New Button ideas + Kickstarter info

Here are some button ideas that should eventually populate the Cupcakes of Bliss gift box, available through the Book 2 preorder on Kickstarter. I can still play around with ideas, but the current plan is three regular buttons and one papercraft button (probably of Tiffany). By the way, the red outlines and green circle on Quincy are guidelines on the template and won't be on the actual buttons.

And here's a reminder: While some items will be available in the upcoming Precocious store after the preorder ends, others will not. The Cupcakes of Bliss will be very limited once the campaign ends. (Well, they will become convention-only Precocious swag grab bags of random goodies, as opposed to gift boxes that always contain a doll and the button set.) Dolls, the new buttons and the "Two Sides of the Same Coin" charms will be scarce once the Kickstarter ends. Once they sell out, they might not return to the store for a long time. I will have a photo of Autumn and Jacob dolls soon! The prototypes are being worked on! By the way, all Cupcakes of Bliss will ship late August, as that's when I'm meeting with Duae Cat designs to pick up the dolls.

If you are part of the Kickstarter already and want to upgrade, you can do it via add-on. This means you add the total for the item to your pledge (plus shipping, if your're international), then let me know about the add-on when I send out backer surveys once the campaign ends. (You should always review the tiers first, to see if the option you want is available. You can also message me to asking about creating new tiers, or confirming the add-on is ok.)

Add-on options are:
$22 - One extra book. (International orders add $10 for shipping costs)
$30 - Cupcake of Bliss gift box. (International customers add $10 for shipping costs)
$16 - Complete the 'Two Sides' charm set. (Option only for those with an artist edition. International orders add $5 for shipping costs)
$5 - A sketched Precocious cast postcard. (All orders over $80 will get one for free. No extra international shipping charge.)
(If I told you a different international shipping cost add-on earlier, you don't have to update your cost. That was my bad math and I'll take the hit for it.)

If you are not part of the Kickstarter campaign for whatever reason, you need to email me with your requests so I can factor them in to my orders. Even if you've already informed me, a reminder at the end of the campaign will be handy.

Some card sketches

From what I'm hearing from my doc, I'll have to do more adapting to being broken than waiting until I'm fixed, so I've been trying something inspired by my friend, Becca: Three daily goals. The farther I fall behind, the more frustrated I can get - so this helps break it down.  It's better to make a dent in the work than flip out and stress over how much I have to do, and what order I should do it in. It won't allow me to get far ahead, but I hope I can keep pace and get a few extra things done.

My goals are simple and sometimes vague. (Even then, I don't always get them done, but I'm not letting that get me down.) Yesterday it was 1)Ink two comics, 2)Color and upload two comics, 3)Begin work on two more comics.  Today it was 1)Finish last night's two comics, 2)Sketch out some owed commission work and 3)household chores.  I got 1 done, didn't really do enough to check off 3 (but I'm checking it off anyway) and 2... here you go!

Normally this is something that can be done during a stream, but I've also sketched and inked the art cards as prep work when needed.  As any streaming I make must be limited now - The more I talk, the worse I feel - reducing streamed work to coloring only will be beneficial. (It's not the full experience, but it's better than NO experience, right?)

Usually I'd go straight to inking, but I'm taking a break - and it allows me to show off the idea of the spray paint on the wall behind Roddy.  I'm not sure if it's over the top or not.  It wouldn't be included in the inks anyway, since it's part of the coloring stage, but whatevs.  For Dionne's card, the only change is me including her feet and the platform she's standing on. Well, I played with some costume stuff too, but it'll get refined more in inking no matter what.

Tomorrow's goals, by the way:

1) Brush up on reading Ginpu and sketch out my guest comic. (She's sicker than me, so she wins.)

2)Turning the outline for next week's Precocious into solid scripts

3)Lining pages and starting the thumbnails. (Takes longer than you'd think.)

Yesterday I went beyond my goals. Today I came up short. Tomorrow, I'll probably come up short, but it's a hefty list. I'm hopeful, though.

I got some special fan art!

Every time someone makes fan art for me, it's awesome - but when another busy comic creator takes the time to draw something for me, it's really special.

