Welcome to Colony 12
Progress Status
I've added some more texts to the Reading Room, I've completed more art pieces, and I've been working on model sheets. Some of this can be viewed right now, but quite a bit of work is going on behind the scenes. I think that I've been making good progress, however, and my next step should be to do more practice comics.
As usual, you can check out the forums to get a more in-depth explanation and update.
Brief Update
I'm slowly settling into my vacation, so I'll probably write more later. For now, I'll be doing some work on my art, and stories. Check out the forums for some of the figure work that I've been doing.
Vacation Upcoming!
This is a somewhat more brief posting- my vacation is upcoming (it starts Friday evening, in fact), which is very welcome. I hope to get back on track with my art and comic writing. I've been very busy and consequently very tired lately, which has proven a tremendous detriment to completion of all the tasks I need to complete art wise. While I'd like it to be different, my art doesn't make money for me, at least not yet, and probably won't outstrip my day-job's income for quite some time when it does start making money.
Artwise, I think something I need to look out for is unnatural stiffness in my lines and poses. I need to make sure that everyone has real weight, and real form, and natural posing. The holidays will prove a good time for me to do so, as I'll have more free time to work on art and other hobbies.
And best of all, I'll have time to draw more pics of Mindy, Saeko, Ayana and the rest of the crew. Hopefully that will be a positive for you, too.
Computer Art: Harder Than it Looks
I have reached a major capability limit for my current tool of choice for coloring (Paint Shop Pro 8). When it comes to a digital tablet, it sorta barely supports it, especially when it comes to pressure sensitivity.
It does most other things really well, though. It's such a simple thing for it to do- when a brush has its hardness set very low, then reducing pressure, should produce more feathering, to a really soft edge, rather than a tiny sorta aliased point (that sort of thing makes sense with a harder edge). Also, to allow a similar effect with the airbrush would be great. For every tool except the caligraphy pen tip, it's more like a really precise mouse than a pressure-sensitive tablet, which is very unfortunate.
I'll give GIMP and GIMPshop a chance, and see if they can yield better coloring results. PSP X isn't really geared towards my needs, and I really don't want to spend $700 Canadian on Photoshop, especially not for the little things that I'm doing. I've had good luck with Open Source projects, anyways- I frequently use Inkscape to vectorize my scanned inks, and it does a very nice job of that.
Also, I may need to make a tutorial on the use of masks to quickly color line art. I've seen a lot of really involved techniques for coloring it (especially a lot of lasso selections), whereas I've been using masks and the magic wand, which leaves no ugly white borders, but doesn't take lots of time to do. You just need to mask, select the areas to paint in (click click click- thanks to the magic wand), and then choose your tools (flood fill comes in handy to get a nice base color down). I end up using three layers for colors- base color, shading and highlights, so it doesn't take up too much space on disk or too much memory when working.
Okay, One More Space Story...
Fingers crossed for success for Robert Bigelow's inflatable space station test item, which launched Wednesday, and has deployed. If it works (throughout the five-year test cycle), then he can move onto the next steps towards a functioning orbital hotel, which opens up the door for many different space businesses.
As mentioned, it will be tested over a period of five years to ensure durability as advertised. Here's an excerpt from the Bigelow Aerospace site:
The ISC Kosmotras Dnepr rocket has flawlessly delivered the Genesis I into the target orbit of 550km altitude at 64 degrees inclination. The internal battery is reporting a full charge of 26 volts, which leads us to believe that the solar arrays have deployed. The internal temperature of the spacecraft is reported to be 26 degrees Celsius and we have acquired the spacecraft's Global Positioning System (GPS) signal that will enable us to track the ship in flight.
You can read more at the Bigelow Aerospace website
I think the key thing that you need to realize when you think of an inflatable station is that we aren't referring to a balloon here. Try to think more along the lines of a Zodiac inflatable boat. We had one when I was a kid, and it could take a hell of a pounding without losing air. In many ways, it was stronger than a comparable fibreglass-hulled boat.
It's the same for this station, which is constructed of Vectran, which is twice as strong as Kevlar, making it stronger than the rigid ISS modules. Or, at least that's what I've been told. It is also very resistant to the hazards of space- things like radiation, free radicals, and the like, meaning that it stands a good chance of succeeding.
