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.

Following up our acrylic and watercolor assignments, the final was to be a mixed media, four-page adaptation of a song or poem. I decided to do Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” partially because it’s one of my favorite poems and partially because it happened to be a perfect four stanzas. I worked primarily in watercolor because it’s my favorite paint media and fulfilled the mixed media requirement by adding in gouache and minor collage elements via pasted on paper snowflakes and lettering.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take progress pictures until I was this far into it and already had most of the figures finished. In retrospect, I really should have done more of the background before I did the character. It was a pain in the ass working around him later on, especially since, being all watercolor, heavy washes would  have pretty much erased him. Getting this far also took an insanely long time because I had to layer everything like four times before it any of the colors were saturated enough.

Finished painting the horse and blocked in basic background elements. Started working in gouache for the darker parts of the sky.

Almost done! Just need to add snow! The fun part!

Snowflakes in blobs of white gouache! Plus, preliminary lettering to figure out placement. And paper snowflakes. Holy crap it is hard to fold and cut when the paper is like 40×40mm! Ideally, I wanted them smaller, but there was just no freakin’ way it was happening with my fat fingers.

Proper scans of the pages before I added the snowflakes and lettering. The scans could be a lot better, but since the original pages were so warped and because I had to press down the scanner top while scanning, there were weird shadows on the scans that I had to try and fix and blah… PRO TIP: Don’t use illustration board for very wet media. :( I’m sure this would have turned out a lot better if I had used watercolor paper, but nooooo… I don’t have enough boards to stretch four giant pieces of watercolor paper at the same time and I wanted to work on the pages simultaneously, so yeah. COLORS ARE PRETTY AWFUL. Especially on the third page. I don’t even know.

Final version is below! I ended up adding some more general, gouache blob snowflakes in addition to the few paper ones that were varnished on. Text is all hand written on cardstock then pasted on black for a border, then pasted on the pages. Did margin clean-up digitally and added some panel borders to some of the inset panels. Colors are still weird even after tweaking color balance for like fifteen minutes. =_= OH WELL. DONE IS DONE. Now I have eight pages and two covers to finish inking for another class for Thursday and then I’m done with this quarter. Woo!

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!)

That is my neighbor Alicia’s long stapler. It was a fickle beast that did not like me, but I had to make due since I don’t have a long stapler myself.

Piles of sorted pages lying on my bed. Oh, the exciting and glamorous work involved in making comics! These particular piles are from my 2008 24hr comic, which was an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

This is what they look like stapled together as minicomics!

It’s like a book or something!

Stamping my fancy signature stamp on the mini of my 8-pager from the Tokyo class.

All done! I reduced that giant pile of paper to this. Twenty copies of my 2009 24hr comic, fifteen of my 2008 24hr comic, ten of the AWA comic I did with Catherine, and ten of the Tokyo comic. Woo! I am relieved to not have gotten a papercut during all this madness. I thought about also making a mini from the Tokyo strips I did, but I am still contemplating that webcomic idea, so I dunno. Anyway if I had printed off any more paper, I would have had trouble stuffing it in my bag to bring home. :|

So I’ll have these for sale tomorrow along with whatever con merch I can carry with me, so if you’re in or around downtown Savannah, come to the Pirates’ House tomorrow for some comics!

Yeah… next time, I’ll do better than these awful scribbles… And I’ll hopefully not waste four hours online at the end of the day… Fah! Happy New Year! :3

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.

Left page starts off with a quick thumb for a recent assignment. Everything else is for a very old personal project that I doubt will ever manifest into anything solid, but I enjoy working on it all the same? Working title is Dandelion Season, but honestly, I considered it perpetually untitled and refer to it a lot as the ZXN project. Blurred out text is some spoilery story notes.

More random things from the same project, er, except the cats, which are random studies for another upcoming assignment. I really need to get human/horse relative proportions down… I am rather fond of the facepalm face on the bottom right. Not so fond of the very cliche, wrist-to-eye crying face? It just doesn’t seem like a very natural thing to do, y’know?

Lots of blurred out dialogue, durrhrr. This is pretty much the extent of what I have written down for this story. Lots of random dialogue scattered through six or seven years of sketchbooks. Yeah, this project is that old. But at least I’m trying to draw more full bodies, even if they’re not very expressive yet. Better than floating heads!

Some unblurred dialogue here because it isn’t story-specific. Though you get to see that I tend to write dialogue backwards in my sketchbook. Most story-relevant notes are also written backwards. (Because I can!) Notes to myself about the drawing or simple things are written normally. The “Breath of Fire 4″ note was because someone watching me doodle this stuff in class said my character costumes reminded him of stuff from that game, so I went to look it up later. I don’t really agree, but whatever.