Ok, so I kinda asked for this one. Mark, the creator of Autumn Lake, wanted to draw something and asked for ideas. I told him to draw Precocious fan art. Instead of e-slapping my arrogant face, he did! Check it out!

This makes me happy, as Autumn Lake is one of my favorite webcomics. There's something very classic about the feel and execution of Autumn Lake, and it's that sincerity that is so appealing. Mark and I share many influences, so of course it pleases me to see another out there aiming more for timeless than trending topic. It's special, and it really needs to have more eyes viewing it. For those scared of the archive size, I suggest starting with the epic Lonely Robot saga.

Deleted Scene Time!

Here's a quick sketch of a comic that got cut for time. I thought this script was the weakest of the eight I wrote for the week, so it went away. In hindsight, I wonder if using this comic and combining #968 and #969 (making this comic the new 969) would have been better for pacing. Oh well, too late! (click the image for a larger version.)

Another day, another sketchbook page

I think the title says it all. Nothing snazzy to show from today, but that's not a bad thing. I need to do more of this daily sketching thing - this is sketch blog after all - but all that productivity stuff can get in the way! Eh, look at it this way: No matter what, I'm doing something awesome! THESE SKETCHES ARE AWESOME!

Playoff bound

So I've been rambling to a friend about football! football! football! I had had a lousy ride home - stuck for an hour with the interstate shut down! - and I needed some rambling time to burn off steam, ok? As I explained the playoffs and added my opinions - my many opinions - my eye turned to the pile of "I should stop ignoring these" papers on my desk. At the top, were my old football sketches from October 2008. They had hung over my scanner since then. I had recently taken them down, as the character designs had evolved quite a bit - and I kept knocking them out of place when scanning.

It was time to do some updating. Ahh, the memories! At the time of drawing, the Redskins were 6-2 and cruising... on their way to horrible failure! The Patriots were in command of their division and knew they were golden... until they slacked too much and missed the playoffs on a tiebreak. The other six teams I support were all miserable failures... until the Chargers somehow pulled a miracle to win the division. (The rest remained sucky.) What would be the update?

This season, my teams fared a bit better. Roddy's Chargers, Dionne's Patriots and Suzette's Packers all made the postseason. Time for an update in drawings! Well, at least in simple sketchy form. I like seeing some smiling faces on my football fans, dangit! Now if only the other five teams can pull themselves out of their misery...

I may want to go back and redo them all, for the new year! I still have that sketchbook, so I can make them the correct size. Roddy at least needs to be redone, as his character design changed muchly since he was first drawn.

In the end, this is really not interesting at all - but it did give me something to draw on a day when I'd have been happy to nap it away!

Closing out the storyline

Yes, folks, the current Precocious storyline is coming to an end! Can you believe this thing has been going on longer than seven weeks? Wow. It's going to come out *just* short of Gender Wars as the longest Precocious storyline, but I don't feel like stretching it out any longer to grab that title. I love you, peanut butter politics, but I won't drag this out.

Since I want to finish this up on Sunday - because the next storyline needs a Monday start - that means cutting a little bit of excess from the script. One deleted strip was converted into this weeks vote incentive. (Once you read it, you can see it was cut for a reaso - but, hey, it's still a bonus strip!) This image you see here was a punchline in search of a set-up. I never found a set-up that worked, so to the cutting room floor you go! You can see what replaced this strip in tomorrow's Precocious update.

No takebacks! (Or are there?)

It's time for more experiments with a pen! Once again I'm sketching without a net! If I make a mistake, it's there. Nothing can erase ink! Ink owns all!

Ok, fine, I can still photoshop out some screwups - namely the right Max and Roddy, which were the first two sketches done, of course. It takes time to warm up! That's how it works for all of them. On the right is my first pen attempt, with the follow-up on the left. (It's a left-handed thing.) As you can see, just a bit of practice and I did get better. Go me!

