Drawing and Writing (May/June)

After about a month and a half, I've made some progress on several mini-comics, and am attempting to finish the related novel. I have six minicomics planned, at probably three pages each, for a total of eighteen pages. Two of these arcs are finished, as six final pages in color, and I've also done all the special poses art I could think of for the other pages, although much of it is not cleaned up and colored yet. I know that more art will be required once I've actually laid the pages out. As usual this is a combination of traditional and digital techniques, where the art is inked on several pages of letter paper and assembled, with digital cleanup. This has involved hundreds of sheets of paper.

Two of the arcs have finished-ish scripts, while the next is a little rough and the last is vague. I did pretty complex backgrounds for these first two, with the help of simple-ish CGI builds done in Blender. I don't especially like doing backgrounds, and focus on characters. This has held back some of the still-theoretical work on video game development. I create the characters as separate high-res assets that can be reused, and hopefully the end result when it's all put together isn't too strange.

I haven't released any of this yet, because further work needs to be done on the website side, and I was a little short of ideas about it. I have more ideas now, but will probably need to do a small amount of video as well. The art book is well over 400 pages now and climbing, and the related novel is also over that page count on its own terms.

I've been ignoring the website work and instead trying to finish the novel, since it all has to be tied together. I had left the ending unfinished months ago, and am chipping away at it now. It's a tricky sequence, full of characters and moving parts. My days as a screenwriter taught me to focus on dialogue, and to only briefly describe action, and this is a tough bad habit to break. I am more comfortable writing dialogue and monologue, with action as an afterthought, so wish me luck in getting over myself here.