The concept of an inflatable habitation module is a very important one, and has significant implications for the future of space colonization and space travel. For one, it makes it easier and cheaper to lift larger habitable sections into orbit. For another, if it is as strong as advertised, then it means stronger and safer habitation sections.
We may not have got the flying cars on schedule, but space hotels are right on track.
Telecommunications... IN SPACE!
Here's something interesting that happened on July 10th, in 1962: Telstar, the first commercial commsat (well, Wikipedia says "active") Telstar was launched. It lasted less than a year, but there you have it- live television transmissions over very long distances. Continuous improvements have led to the ubiquity of worldwide, live television. I'm not really sure I can comprehend how big a change or how important this is, as I wasn't around to remember a time when this wasn't the case. Maybe it's a huge deal, maybe it's not such a big deal, and news transmission was fast enough before. I have no accurate frame of reference, though I'm sure with research I could determine somewhat the relevance of the developments. Even then, however, I would still have that gap- that inability to understand how different what is from what came before.
Communication and information are vital to little creative people like me. An inexpensive way of reaching the most possible people is the only way that I can do what I do. Let's face it: I'm not exactly creating mass-culture stuff here. I just hope that there are a few people out there who might be interested in what I'm doing, but without the internet and cheap communication, I would never be able to do this. I'll have to return to this subject later on, when I've had some time to think about it beyond platitudes.
Okay, having a scanner and a photoediting/paint program has helped, too.
Getting the Word Out
I've been doing a lot of thinking about promotion, or how to promote my comic/work. Perhaps by chatting about it here, I can help to clarify some things in my mind. I need to get the word out, as I said above, but I have to do so in a way that won't annoy people, and won't get treated like spam.
One thing I have figured out is that word-of-mouth is useful. So, if you like what you see here, and you know someone who might like it, too, could you let them know? I'd appreciate it.
Other than that, I need to do two things: make my art as good as I can, and get as much comic work and backstory stuff up as possible. There's no point in promoting a poorly made half-finished site. Which reminds me, I need to get back to work on my backstory stuff, so I'll cut this post short, now...
Birthday Yesterday
I had meant to update this yesterday, but forgot. If you check the forums, and look at the latest posts, you'll see links to all the birthday art that I finished up. It's not all that birthday-themed, however. At any rate, I hope that you have a look around and enjoy what you see.
Art-wise, I am still working on my chiefest struggle- proper visualization... er, and making sure that it gets on the page right. My mind has the unfortunate habit of filling in lines and details that aren't in the drawing that's on paper.
I'll try to keep making at least little posts to the index page while I work on comic backstory stuff, but if you'd like to ask about pics, or make suggestions or requests, you'd be best off visiting the forums...
Space Stuff
You know my original plan to get all that local area backstory stuff? Well, it got sorta back-burnered, as I ended up visiting a site called Atomic Rockets, which is a site designed to help science fiction writers create at least semi-plausible spacecraft for their world settings.
Initially, I hadn't planned on making my craft even semi-plausible, and would just make stuff up. This changed when I started reading the site, and realised that by using a few basic rules, I could create a more believable story. More importantly, however, I realised that by adhering to those rules, I could flesh out the "space" part of my world. Beforehand, it was sorta amorphous. Now, it's very concrete, and that flows back to the ground-based stuff, as the way things work on the ground will be affected somewhat by the way things work in space.
So, I now have rough estimates for movement of people off planet, the amount of cargo that can be moved around, travel times, and basic operations in space. All of this makes my job as a writer much simpler, and it helps me as an artist- I now know what I should be thinking about when I draw spacecraft and bases.
You will probably need to do more research outside of the site when you construct your craft- I suggest at least skimming Wikipedia for further development of concepts.
Actually, with all the writing I've been doing, I may be able to upload some space material sooner rather than later.
On a different topic, stay tuned for July 3rd, when I upload the rest of my Birthday update!
Oops, I Need to Post Stuff Here
Er, if I want this to be a pseudo-blog, then I better start posting things. If nothing else, it acts as an easy way for the reader to check to see if things are updating as they should.