I like these sketches because it's always fun to get into the Precocious supporting cast. Scripting is underway for the next big storyline, and these things give everyone a time to shine. (Bonus: I also FINALLY have next week's strips scripted. I cut that awful close.) Now I'm ready to start churning away at the strips, ideally building up a buffer - but there's a big difference between having the next 14 strips SCRIPTED and having them DONE. Motivation, I chose you!

Please?

Uplifting

I love it when people do things for me - especially since I rarely do things for other people! It means they care enough to overlook my jerkass nature!

Today was a Metric day. When I'm down, I listen to Metric's "Fantasies" and rock the frak out. Track 1: "Help, I'm Alive!" Track 3 includes the line: "I'm not suicidal, I just can't get out of bed!" And, despite the seemingly dark stuff, it's all in electro-pop, inspirational rockitude. It really gets me pumped up. "Every living thing/pushed into the ring/Fight it out to wow the crowd/Guess you thought/You couldn't just watch/No one's getting out/without stadium love." Meaning: Suck it up and fight on through!

So a sluggish day began looking up. My trainwreck interview with WCRI was posted and Tom of Alone in a Crowd drew me some fan art! That gets the spirit going.

Now, I leave you to go work on the strip. Maybe. (I'm still looking at that magnetic bed...)

I am not a techie

On paper, I'm a genius. I'm, like, super smart. REALLY! That being said, I'm a complete idiot when it comes to techie things. It doesn't interest me either, so that means I'll probably never learn. I can try and do the research when I am forced to look up techie stuff, but research doesn't always replace know-how.

You've seen my fail when it came to the DVD player. Witness the ultra-fail of my new monitor! Do I actually need a second monitor? Not really. I wanted it so I could split my photoshopping and webdesign duties between settings - or have a second screen for movie watching while I work. When I found a wonderfully-priced monitor on Costco.com, I decided to give dual monitors a shot!

But problems exist. My laptop doesn't have a HDMI port, which means I have to go VGA. That's not a problem with me. I can take some fuzzy letters. It's really dumb of this model to not have HDMI, but that's my ignorance at work. When I ordered it, I didn't even know what HDMI was. (As I said: Not a techie.)

The other problem is *how* to hook up dual monitors. I did some research and I read that a splitter was needed. I looked 'em up, found a cheap one and bought it. I did not think my cunning plan through. What does a splitter do? It does not split one VGA port into two. It splits one VGA *signal* into two. I've mirrored my display! All techies can laugh now, because this should have been obvious. I was misled by the internet, OK?

Now I'm at a loss. Can this bugger even *do* multiple monitors? The other port I have on this laptop is svideo, so maybe I can use that. (Y'know, if I *had* a svideo cable...) I fear I am royally boned due to my technical ignorance. (Reading through some Dell forums, some got the svideo thing to work, others claim it's impossible. I'm more confused than ever.)

Just to make this a total disaster, the new monitor has a HORRIBLE flicker. It wouldn't have been the end of the world if I couldn't have two monitors - There's always a use for an extra HDTV - but if I can't use this monitor as my main monitor, what good is it? Research online says, "oh, just set it to 75hz!" Um, the only option is 60. What can I do?

I fear it's about time to see how good Costco is about handling returns....

Supporting cast parade!

Do you know how hard it is to draw a bunch of characters together? (Wait until you see the nightmare that I faced for Sunday's strip.) Oh, I wish I was a simple, talking head comic some days...

Shiny happy people holding hands

Why do I set myself up for this? This Sunday strip is expanding rapidly, now featuring a giant shot of the class - in what should be a full class shot. Oh, SCREW THAT! I have neither the patience nor the skill to draw 15 desks and 13 kids spread among the desks with a few in the center forming a discussion group. WHY DO I SCRIPT THESE THINGS?

So here is my first attempt at a compromise. Forget the damn desks - they pushed them all back so EVERYONE can join in the discussion group. And they sparkle, because in comic visual language, that means EVIL CUTE! (Because Bud and Kaitlyn holding hands isn't enough of a sign that evil reigns.)

Life on the edge

It's seems all I can draw today are the outsiders of the comic. On the plus side, they're nice sketches. On the minus side, I CAN'T DO ANYTHING PRODUCTIVE!

