Nerd Business / Project Diary 8/13/11— Forcing myself to do monthly progress updates for Issue Four of my dumb-ass webcomics, as a way of keeping moving forward & staying motivated. I’m locking myself up to make some headway on that (uh, and a motion for the day job) this weekend…
Well, started to put together a new website, the “still under construction” version of which is over here. That was a huge pain in the ass since I had to learn more about wordpress & comicpress (both of which were way harder to configure than makes any conceivable sense) & web-hosting than I ever wanted to. Everyone apparently uses Go Daddy for their domain names so I had to use that which… made me a little uncomfortable since their television Superbowl ads are always some sad girl inserting a flesh-colored dildo into herself for 30 seconds, and then at the end, she mutters “websites for the internet” or something… and… why is that the ad???
Besides that, I’m 99.9% done with my clip-art shots so I’m starting on the “higher budget” panels— the story-specific panels I can’t repeat. I got a sketchbook for that so I can draw on paper again. A lot of time playing around in Photoshop— the Lazy Comic Artist filters you see people using— the image above is Sketchup, with Equalize, Poster Edges and Threshold at work. (If I were a guy who wanted to write comics and had no ability to draw them, instead of running around begging crazy artists, I’d go buy a camera and learn me some photoshop filters, try to reverse engineer the photo-ref-y artists— sure, if you like comics, the results aren’t great… but neither is waiting with your fingers crossed for some artist to do you a favor…)
Too much time spent this month failing to draw dogs, though. I wrote something with a dog in it, thinking “Oh, that won’t be a big deal— there’s a million drawings of dogs in the world that I can swipe”… even swiping my little heart out, even tracing, I can not draw a dog to save my fucking life. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with that…
In the “Nerd Business” category, I contributed a list of 10 comics to the Hooded Utilitarian’s Top 10 List of Greatest Comics that everyone disagrees with (myself included!!). I went with 10 essential reading / canon type books, books I perceived to be of “significance,” or “best in class” type books, instead of personal favorites. I thought that was the point. Looking at it, my list does seem conservative but… I haven’t seen too many things on other people’s lists where I’ve thought, “Oh, I should have picked that instead.” Just jealousy for the people who can read foreign languages…
