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
What I really need to do is stop feeling like every entry in this blog needs to have lengthy, substantial content. I can save the deep thoughts for my opinion blog, even if it’s on unofficial hiatus at the moment while I wrestle with schoolwork.
So!
Here is just a quick, albeit belated, announcement that my Kitsunetsuki piece did, in fact, make it into the SCAD Society of Illustrators (SOI) fall show, which opens tomorrow (or well, today), October 30th, at the SOI gallery space at the Savannah Mall. The reception is from 6-8pm and there should be food. I will be there and I will post pictures afterwards! The exhibition hangs until November 12th.
Ehehe, I am excited because I haven’t seen the work framed yet and I guess because this is my first time having a piece in a show. I didn’t mention it here, but I also entered my New York series into a different SCAD show (the annual Small Works exhibition), but they didn’t get in. Oh well. Better luck next time. I’m definitely planning on entering all the rest of SOI’s shows this year and whatever else I can get info on, not to mention the senior show, so hopefully I’ll hang a few more times before I graduate in the spring.
I never did write a report for EXPCon, but I don’t think I’m going to at this point. Oh, did I mention that I’ll be in Tokyo for two weeks in December with a bunch of the Sequential and Animation students? Yeah. :P I will write in here more often! Seriously!
Tags: gallery show
The SCAD Society of Illustrators usually has a juried show every fall and winter quarter, but I’ve skipped out on submitting to a bunch of them mostly because the themes didn’t interest me. As it’s my last year in school, I want to submit to as many things as possible, so it’s nice that this year’s fall show also has an agreeable theme: “Monster Masquerade.” As usual, they don’t elaborate more that, so I just started scribbling random things:
I had two ideas. One was just two generic kind of monsters dressed for a traditional masquerade — cute, I suppose. The other was based mostly on the Japanese kitsunetsuki — pretty much any fox demon that possesses young women. I thought it was a pretty nice twist on the words of the theme.
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Tags: gouache, ink, mythological, watercolor
24hr Comic Day was yesterday, October 3rd.
It was my third consecutive year participating. As usual, the SEQA department hosted the event by keeping Norris Hall open all night, but it seemed like there were a minimal amount of people actually participating this year. The designated times were from 10am Saturday morning to 10am Sunday morning, but at ten, there was hardly anyone around. Gradually, more and more trickled in, but probably 80% of the people in the building at any given time were only taking advantage of the extended building hours to do homework and hang out rather than participating in 24hr, even those that were still around in the dead of night and wee hours of morning. Oh, well.
Anyway, I’ll post the comic first and then continue rambling after it.
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Tags: 24hr Comic Day, comic, Dicorn Boy, Rarukyo, report, Yukue