Today has been miserable. I woke up in pain, which is likely the result of stress finally taking its toll on my jaw. If that's it, then maybe some relaxation will make it go away. If it's something more dentally malicious, I'm in real trouble. I'm sorta on the Winchester dental blacklist right now. Right now I'm living off an advil/excedrin combo, and that's only enough to keep me from screaming. Guess that's a plus. I *really* hope this goes away tomorrow.

This is not a good time for a breakdown. Tonight the last of the bake sale story runs, and tomorrow gag-a-day May kicks off. I'll be dancing on the edge this month, and that makes me very uncomfortable. I'm used to having a few weeks of strips in my buffer, and I'm starting to burn off the last of what I have. Here's to hoping life improves in the next few weeks, because I'm creating strips at a far slower pace than a daily strip requires.

25 Essential Expressions

This challenge has apparently been going around the webcomic circle, and so I join in the fun. That was WAY harder than expected, and I did rather poorly. I am a cold, emotionless being. Well, I do rage fairly well, with confidence!

(click the image for the full-size gore.)

Edit: Anyone wanting to try this out, here's the template.

Spoiler alert!

Realizing that I have precious few color strips of many Precocious characters, I set about rectifying that. There's a massive color story coming (the ever-hyped parents' intro) which should cover some good stuff. But what about the supporting kids? They won't be appearing! Strip #7 is the only color version I have of them outside of supervillain get-ups. Well then... let's play some more!

This banner ad features a detail from next Sunday's strip. Those in the know might even be able to figure out the punchline. Oh well, it took a long time to make and it's "bonus" - that's fair game for blogging! Not sure I'm fully sold on the ad yet, but it's good enough for now.

Edit: Darn differently-calibrated monitors! Kaitlyn is the best-looking one on the HDTV, but she looks like a washed out Martian on the old school screen. I have no idea what you people are seeing. Please let it be the good version!

As the Webcomic Turns...

As I am hopelessly obsessive about things, I've done a *lot* of reading and analysis on webcomics. The goal was to expedite my improvement and skip over some of the common shortfalls. Good idea, in theory. In practice, I've learned there's no teacher like experience. I think back to my time at the garden center. By the end of my run I knew every plant there and how they should be kept. I could dispense advice to grateful customers. When I got home, I found I still couldn't garden to save my life. Basically, I'm an example of a fool I've been mocking since high school. Intelligence and maturity are not related since high school, yet I still set out thinking, "I could be the exception!" Yeah, look at my early strips. I might understand the concepts involved, but I had zero skill in using them. (Still don't really, but I am getting better.)

One thing I really wanted to do was sort out my character proportions. This was where I was the most inconsistent, and I wasn't even sure what I liked best. I went in trying to anticipate how my style would evolve. The lines would get cleaner and more precise. Characters would probably get more steamlined. Proportions would settle themselves. Oh then, so I tried to push myself in that direction. I actively shrunk my characters to Peanuts-level proportions. They were cute! Then I tried to draw them sitting in chairs - or worse, hugging. Uh oh. Have I shrunk my characters too much? Is it time for the yo-yo to go the other way? With many upcoming strips featuring the parents, the proportion contrast needs to be settled before it gets silly!

Well, one lesson is learned. I'm just going to run with it. I'm going to try and draw what's natural and not freak out too much. Look at the Dionnes above. One I just drew while sketching; the other I *tried* to draw. I think you can figure out which is which, and which looks better.

The Roddy and Bud also representing one I tried to draw and one I just drew. In this case, Bud was a random sketch. Roddy was drawn as a response the scrunched Dionne. He's supposed to be a comfortably-sized sketch, representing a gentle heightening so I could lengthen the arms again. (I really hate drawing arms that reach below the knees, and that is chimpily wrong!)

I do believe if I just let go, my pencil will be kind to me. (Famous last words?) Looking back through the blog archives, I see pics where I note that I am trying the big head thing. They look like... the Roddy sketch! Clearly, I am moving in the right direction, but I might be pushing too hard.

