I demand a lot from my readers

Look! It's the lost Yvette watercolor! The good lad who received her was kind enough to take the photo I forgot to take and send it to me... and it only cost him the price of a NEW CAMERA! (I appreciate the dedication, but that money could have been spent on ME instead!)

Anyway, if this is a trend, the next person I send a watercolor to has to buy one of those extremely sensitive $2000 large-format scanners to capture the essence of the piece. And then they should send me that scanner, because daddy wants.

You want these!

Behold: Two finished watercolor commissions for the commissionathon! Don't you want one of your own? You totally do. And I want you to want one too!

Because I really need your money.

Now the hard part!

Here are two more inks that need some watercoloring! That brings the total to three, and that means it's time to break out the paints. These are going to be tough experiments, but it'll be fun to see how they come out!

Flower Power!

A new commission appears! This request is for Suzette going full flower child, as hinted at with her makeover in the current arc. I was tempted to sit her down and make her strum a guitar, but doing so would cover up the tie-dye shirt, and I really want a chance to watercolor that thing!
And I haven't forgotten the other commission! Here's the final inked version. Watercoloring begins... well, I dunno when. I may do it tonight. I may do it Thursday. Wednesday is a comic work day, so probably not then.

Either way, THESE TWO COMMISSIONS DESPERATELY NEED BUDDIES! Guys, I am never going to be able to pay my bills unless you start demanding watercolors!

Let's get to work!

I gotta admit, I'm a bit surprised at how big a dud this commissionathon has been so far. I knew it would be a tough sell for my friends, even though they are INCREDIBLE artists - but I kinda figured I'd get more than ONE request on the first day. Oh well! That means it's time to spoil my one patron rotten! I'm sure tomorrow will be better.



This request was to create a composition of a Precocious girl as an evil girl scout. I've narrowed the candidates down to Suzette and Tiffany, and you can see my Suzette sketches here. (I'll work on Tiffany and make a separate post for those sketches in an hour or two.) The first sketch I did was of Suzette earning her "knot tying" badge, via noose. Maybe that's too dark? The next idea was a protest, with her burning the (vastly overrated) girl scout cookies. I couldn't figure out how to make it a horizontal composition, due to my inability to properly draw girls in skirts sitting down, so I moved on. The last two ideas kept the cookies, but turned Suzette into a threatening seller.

So that's sketches for evil scout #1. Stay tuned for evil scout #2!

Grrl Power

Ta-dah! I finished something! (Pending approval, of course.) It only took a MONTH longer than normal. Obviously, this was due to the move/grad school panic - and commission man knew it would be delayed going in - but I still feel bad it took this long.

Now I move on to the long-term Dionne/Autumn commission. I'd like to get it done before I move, so that gives me a week to finish it. NO MORE EXCUSES, CHRISPY!

On west coast time, I'm good!

Bad: Missed the midnight deadline. Good: Because I was working a commission! This bugger is taking far longer than expected. Colored pencil takes time. Having to use several layers of colored pencil for each section increases the time fivefold! This is why shading is evil! I'm never doing it again! Ok, so it's not just shading. I also don't have a good variety of brown pencils, so Suzette requires a lot of blending. (I went out and bought a ton of gray pencils though, so any Yvette/Max commissions are covered now!) Hey, she did come out looking nice, though! I wish I had time to finish up the background and lettering areas, but bedtime comes too soon.

No promises on finishing this tomorrow! While it will be nice to get one commission out of the way - if only so I can officially pack my art supplies away - I have plans. It all depends on if I can get a good night's sleep tonight. Those things are hard to come by!

The new equality

Matthew Dawson, my former colorist, offered to fix up my poster with his immense coloring/composition talents. Looks better, doesn't it?

Of course, now I have a predicament. How can I offer this image as a donation incentive now if someone else worked on it? I'll have to buy him out!

Posterized

Here is a digital mock-up of the Suzette commission. Soon to be available in poster format? I'm rather pleased with how this came out. I did my best to imitate the original Rosie the Riveter design.

If I want to make mini-prints of this, I'll have to play with the format a bit, but there's potential there. Don't know *when* the playtime will come, but at least I have all I need there in a Photoshop file!

Power to the progress!

See! I haven't forgotten my commissions! I have just become VERY VERY SLOW at getting them done. Blame the stress of a life in transition. This is the month I need to pull myself up from lazyland and become the Savannah production dynamo! For some reason, getting back into my old rhythm has taken far longer than expected, but it'll happen. I've got 30 days to pull it together and knock everything out. THIS CAN BE DONE!

So here we have the ink version of Suzette as Rosie the Riveter, ready to receive her coloring. If approved, the next step is to figure out what nifty saying will accompany her and how it will fit into the composition. Any ideas?

WE CAN DO IT!

Calamity struck today as my printer went whacko and prevented me from successfully printing out the Max commission for finishing, so I had to move on. Another commission was suggested with Suzette as Rosie the Riveter, and I am all for that! It was fun, if difficult, to draw!

And then I forgot to post it for two hours, missing my midnight deadline. DAMMIT! I can't do it after all.

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!

Inner peace. Outer violence.

Today's sketch idea is courtesy of my brother, who suggested I draw a martial arts scene with Jacob bowing in respect and someone (had to be Suzette) giving him a boot to the head. The final result is... close!

I could use some inner peace right now. I'm slacking hard on inking next week's comics. It'll get done, just not as fast as I'd like. Tonight the goal is to get five pages inked, resulting in three strips total. Tomorrow I color the massive and complex Sunday and then it's smooth sailing for a while. Of course, as soon as one thinks that... BOOT TO THE HEAD!

I have friends today!

I did a few sketches, but my day is devoted to socializing. This is a rare event, so let me have it!

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?

What might have been

Here's a sketch of the strip that *almost* ran today. You can decide which one is better. Click the image to see the comic in full-sized goodness.

Take me out to the ball game

I'm going to see the Washington Nationals play tomorrow, so baseball is on my mind! (In as much as what the Nationals play is baseball.) Ok, ok, the Nats have a winning streak going. (Which is in danger as I type.) Either way, I am going to jinx the heck out of SOMEONE tonight. (I'm sorta rooting for the Nat's opponents, the Blue Jays, because Blue Jays are cool and Canada is cool in other ways.)

In Precocious baseball, it seems natural to have Suzette was the catcher. Problem with sketching her as a catcher - How does one draw a catcher's mask on a muzzle like that... without, er, muzzling her too much. I finally had to to Schroeder from Peanuts to get a catcher's mask I liked for her. What other strip does baseball better?

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...

It's Tuesday! RIOT!

(No, you are not expected to get the joke in the headline. Only one person will.)

Today is a strangely social day. After two weeks of complete isolation, I've managed to socialize with two my three remaining friends (sorry, Dana! I still love you and miss you!) I needed the unwind/work time, but it's nice to be social again - especially since I'm heading back to DC later this week.

What I'm saying here is this: I'm busy! You will take whatever I sketched today - even though it has no theme - and LIKE IT!

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.)