So, as for progress? Well, if you check out the galleries, you'll see a bunch of new pictures. In the forum, I've made a bunch of threads about the new pics, both original and fan-art. I've completed a few practice comics, too. Hmm... I'm not one for a lot of talk about my own work, I was always taught about modesty, but I need to remind myself that this isn't about being a braggart- it's merely about informing you, the reader, about the things that I've been doing.
Mindy, Saeko and Ayana are really fun characters for me to draw. I've just got to keep working on them and making sure that when I draw them, I let them "speak with their own voice", as it were. I have to treat them as individuals, to let them be themselves, and not get distracted from that. In that respect, Saeko is a bit easier to deal with, as it's hard to confuse Saeko with anyone else.
I've been doing a lot of thinking, and a lot of practice lately. I spent a long time wondering why my characters never quite looked as nice as the fan-art that I did. It took me some time to realise that my big problem was the basics. It seems that everything I do comes down to the basics of art. I can expand on that more in later post, but the brief explanation is this: When I pay attention to the start of a drawing, I do a better job then when I try to clean up problems at the end. Oh, and for me, the start of a drawing is the visualization of the scene- a clear picture in my mind's eye. If I have that, and I draw true to that vision, then I have the picture. Thumbnails and little sketches can help that vision, so it doesn't have to be a fully formed mental picture at the first, but it better be by the time I really draw the pic, or it'll turn out sorta bland.
My big problem was that I wasn't paying attention to the basics for my characters: facial features, heights, proportions, expressions and the like. I hadn't paid enough attention to getting these things set right, and as such, I wasn't visualizing the piece properly before starting it. My more recent work has concentrated on getting this right. It's the key to good art.
On that art note, I picked up a book on free-hand technical drawing. It was published in the UK in 1965, and is filled with all sorts of important notes. One of the most important was to draw the invisible faces of an object, lightly, so that you can ensure the proper shape facing the viewer. One example used was a beach-ball- the way the stripes curve along the ball itself can be drawn correctly very easily if followed through to the invisible (to the viewer) side of the ball. If not, it is very easy to get them wrong. This applies to so many different things, including physical structures of characters.
As for the comic backstory work, I've made some big progress on the rough copies, but nothing's really ready for uploading at the moment. I hope to change that soon. I was mainly focussing on the distant past of the Colony, and also with technical and scientific minutae, which is very important for me in order to frame the "modern" world of the planet, but not quite so for me to create comic scenes. That's the main reason that I've switched focus from basic tech and history to things that Mindy and friends would encounter on a day-to-day basis.
I've snapped off a big chunk of writing for Starlight, the coastal city where Mindy and company live, but boy do I ever have a lot more to write. It gets a lot easier for me to write a comic when I've got the background stuff done. Scenes are easier to set and take less time to write up when I've got a place to set them already created and ready to go. It'll also help me maintain consistency.
I'll try in future to keep the time between updates to a more manageable level- say, a posting every few days and somesuch. If you'd like to hear from me more frequently, you can e-mail me, or visit on the forum. It's a bit quiet now, but all forums start out a bit quiet, except those built for the transfer of guests from an existing one.
A Semi-Ordered Progression
Things are progressing swiftly on the site, though perhaps not as swiftly as I would like. I have finalized the format of the homepage, and have introduced a pseudo-blog [which I am currently typing in]. I want to restrict discussion to the forums, however, which is why there is no comment link here.
Anyways, most of the site is at least structurally complete. Content-wise.... well, I've got quite a bit in rough-draft form for the associated backstory texts for my comic, but the comic itself is a ways off. In the meantime, why not check out the practice comic pages, or perhaps the art galleries? There's also the forum to visit, and it isn't too bad.
I've been working on this for at least a few years, but it's funny how hard it's been, and though I am almost ready, it's funny just how much still needs to be completed. I still need to tweak the site's appearance, but that's a minor sort of thing. One big thing that I need to do is get a few images displayed here and there, just to make the site a bit more colorful, and also to convince you, the reader, to have a look at my other art.
