Overdue sketches

I'm only 12 hours late with these! These represent the last of the May commission project.

This should be my May 31st commission.  I started with Bette at the beach, I should end with Bette at the beach! Here, she is joined by Mitzy Bard, as they sunbathe after a tough school year.  Hmm, maybe I should replace their cooler with the beach ball from the first pic. Continuity!

It's getting warm out there, so Gren wanted his hyena character dressed as Jack Frost and enjoying ice cream.

And I guess I can't have a sketch post without more Wen sports poses.  This one was him in motion actually throwing the football. Unfortunately, those poses aren't that elegant or readable.  Also, I'm pretty sure I'm in some government database now, as I got these poses by watching a video of an eight-year-old girl throwing a football around - pausing and rewinding, pausing and rewinding, pausing and rewinding...

Belly dancing, take two

Here's Ms. Bard doing her belly dancing thing, this time in different colors! I hope this one is better than the first attempt. The scanner seemed to hate the lighter, subtle purples of the drapery and veil, but that's to be expected.

My work schedule is going to be shuffled yet again. First of all, I have to work around construction that'll be happening in my apartment next week. I doubt the workers will be here for more than a couple days, but for the duration of the project my coloring computer will be under a tarp. That means getting my comic work done this weekend instead of next week.  Next, it's putting the finishing touches on the book, which means some back and forth about design, drawing/scanning a few more pieces of art and writing some copy. (I am SO slow at copy.)  Everything else - commissions and one special project - can be worked on in my studio, so that stuff will be the priority when the workers are here. Yeah, I've been moving pretty slow - but I try to keep moving.

What is color theory?

Here's the Ms. Bard watercolor as it stands now. I made the mistake of diving into the piece without planning. One part of my brain told me a gold bikini would look good. Another part of my brain wanted to try using only cool colors in the piece. The result is a mishmash that I'm not happy with. It's going in the con portfolio, but I'll probably redo it for the actual commission piece - this time with some color tests done first.

As a test, I desaturated the image and upped the contrast. When *that* looks better than what I made, it means I should start over. Darn it.

There's evil inside me!

(The blog-spamming continues. Be sure to look around for all the recent posts)



First off, here's the inks for one of my watercolor belly dancer commissions. Isn't it nice? I wanted to have it finished already, buuuut....

I'm sick. Booooo.

I've been fighting this for a few days now, and today I chose to give in and let it turn me into a whiny weaklng. No luck so far, but it *did* put me behind with my work schedule... so yay? This is one of those sicky things that won't make up its mind. I'm not sniffly or anything. I'm not in full-blown flu mode by any stretch. Instead, I've been steadily hovering on that border of "sleep if off" and "fight through it." I've got what feels like a slight fever, I'm continuously nauseous and I've got persistent head and body aches. It's enough to make me miserable, but not enough to justify a complete shutdown.

I'm gonna fight as much as I can today (the plan was to get three more blog-worthy things done) but I'm not sure how much progress will actually be made. Wish me luck!

Dance for me!

While I don't have much time for commissions these days, I do still have a few obligations in my inbox. I want to be the best, so let's work on some today!

This project has a few of my ladies cast as belly dancers. I seem to recall the three being Bette, Mitzy and Deirdre... maybe I should have checked my email to confirm them before sketching? Eh, doesn't matter. I can swap some heads around if needed.


To start things out, I did searches for good belly dancing poses. The dresses can be finalized afterward. In this sketch of Mitzy, the dress from the photo would be practically impossible to convert to watercolor - but the pose was nice! By the way, forgive any shading discrepancies. They were not the priority during the sketching and, frankly, I haven't thought of how most of my cast would look with skimpy clothes on.

There's some dissonance going on in my head with my cartoony characters matched up with human poses and dimensions. I tried to "correct" the anatomy from correct human to way-off Precocious, but I definitely need to figure out how I will melt these two elements better.


I didn't think the pose would work out with cartoon anatomy, but it kinda does. I'd like to keep working with this idea.


Deirdre seems like a weird match for this hobby, so I wanted to make her pose a bit more unsure and less dynamic. I found a dress that was more conservative for her.

I've got a lot of work on this project if I want it come out looking grand. Getting the anatomy to look right with my undisciplined method of drawing is hard, and getting the dresses and veils to flow properly is a task as well. I hope to find some time during the next few weeks to keep sketching for this project, as well as the others in the queue.

The joy of minor characters

Yesterday I got to do something I hadn't done in a long while: Introduce a new character to the Precociousverse! Meet Mitzy Bard, the Poppinstock Academy third grade teacher! We may never see her again in the strip, but she's canon now and that means SHE NEEDS A PROFILE!

This is where the fun begins. New characters are full of potential, and I can shape Ms. Bard into anything I want. Let's explore her life, shall we?

What we know of her in-strip is that she's been held captive by the older kids during the school revolution and that she freaked out when her class was invaded during the ice cream social. She didn't seem to be very pleased with Ms. Monster's behavior either.

It's time to start connecting the dots. I see Ms. Bard as younger than Ms. Monster, and probably more naive about the way the smart kid system works. To get where she is at that age, she had to be a real go-getter and little achiever in school - likely getting a nice, pricey education. She probably came from an upper middle class or rich family, which kept her fiscally sound (and a little spoiled) through school.

Personality-wise, I think we can say she's easily flustered when things go wrong. She's probably the type to try planning out every little thing, so she falls apart at the unexpected. Assuming she and Bette Monster aren't on the friendliest of terms, I can see resentment at Bette's wily and unconventional teaching ways - labeling them as lazy and mean. Mitzy probably sees herself as the good and NORMAL person, bristling that the school would hire smartasses like Bette and eccentrics like Dr. Oven. They aren't good role models! Mitzy plays the by the rules, always doing what she feels is the right thing. And I'm not saying Mitzy is delusional about this stuff. She may actually BE a good person in this comic full of insane jerks! She's the type to get victimized - the question is how much of it is exploiting her good nature and how much is it her bringing it upon herself?

Although not mentioned in the strip, my WORD OF GOD statement regarding her name establishes her as single, which must bug her as it means her fantasies of finding a husband at college didn't pan out. She thinks she's been doing everything right, but her boyfriends keep turning out to be lying jerks! Oh well, at least she's not as old as that spinster Bette. Mitzy is at least TRYING!

How was that? Keep in mind that the personality is all speculation for now. I can change her into a biker chick by the time she appears in her next strip, if she ever does appear again. (I have no plans to bring her back any time soon.) It's merely fun to do these thought exercises.

I have to wonder if the readers have their own impressions of Ms. Bard.