Left is still part of the same project. Right is random crap, including some thumbnails for the next SOI show, which is themed around the Humane Society as proceeds from the show will benefit them. Also, the canine-thing with trees on its shoulders is Esk, who belongs to Kesame.

Oh! Speaking of Kesame, I recently commissioned her for some art of a character of mine and she made him beautiful. ;_; Looook~. I wish I could pull off fur texture that awesome.

That’s all for now. Midterms is coming up already. I have a lot of small projects I need to get done by mid-February or so and then final projects for this quarter after that, so that’s what you have to look forward to seeing?

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!

Click to enlarge! As you can tell by the date, most of the sketching took place in the beginning days when I had no idea what I was doing (oh, wait, I didn’t know what I was doing all month…). This was basically me brainstorming characters without knowing what part they played, if any. A few of the folks depicted here never really got any major roles and some were never even introduced. One of the poor bastards here also dies fifteen thousand words in. :X

Neither of the girls on the left made it into the story, though who knows, maybe they’ll get thrown in whenever I get to editing it? I’m not really sure why the Dark Mark is on the righthand page. It sure was fun to draw though.

I draw a ton of headshots, don’t I? :( I think bird people are fun as hell to draw though.

But that’s it! I have a few more pages, I think, but they’re not much different from these, so whatever. 2009 was a pretty exciting year of NaNo for me since none of the characters I was using were pre-established. I didn’t know their names until I wrote them in and didn’t know what they looked like until I doodled these. Hopefully I’ll be able to smooth them out and draw them again some day. SOME DAY. EVENTUALLY. <_<

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.

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.

This is what happened. That first week? It was great. It was fine. It was much better than I thought it would be. The second week? Terrible. All of a sudden, the ideas were gone, I had no idea what to do with any of the characters, and I had no desire to write whatsoever. It’s a typical NaNoWriMo cycle, but this lack of motivation and inspiration coincided with the beginning of finals, which meant I was doubly unproductive. I was neither writing nor working on any of my schoolwork, which meant that on the third week, I was busting my ass on the schoolwork since it was kind of due. Pulling all-nighters for a straight week to make up for lost time on finals meant NaNoWriMo was still on hold though, and so I went yet another week without writing.

Finals ended abruptly, as they always do, and I went home for the break. Or well, my one week of break before I went off to Tokyo — did I mention I was going to Tokyo? I was to fly out of the country on November 27th. I wasn’t bringing my laptop on the trip, so if I wanted to finish my NaNo novel, it would have to be before I left. Being so insanely far behind, I was very torn as to whether I should bother. I piddled out a few more thousand words, but I was still having a hard time getting back into the story. I had killed off a main character and wasn’t quite sure what to do from there. To try or not to try.

On November 25th, at ~25,000 words and two days to go, for some reason, I decided to go for it. I had to write the entire second half of the novel in two days. Man… I knew it was possible because there are some insane folks that crap out 50,000 words in a day or two at the beginning of the month. Those are the people who’s final word goals are around 500,000 words instead of 50,000. I still think those people are crazy, but still, I knew it was possible. So I wrote. And I changed the POV to a different character to make things easier for myself and to give the novel a sort of dual narrator-ship. I don’t know. I really had no idea what I was going to spend the next 25,000 words writing about, but whatever.

There was a déjà vu element to it, honestly. This was kind of what happened in 2007. Except in 2007, I wasn’t that far behind. And I had more time to catch up. This year, on Thanksgiving day, I timed myself continuously for ten minute intervals where I would write as much as I could with no distractions. I averaged 400-600 words every ten minutes. Then I would take a ten minute break and go again. So I averaged 1,200 to 2,400 words an hour. But still, I had to have Thanksgiving dinner. I had to pack for Tokyo. I had to make sure all my passport stuff and everything else was ready to go.

The good thing about being able to leave on a trip to the other side of the world is that it’s a convenient excuse to stay up at all hours. That’s part of the reason why the chart is kinda messed up — since I’m set to Eastern Standard Time, it started the next day at midnight. I did a hell lot of writing between midnight and like, six or seven in the morning, when I went to sleep. <_< Thanksgiving day ended at midnight. My flight out to Tokyo was the following day. At 11am. We were leaving for the airport at 8am. At midnight, I still had 10,000 words to go.

