we were just finishing up steaming the wrinkles out of the drapes that hung across the back of the gallery, separating the main floor from the cluttered back.
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Tags: report