Oops, I Need to Post Stuff Here
Er, if I want this to be a pseudo-blog, then I better start posting things. If nothing else, it acts as an easy way for the reader to check to see if things are updating as they should.
So, as for progress? Well, if you check out the galleries, you'll see a bunch of new pictures. In the forum, I've made a bunch of threads about the new pics, both original and fan-art. I've completed a few practice comics, too. Hmm... I'm not one for a lot of talk about my own work, I was always taught about modesty, but I need to remind myself that this isn't about being a braggart- it's merely about informing you, the reader, about the things that I've been doing.
Mindy, Saeko and Ayana are really fun characters for me to draw. I've just got to keep working on them and making sure that when I draw them, I let them "speak with their own voice", as it were. I have to treat them as individuals, to let them be themselves, and not get distracted from that. In that respect, Saeko is a bit easier to deal with, as it's hard to confuse Saeko with anyone else.
I've been doing a lot of thinking, and a lot of practice lately. I spent a long time wondering why my characters never quite looked as nice as the fan-art that I did. It took me some time to realise that my big problem was the basics. It seems that everything I do comes down to the basics of art. I can expand on that more in later post, but the brief explanation is this: When I pay attention to the start of a drawing, I do a better job then when I try to clean up problems at the end. Oh, and for me, the start of a drawing is the visualization of the scene- a clear picture in my mind's eye. If I have that, and I draw true to that vision, then I have the picture. Thumbnails and little sketches can help that vision, so it doesn't have to be a fully formed mental picture at the first, but it better be by the time I really draw the pic, or it'll turn out sorta bland.
My big problem was that I wasn't paying attention to the basics for my characters: facial features, heights, proportions, expressions and the like. I hadn't paid enough attention to getting these things set right, and as such, I wasn't visualizing the piece properly before starting it. My more recent work has concentrated on getting this right. It's the key to good art.
On that art note, I picked up a book on free-hand technical drawing. It was published in the UK in 1965, and is filled with all sorts of important notes. One of the most important was to draw the invisible faces of an object, lightly, so that you can ensure the proper shape facing the viewer. One example used was a beach-ball- the way the stripes curve along the ball itself can be drawn correctly very easily if followed through to the invisible (to the viewer) side of the ball. If not, it is very easy to get them wrong. This applies to so many different things, including physical structures of characters.
As for the comic backstory work, I've made some big progress on the rough copies, but nothing's really ready for uploading at the moment. I hope to change that soon. I was mainly focussing on the distant past of the Colony, and also with technical and scientific minutae, which is very important for me in order to frame the "modern" world of the planet, but not quite so for me to create comic scenes. That's the main reason that I've switched focus from basic tech and history to things that Mindy and friends would encounter on a day-to-day basis.
I've snapped off a big chunk of writing for Starlight, the coastal city where Mindy and company live, but boy do I ever have a lot more to write. It gets a lot easier for me to write a comic when I've got the background stuff done. Scenes are easier to set and take less time to write up when I've got a place to set them already created and ready to go. It'll also help me maintain consistency.
I'll try in future to keep the time between updates to a more manageable level- say, a posting every few days and somesuch. If you'd like to hear from me more frequently, you can e-mail me, or visit on the forum. It's a bit quiet now, but all forums start out a bit quiet, except those built for the transfer of guests from an existing one.
A Semi-Ordered Progression
Things are progressing swiftly on the site, though perhaps not as swiftly as I would like. I have finalized the format of the homepage, and have introduced a pseudo-blog [which I am currently typing in]. I want to restrict discussion to the forums, however, which is why there is no comment link here.
Anyways, most of the site is at least structurally complete. Content-wise.... well, I've got quite a bit in rough-draft form for the associated backstory texts for my comic, but the comic itself is a ways off. In the meantime, why not check out the practice comic pages, or perhaps the art galleries? There's also the forum to visit, and it isn't too bad.
I've been working on this for at least a few years, but it's funny how hard it's been, and though I am almost ready, it's funny just how much still needs to be completed. I still need to tweak the site's appearance, but that's a minor sort of thing. One big thing that I need to do is get a few images displayed here and there, just to make the site a bit more colorful, and also to convince you, the reader, to have a look at my other art.