If I let it go, I think most will come out around the Bud proportion, which is good enough. He does tend to have a larger head, mostly due to the lack of hair or ears to enhance his height and cranial bulk. Something has to be done to balance out that big-eared, point-haired Autumn!

Also, I'm glad I didn't post this entry last night. Today was supposed to be a work day on the comic, but it instead turned into a comic work day. Instead of making strips, I was working on the website. Lots of stuff got done. The linking page was altered, the cast page was completely redone and I bit the bullet and signed up with Project Wonderful for advertising. I've given myself $10 to play with as I place buttons on lots of minor comics with hope in my heart. A few hours in... I have one hit. And I think it was me. Oh well, it's progress! In time I'll ad my own buttons and the cycle will continue.

Space Invaders

So I'm back in Winchester, and already I've been charmed by its warm embrace.

As you might know, I have a real scumbag of a brother. He's stupid, talentless and a world-class leech. I won't go into listing everything wrong about him, as that would take many years, but I will point out that his current business plan is to form a company - since companies make money! What will this company do? Make money. Anything else? No.

See, he'll be my "manager" in regards to my art. I do the work. I prepare the material. I apply to galleries. I sell the art. He takes the money. HOW COULD THIS PLAN FAIL? How could I say no to that? My brother's current business plan is to steal from our mother as hard as he can and live the good life until she gets the credit card bill. His long-term goal is to steal from ME as hard as he can and live the good life until I get the credit card bill. Progress.

There is one clear rule while I am gone: DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE DO THAT! My room is my fortress of solitude. It is my studio. It is where I do everything, and violating this space is extremely prohibited. Oh, and it's not just a territorial thing. My brother simply cannot be trusted. He sucks at life.

If he was any other species, he'd have been kicked from the nest or killed by a predator a long time ago. As he his human, he gets second chances and coddling on a daily basis, which has only taught him that he will ALWAYS be bailed out no matter what sort of trouble he gets into. The result is that he never learned simple decency. He does not know how to close doors. He does not know how to properly store perishable food. He does not understand that taking things that are not his is wrong. (Nor does he understand that buying things with others people money does not make those things his.) He does not know how to properly clean anything, nor does he have a sense of what needs to be cleaned and when. He is covered in a layer a filth. He has no respect for other people. He believes the entire world belongs to him, so he fears nothing while taking everything.

So, yeah, I get home and he runs out to greet me like a dog. I give him a package containing toothpaste, tell him the package contains toothpaste and watch him beam like a child as he tears it open. "Hey, this is toothpaste!" He carries my clothes downstairs and runs of thinking he's done the world a favor. I assume he ran off because I was about to find out HE VIOLATED EVERYTHING. If I expressly forbid it, he did it. A lot. And with gusto. Don't sleep in my bed? Asshole not only slept in it, but he set up a buffet in it! His clothing was scattered around my bed. Food and drink was everywhere. Hell, just to ensure the violation cut deep, he left his spank magazine in play sight. Oh, and for those who know my brother well enough to know, you assumed correctly: He left the porn in the player as always. I broke it and stuck it upstairs, next to the phone charger I found sitting in peanut butter.

Alright, that's enough of my complaining. I'm home, I'm furious and I need to purge. I wish people as smart as livestock could be classified as livestock. It's to cruel to this family and the world to let that scumbag life. Alas, the law says it's a no-no, so we just to wait until he dies of his own stupidity. Ugh.

One positive thing is this is the perfect segue into the next batch of Precocious strips! As seen in the sketch, Roddy will be invading our kids' fortress of solitude and violating all kinds of space! Roddy is hardly the irritant that my brother is, nor are his violations egregious, inhuman and slimy. Still, a segue is a segue...

That teenage feeling

You know those sketches withheld two days ago? The ones I thought had the potential to destroy ones faith in a just and loving universe? Well, I redrew them... and I'm still rather uncomfortable with the concept. BUT, this is one of those cliches. If you have a comic with kids, you have to draw them all grown up. So, I present to you... PROM-AGED GENIUSES!

This is all TOTALLY non-canon, of course...