At a quarter to six, the story in the novel was more or less concluded, but I was still about 2,000 words short of 50,000. I piddled around a bit and wrote a short epilogue kind of thing and threw random words around for the final stretch. At almost seven exactly, I entered in my final word count and verified on the NaNoWriMo site.

I really didn’t have time to celebrate or contemplate that I had just written some 23,000 odd words in 24 hours though. Instead, I dragged my luggage down the stairs, ate leftover food from Thanksgiving dinner, then listened to my mother fuss at things I might have forgotten or might need for ten minutes before jumping in a car and going to the airport.

I was in Tokyo from November 28th – December 12th. It was pretty awesome and I really, really want to go back soon. I have an insane slew of photos waiting to be posted and a lot of posts I want to write about the trip both on this blog and Opinion Prone. Unfortunately, the trip came with a catch: homework.

As it was a college thing, I took ten hours worth of classes on the trip. Predictably, not much work got done on the trip itself, so it all falls on to the rest of my winter break. Some break, right? I have an eight-page self-contained comic to draw. I have eight daily strips and a Sunday strip of another comic to draw, not to mention character design sheets and all the other prep work that goes into a comic. Both comics need to be inspired in whole or part by Tokyo. I’ve been home for two weeks already and I’ve gotten startling little done thanks to holidays and commissions. Everything is due a week or two after we get back to school (January 4th), so I really don’t have much time left to get it done.

…At least I know I’m good at finishing things insanely last minute. It isn’t even like I do it on purpose though. :(

Anyway, happy holidays, folks. Hopefully, I’ll make some more headway on these assignments in the next few days and will be able to post some character drawings and sketches or something. Also hoping to get Tokyo photos up on Flickr soon! As for my NaNoWriMo novel, it’s in need of so much editing, it’s not even funny. If even 5% of the words I wrote in November are usable in the end, I’ll be happy, but I don’t even want to think about the damn thing until like… March, at least.

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.”

Six years after I started making NaNoWriMo an annual event, I think I’m finally tackling this with that intended spirit of wild abandon. Forcing myself to continue to take this on on top of a thousand other things this year means making sacrifices, and it certainly won’t be my word count that suffers. I finished in 2006 and 2007 but not last year. No way I’m making this a losing streak. So finally, finally, I am writing without a real plan. (And any plans I try to form seem to force things in a completely different way than what I intended anyway.) I am writing a story I have not had in my head for months and months if not years and years. I am writing a story where the characters are new to me. I am writing a story where every time I feel like I’m running out of momentum, I run around the NaNo “Plot Doctoring” forums until I find something else to write about. And hell, I’m writing a genre I never thought I’d touch: Young Adult (YA). I mean, really. Where did that come from?

Naturally, not having a plan means that I’ll have a lot of editing to do later, but that’s not the point, is it? At least I’ll have something to edit. Honestly, I already know that I’ll most likely end up pruning away much of what I’ve already written, and I might be rearranging events later so they aren’t so haphazardly strung together. Right now, as I’m still not quite sure I have a plot, there’s no backbone to hold things together. But I can worry about that later. In the meantime… whatever?

The only plan for now is to finish around November 25th so I can enjoy my Thanksgiving before throwing stuff into a suitcase and flying off to Japan for two weeks. This puts my personal daily word goal at 2,000 words rather than most others’ 1,667 words. And as such, I’m right on target at ~16,000. Tomorrow, I’ll need to be at 18,000 before I sleep. So far so good. Too good. I am definitely expecting some major writing blocks, certain rage, characters expectantly dying (oh, wait, that’s already happened), and angsting over Twitter before all this is over.

Similar challenges that force me to draw x things over y time are also fun — I had wanted to participate in Inktober, but I found out about it too late and didn’t like the idea of having to catch up on a “one thing a day”-type challenge. I plan on doing my own “Inkbebruary” in February instead because February is the soonest I’ll be stationary for an entire month.

Anyway, back to NaNoWriMo. November has always been a terrible month for such an event because of the number of other things I have to deal with, but I think this year takes the cake because on top of finals, various birthdays, leaving school for the winter break (including a day or two of travel where no writing will get done), and Thanksgiving, I’ll be leaving for Tokyo on November 27th and probably not taking my laptop with me, thereby cutting the month-long event short by at least three days. So. 50,000 in 25 or so days. Awesome.

There is also the problem of the story.

