Tabula Rasa - A Lesson Learned.

A day late but not unexpected at this point, I've got a full post on what's been going down in my neck of the woods. So sit back, relax, and I'll try to make this as coherent as possible - irregular sleeping hours do wonders to a person's ability to write.

A week ago last Friday there was an exploit in my Wordpress install of Stacked Hand - the plugin I was using for newsletters, specifically - and malware was hacked into my site. Because of my update schedule I didn't catch it until the following Monday, and my site was closed down later that week. Thanks to some help, I've cleared out the old archive, done a fresh install on the site and starting from scratch on the build. I didn't think of backing up the site itself for such an occasion, so the format is starting over from new.

Obviously, this means that the site right now is threadbare as all getout. I've learned from the launch in April that I need a much more solid design for the site itself. So what this boils down to is this: for the time being I'll be working on redesigning the site to better reflect the theme of Stacked Hand, and then putting the pages back up to start the schedule up again. For the time being page updates will be suspended, but you can see what's been posted so far on the comic's mirror site. I apologize for the inconvenience, and will be working to fix this as soon as I can.

Keep being Awesome,
C-Z

Cleaning House, Entrepreneur Blogging and Updates.

Yes yes, I know, I've once again spaced out and left this space vacant. In my defense, things have been steadily picking up since the last lengthy post I did here. A quick rundown, for those who haven't been paying attention:

• Stacked Hand has officially launched! The page itself is still in a good need of a website tune-up, I just need to set aside time to implement it. The current update schedule is biweekly on Mondays. (next update is Jun 23rd). 
• There is also a mini comic in progress telling more of the exploits of our yet-to-be-named main character. Don't worry. He gets his introduction soon enough. 
• I am busy at work developing another set of prints for next year's convention season. The first series is based on the art style of Alphonse Mucha. 



Which, while it is visually appealing as all hell is very. Very. Intricate when it wants to be.

• Thought Bubble has also launched over at the Peoria Journal Star's website! Each week I review webcomics and small press books, and take a look at the comic culture in general from where we are now. It's been going for about a month now, check it out. 
• And of course, I'm still teaching, with a few new courses to start up here in the oncoming weeks. I'll have more information on that as it develops in the future. 

If you want to help support me, get access to more updates/WIPs like the one I just posted above, and get monthly request sketches and new wallpapers, give a spin over to my Patreon account.

This past week at 1MillionCups in Peoria the discussion was brought around to doing a community blog that features/spotlights the hundreds of entrepreneurs that are in the local community and whatever projects that they're working on. I would love to try to get a push towards at least a listing of the group in that way, or a site that could be used as an aggregate feeder that would link to the entrepreneur's own writing on their current work. One of the things my teachers used to instill in us was a high value in production blogs, no matter how much of the process you actually want to keep hidden from the general public until the big reveal. You can still do bits and pieces - snippets, really - and get folks interested in what you're working on. At least, I'm guessing that's why you're all here, right? </rimshot>

Anyway. I leave off with a mental note to myself to seriously clean up my label list for this blog. It's cluttered and pretty awful. Til next time!

Mailing Lists, updates, or Why I Haven't Posted In Almost A Month.

Alright, lesson learned. I've started marking days to update the blog in my google calendar. I love the ability to schedule things and have my phone shriek at me.

So, what I've been up to lately: so, right after the (re)launch of my personal portfolio site, I got sick for a few weeks. That meant that instead of working on the comic pages, I was regulated back to working on scripts for future chapters. I'm up to chapter three at this point, probably about halfway through. Writing has a way of biting my expectations in the ass, though, so we'll see where that goes. After I got healthier the bf's birthday rolled around, so I felt the need to quickly put together a picture for him based on the game that both of us have been playing to death lately.

Yep, that one.

We've also had some wonderful news: in late November, the BF and I will be experiencing a whole new adventure in our relationship: I'm talking of course about having a pet together. We finally found a breeder (admittedly very late in the year) and have a wonderful, fuzzy baby corgi puppy coming to live with us. We decided to name him Puck, and we get to see him in two weeks.

I don't know who's been making more high-pitched noises, myself, or my bf.

What's down the road? More comic pages, and a review of a new program that I recently discovered thanks to the internet. It's called Mischief, and it's a vector-based program that supposedly will save your art at any size. I'll be writing something on it by the end of the week, just downloaded the trial today. 

One more thing before I go: I recently put together an advertisement for a friend's online magazine called Beautiful Monstrosity. It's for the comic's site, and the subscription/mailing list is wide open now that I fixed it (durrhurr me.) If you're interested at all in being told when the site itself is completely live, skip on over here and fill it out. Leave a post on my FB page if something's messed up.

That's all I got time for. Til next time~

Diving into things headfirst.