So here we have our heroes... fairly unravaged by age. It's not like I could augment Autumn much, since the joke is that she'll grow up to look EXACTLY like her mother. Autumn's distinguishing characteristic in her family is her strong "bends like copper wire" hair. At 18, she likely wants to restrain that a bit - resulting in a bulky Tiffany-esque braid.

Bud's sketch here isn't as good as the first one I did. But that one wasn't as large, so I had to go with this. The premise here is that, although he's identified as the independent character formed by an absence of parental supervision, he cannot escape genetics. He's hit a growth spurt, making him the tallest of the six pictured here, and he might just end up closer to his daddy's size than anyone could expect. (At this point, my 5'11" self would like to give those doctors, who said I'd never top 5'7" because I was too tiny as a kid, a hearty IN YOUR FACE!) The earlier aged Bud sketch gave him a more teen-friendly hairstyle and it had more of the "maturing male cat" feel to it. (In a non-creepy fashion.) It was already obvious Bud's hair and ears come from his mommy, but the secret specter that haunts him now is her love of video games! Bud fought against it all his life, but that's her old DS he's playing! Mwa ha ha!



Now things get slightly odd. Roddy's no surprise, since he appears to have just grown in size and not matured in personal style at all. How, uh, creative of me. No, his distinguishing look here is his football uniform and clipboard in hand. Anyone who knows the game knows what that means: Backup quarterback! On a likely-weak high school team! Oh, destiny!

Jacob. Oh my. The poor child has finally snapped and gone... emo? There was a time when "I live in a spiritual vacuum" was a punchline and not a tedious and oft-repeated conversation filler/killer. His outfit is meant to look like a hybrid between militant religious garb... and a fast food restaurant uniform. Is there no better symbol for high school "philosophers"?



And here I am both amused and disturbed. I enjoy the neckline reversal on display here. Dionne now wears the bell collar and Suzette sports the heart on her... uh... suddenly ample chest. (You are allowed to shudder here.) Yes, the joke here is that Suzette grew up to be tall, shapely and sexy... SO FUCK FEMINISM! Everyone pays attention to her now! The joke is funny enough to me that I went ahead and drew cleavage on a character normally drawn as a 9-year-old. Oh yeah, she's only 17 here; so if you like the sketch for any reason other than humor, that's one more personal problem you can add to the list.

On the other side, Dionne hasn't taken up the militant mantle. I think she wears the bell just to point out the Suzettian Hypocrisy. Otherwise, I gotta admit the 18-year-old Dionne turned out to be extremely adorable. This is the sketch that made me toss aside a loss of youthful magic and go ahead with the sharing.

So where are Tiffany and Max? For Max, I ran out of sketchbook space. (Unfortunately, drawing older Suzette took multiple tries.) Also, Max isn't a character likely to change over time. He'd still be bigger than the rest, just with more adult proportions. Ooh! For Tiffany, I know her future fate in this decidedly non-canon world... and I'm not telling! It's something so funny that I won't let myself treat this post as a purge... instead there's a VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE this could just be a staging area. (If my strip has a long run, I've debated having "non-canon weeks" when I could toss out all my normal discretion and brutally drop the fourth wall on top of my unsuspecting cast.)

Accepting the inevitable

I'm not sure why, but my sketching of late has been along the lines of, "now that I have these characters, how many ensemble standards can I cover?" If your project has enough characters, how can you NOT force a Last Supper image upon a fully-suspecting populace?

I believe next on the list is.... Drawing your furry characters as humans! This is not much of a creative challenge for me, as the four main cast members WERE humans when 10-year-old me first drew them and the current versions are fairly faithful adaptations. Really, the only reason I haven't gone down this road yet is that I still hold out hope of somehow finding my sketchbooks from that time period. Farthest back I've found to this point was 8th grade, which was when I abandoned my children in favor of cartoons mocking my classmates and teachers. It's also somewhat painful to draw my characters at their most primitive of incarnations. Oh well, if I don't get any REAL ideas in the immediate future, I'll try that.