Throughout the years, I’ve done various levels of pre-planning, but the most was a haphazard “full” outline that had a beginning, most of a middle, and kind of an end. The middle is usually what kills me. Starting is easy. Having an ending in mind isn’t that hard either, but getting from point A to point B and filling out the 50,000 word quota is hard. I also have a bad habit of just dropping off and not actually finishing the story after I hit the 50,000 words. The official NaNoWriMo goal is to make it to 50,000, but actually finishing the story is probably a good idea too…

This year, I’m kind of at a loss as to what to write about (which is kind of bad with… an hour left until the local starting time). I am thinking of doing a re-write of my 2006 novel to 1) finish it, 2) make it suck less, 3) so I can use it as an lengthy guideline for a graphic novel based on general story I want to pitch to VIZ Media soonish. I guess it would still count since I wouldn’t be revising the original (it’s terrible beyond revision!), but rewriting the idea completely from scratch. I just also think it’s kind of lame to do a repeat NaNo novel and am somewhat worried I’d get bored with it because of such. Then again, you’d think I’d get bored of some of my stories after passing them around in my head for years and years and years. Some of the stories in my head I’ve been working on for seven or eight years. :\

I always toy around with the idea of just going into November and writing about whatever the hell comes to mind, but I think that would just lead into a lot of blank staring at my word processor and not getting anything done at all. I think I at least need to have a character in mind and a goal for that character to be the most basic premise of the story; all the twists and tragic details and come later, but a character and a point are the most important things to start off with.

Ho hum. Fifty-four minutes left on the clock. As man times as I’ve done it by now, I still don’t know what to expect out of this. Last year I broke my brief winning streak. Am I gonna get it back or is it the start of a new fail streak?

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.

Apparently the gallery space used to be the Disney store, lol, so there were dressing rooms and such in the back behind the curtain. All in all though, it was a really awesome space and there was lots of room. I can definitely see them expanding the hanging space in the future by putting in some fake walls around the center or cleaning up the back enough to use more of the walls back there. It was also in a very easily accessible portion of the mall, which made it easier to cart loads of food from Darci’s car to the gallery.

Empty gallery; still setting up!

Other side of the empty gallery.

I thought there were going to be 40 pieces in the show, but there were only 28. This made me even more surprised to be in it at all since everything else hanging was definitely better than mine, durrhurr.

Darci setting up the bar area.

We had all these little cups filled with candy and a "menu" that listed all of the pieces in the gallery by title, artist, and price.

A lot of the pieces didn’t have prices listed though, including mine, and both the menus and the stickers by the frames said “contact artist” instead of a price. This was unfortunate since it didn’t actually mention a way to contact the artist? I wrote in a price when I submitted my piece, but I guess it wasn’t in a prominent enough location? Since just writing in a price on the sticker would look messy, I left my price with Darci in a notebook, but I’m not really going to get my hopes up about Kitsunetsuki selling, especially next to so many other awesome pieces (four of which were already sold by the end of the night).

Food! I hit this table like ten times in two hours. It was good.

Kitsunetsuki hanging in the gallery. Exciting.

Too bad I don't get to keep the frame if it doesn't sell, lol.

Some of the pieces next to mine.

Some others in the gallery.

Julie Lieberman, the faculty advisor for SOI, came in around 5:15pm and marveled at how put together everything was; she and two other students went to order and pick up more food before helping with last-minute touches. By 5:45pm, everything was pretty much good to go and people gradually started trickling in as the reception officially opened at six. For the most part, it was the artists and friends of the artists that showed up, as well as members of faculty from the Illustration department, including Professors John Foerster, Kurt Vargo and Allan Drummond, but there were also curious mall-goers and other random folks. I felt a little out of place since I didn’t know most of the people there, but I was surprised to see and did get to catch up with a few people I hadn’t seen in a while since we no longer had any classes together.

Since they’d been encouraged to dress up, there were a good number of people milling around in costume. The lighting wasn’t too great for pictures and I have a long way to go with my people photography anyway, but I still had a good time randomly shooting away.

It's nice to see a crowded gallery opening.

That's an Elmo in the back.

Looking at pretty pictures.

That piece he's looking at was pretty awesome. Looked like a cancer tumor monster.

I think a lot of people were trying to figure out if pieces were prints or originals. I know I was.

Some how, two hours and some minutes passed in photos, eating, and conversation. The crowd thinned as the rest of the mall started to close down and clean-up started in the gallery. Karen and I sat around until around nine then got back on the Pirate Ship and drove back home. Since it was both my first time attending a gallery reception and my first time hanging in a gallery, I hadn’t really known what to expect, but it was a pretty good night, even for all the awkward moments because I didn’t know anyone. According to Karen, the theme for the next SOI show will have to do with the humane society because sales from the show will have a percentage go to them. This is encouraging because I would get to draw cute animals and hopefully that will lead to me getting to hang again. :D