I am this close to putting reminders into my phone about regular post updates. (You can't see my fingers, but they're a few inches apart. Okay, well, about a foot apart. I'm still kind of lazy.) While I can just as easily throw a bunch of art tutorials and whatnot on my setting on tumblr, it takes more time and dedication to put together coherent writing on this blog. And I'm not entirely 100% sure on that coherent part.

Anyway. hn. Unless you've been blatantly ignoring my posts for the last couple of months I'm working on launching my own webcomic. You never realize how much plotting, planning and prep goes into the general amount of work to get one of these things off the ground. And, unlike "normal" comics (by "normal" I mean what most people think of when they hear the word comic: Marvel, DC, Image) doing it as a solo project can be daunting. You're doing the writing, the thumbnail sketches, the pencils the lettering, and the coloring. Not to mention setting up the website itself. I've got a personal goal of completing a certain amount of pages before the site launches, with a deadline of December 31rst. If I get ahead of myself, I'll launch sooner. You'll be first to know!

Speaking of launching, I'm incredibly close to launching my personal site fully, Caffeinated-Zombie.com. I know I've mentioned before that I'm working on the site, but earlier this week I managed to wrap everything up. The only thing I'm missing at this point is a photo for my about page and I'll be launching the site itself tomorrow. There might be some slight updates to the layout/color scheme of the blog to match, but it won't be too much of a deal. 

That's about all I've been up to this week. Hope to see you around. 

Incorporating 3D in a 2D Comic.

This last week started off lousy with a surprise discovery of a ground nest of wasps in our front yard and a flat tire almost a year after my last one. Apparently, wasps don't take very well to a lawn mower over their heads. Surprisingly, I got away with only a few stings. And thankfully, the rest of the week has progressed in a more positive manner.

Anywho, I wanted to talk about a trend that I've seen increasing in the last year or so, at least with digital artists: incorporating 3D into 2D pictures. A few years ago, Matt Kohr posted a series on how to use Google Sketchup to make the framework for a complex background. As a series based around concept art in general, this term is apparently nothing relatively new - fast and loose, sampling textures and shapes in a piece to get a concept down fully and quickly is a practice not unheard of. What surprised me, however, was after I decided to mix 3D backgrounds into my comic projects that this is a practice slowly spreading in comics too.

My first comic project that I discussed last week. 

Environments are harder when you're starting out. I'll admit, the most I'd ever done with digital backgrounds involved very little in the way of straight lines beforehand. So it seemed like when doing an urban-based story, throwing an environment together in Blender with the Freestyle plugin seemed like a great idea. I wasn't alone, however; people have been using Sketchup to start backgrounds and expand on them for at least a year at this point. 

The only downside of creating your own backgrounds in 3D is it does tend to take much longer than in 2D because you're rendering everything of importance. The one upside is that once you have the piece done, you can use it and re-use it again and again if more than one scene is based out of that area.

Once I get the main character's store and apartment done, I'm set for several chapters' worth of stuff. 

What are tips and tricks you use when dealing with environments? 

On Comics, Projects, And Lucky Number Three.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like my particular health situation is going to be clearing up any time incredibly soon. But! I said I'd try to keep up with this blog again and I'm going to do just that. This week's post is going to be dedicated to projects I've had to shelve over the last year.

When looking back, my current webcomic-to-be (located here) is not the first comic I wanted to portray. It's the third. The first (and ultimately, the second) was a project I titled Feathery Wings. In it we had the shapeshifter angel-type (Aske) and an Italian student studying abroad in the States and trying to keep her head above the water. I wanted to go for less of a Judeo-Christian route and explore other versions of the guardian spirit aspect, so I delved into the Norse concept of Vordr, tree-spirits that protected a family or place...and a less-than-happy one that was now treeless. However, as promising as this story seemed (and how borderline Supernatural some of my issues were) I shelved it because I couldn't find a real overarching story. But Aske wouldn't go - they had been one of my first solid designs outside of college, and they weren't going away. I wanted to experiment with a series that had a genderless character as the main character or a strong part of the main cast.

The concept of basing a series around mythology has always been a big draw to me, even moreso with reading American Gods around Christmas last year. So, the world slowly built up around the idea of Gods on the Earth, but something holding them back from tearing the world apart - a pact of non-interaction, of sorts. This left (most) of the deities free to choose lives past the humdrum of their mythos, and integrate with normal society. In comes Ashe - a bouncer at a Mead Hall that acts as a safe haven for otherworldly types. Again, this concept was shelved because of the sheer amount of backhistory I've had to research to date on the world. I felt that until I got a solid connection to the roots of the environment itself, putting it to page was going to be on hold.

So what now? I wanted to start smaller, build in the same universe but without as much interference from the deific standpoint. Humans, and their foibles, and the smaller scale.

That's where I'm at now, that's where Stacked Hand comes in. Aske will still come back at some point, but for now, well...once the comic is introduced, I'll speak a little more about the character creation.