Pulling back a bit, my conclusions is that my current art mood is reflecting my internet situation. I can't keep a connection for more than a few minutes at a time, which means I can do my daily updates... and nothing else. You can't browse news or read comics with constant interruptions! Hell, even though blogging in theory just requires me to get to the posting screen and hit the "post" button when the connection returns, sometimes (ALL OF YESTERDAY) the connection gets so screwy the only solution is restarting the computer... and losing the unsaved blog post. The post you see for yesterday is the 4th or 5th attempt. Earlier drafts included the themes of THIS post. (Guess which common character treatment I decided wasn't worth sharing!)

I'm hoping for some stability soon. I *should* be painting. I *should* be working on the NINE WEEKS of Precocious comics I have scripted. Instead, I am bouncing around without focus. When then happens, uninspired rips on The Last Supper happen. No one wins.

Like the Bush administration and natural resources

It took quite a while to make this sketch. Why? I kept shading to make Roddy's fur appropriately dark. See, the all-black Roddy was fun in pencil because I could make him gray and still have the freedom to give him the expressions he deserves. Everyone knew he was meant to be black, so everybody wins! Now, he's been anti-Jolsoned. Part of him is white! If I make his remaining black parts gray, it just looks like gray. He looks like a feline Max, which is inappropriate, creepy and somewhat unintentionally hilarious if you want to make a "difference between dogs and cats" joke.

So now I have blackify Roddy's blackness. And if I go too far in one place, that means I have to darken the rest to make it look right. As I kept going, the thoughts begin to nip at me... I'm wasting my pencil lead! If I run out, I have to buy more! Poor Roddy, of course he's the one I'm drawing when I contemplate if it's worth finishing the drawing just in case I'll face a minor inconvinience like procuring more easily-obtainable lead.

Now, pencil lead is one thing I happen to have a lot of at this point. Thanks to my comic push, I doing far more work than sketching, so those supplies are holding up well. It's every *other* art suply that is freaking me out. Who knew that being an active artist meant buring through supplies so fast? In the past few weeks, I've had to restock on comic templates, India ink, the "no-copy" blue pencil lead and the very precious mechanical pencil erases. There was a point where I thought what I had was an inexhaustable supply. I bought enough for FOUR MONTHS! Well, my intro story was two months of work, the comic has been up almost a month and I am a month ahead in strips. Lookee there!

Unlike some people (such as the guy upstairs who got kicked out of a bar last night because he was too wasted and caused a disturbance - and spent today on the phone happily declaring that everyone he offended should just get over it) I hate spending more money that I'm taking in. This is a problem when one is without a (paying) job. I worked my butt off enough previously to build up some "winter fat" savings I could live off while I was doing my artist thing... but I've been doing that longer than anticipated. I still have plenty of savings to make the purchases I need - which is good, since I continue to make those purchases - but nowadays each purchase comes with feelings of guilt.

Let's not forget the majority of my art supplies were taken from my dead dad's stash. I've had to restock, of course, but the supplies I inherited *did* help me choose my direction as an artist. I have no desire to work with high-end art supplies. For me, the investment does not justify the result unless I know I'll be selling the work. I make due cobbling the together the few supplies I have. If I know my supplies are dwindling, I tend to hold back too much - which means I'm handicapping myself. If left to my own devices, I will do something like switch my last remaining eraser between each pencil I'm using until some merciful soul takes me out to buy more. (Thanks, Andrew!) When I do finally restock, I buy in bulk. Not only does it often bring a discount, but it allows me to toss aside my worry.

The current comic successes are partially due to me feeling free enough to experiment again. There were times when I impulsively grabbed a template and just started drawing. Shockingly enough, those experiments all ended up becoming actual strips, so I get double pride from that! Still, if they had failed, it was OK to put them aside and move on. Feeling secure in resources means such things are learning experiences, as opposed to costly mistakes. It would likely benefit me if I put more of an effort into consuming supplies with reckless abandon (hence the Bush administration joke in the title) because I will learn and grow (here's where the Bush analogy breaks down, as they never learn) - but I'm still cognizant of a future when supplies will dwindle once more, so I guess I'm still a bit too *cough* conservative here.