Schedule-o-nomics

The art of realizing when it's friday.

A difficult art to master, to be sure.

The random-comic today is a product of good scheduling. That is, I did it WAAAAY before it was supposed to be done.


The "Natural Gender" comic which is currently at the state of inking is a result of bad scheduling. That is, while I realized it should be done today - and I could have made it easily - I pushed 'till the last possible moment, and then I got interrupted by something I already knew was going to happen, but failed to plan for.

My mother's brother's birthday is today - the big 40 - and many happy birthdays to him, his fiancée and their as yet unborn child. That meant today was cocoa, coffee and candy-day at their house, which I knew, but didn't plan for. So when I sat down to do the comic today, the three Cs interrupted me. Cocoa, coffee and candy are very powerful interruptors.

I just need to plan better. I'll try and see if I can't get the linearts for a few comics done this weekend, and get myself written ahead a bit, and then we'll see if not I can get something like on top of this schedule. I should be able to. Question is if I can plan it right.

cohesive

For those who just want the lowdown from mister Brown, the crimson from Jimson, the scoop from Betty Boob, ect.:

• "Girls Only" is on temporary hold for a while.
• "Natural Gender" updates as always, monday, wednesday and friday.

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I've had enough of all this "cohesiveness"-stuff. It has to be all... cohesive and stuff! I can't bear it! So here's what's gonna happen.

"Girls Only" will get a rest for a while. I've grown kinda tired of drawing the characters, and I need some time to write the next part of the story. "Natural Gender", however, will be updating as usual, on monday, wednesday and friday. Sometimes, maybe I can make it double-updates, but I can make no promises. It's more likely I'll be producing a few Random Comics, perhaps. It all depends on whether or not my Muse decides to get her #¤%¤& dressed-up behind back into my skull sometime soon.

Knowing her, probably not anytime soon. Then again, knowing her... quite possibly very soon.
Fickle mistress she is.

Life's gonna suck

Life's gonna suck when you grow up
when you grow up
when you grow up

Life's gonna suck when you grow up, it sucks pretty bad right now
You might have to mow the lawn, do the dishes, make your bed
You're gonna have to go to school until you're seventeen.
(it's gonna seem about three times as long as that)
- Denis Leary
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Well, okay, life doesn't really suck, such as it were. Life is actually pretty awesome.
What sucks is how I'm not producing enough comics. I've kept up with double-updates, monday, wednesday and friday, for these last few weeks, but comic production is kinda going into a lull.

I think it might have to do with me purchasing the "Prince of Persia"-trilogy here the other day, but there is no evidence to support that. Do you hear me? None! You'll never get me convicted. Nobody saw it, and the body was hacked into tiny pieces and burnt when they found it. Don't ask me how I know that. I just do. You can't prove anything.

Anyhow, like I said, comics are kinda going into a lull currently, so expect maybe sometimes there will be only single updates. Besides, kids these days have gotten too spoiled with double-updates. Nooo, in my day, son, we'd wait for WEEKS for an update on our comics, and when they updated it was only a single panel of 50x50 pixels with a few letters that read: "I'm ending this comic FOREVER plz donate ktxh bye," if we were lucky. And we never complained about that, no siree.

Girls Only #10: Bringin' back the paper-cuts

So I've brought the analogue media back into the comic-making process.
I found that, working only with tablet and computer, I was slowly losing my skill with paper and pencil. These are skills that will be absolutely neccesary to me later in my artistic career, and that is one of the reasons I've slightly modified the comic-making process.

It's not a big change, really. I now simply sketch things in pencil first, and then ink digitally. It's the same as doing it all digitally, only with the act of scanning taking up about 30 extra seconds of time.

Also, when doing digital art, I found I wasn't quite adept at keeping up my artistic standards. I could work faster, but the quality suffered pretty heavily. You'll notice if you go through the last few pages of "Girls Only!", the characters' proportions and anatomy varies from panel to panel and sometimes they look outright ludicrous (to me they do, at least.)
It has to do with the fact that to lineart something proper on the tablet, I need to zoom in pretty close to get a smooth line. Zooming in, however, completely ruins my overview of the drawing as a whole, making it much, much more difficult to maintain the proper proportions when drawing. Also, while zoomed in, I'd stare myself blind on mistakes that become obvious to everybody else once it's all sized down to screen-friendly size.

So I'm sketching by hand once again. I did this on the last two panels of page 9 and now here on page 10 of "Girls Only!". I think it works much better, so I'm going with it.

IN other news: after much toil and trouble, I've come up with a new story I'll be running side-by-side with Girls Only. It's called "Natural Gender", and it touches on some of the same subjects as "Girls Only!". It utilizes a completely different set of characters and a very different premise to do so, however, and the two stories are not at all alike beyond a small bit of shared theme material.

Giving you a bit of teaser, "Natural Gender" is not extremely original. The basic idea has been done before, quite a few times. If I say "Misfile", some of you might have some idea what I'm talking about.
I'm taking a good idea and twisting it in a direction that - to my knowledge - it has never been twisted before. Now we'll see if it'll hold or it'll snap under the strain...

Here's hoping for the former!

I'm hoping to make the first update for "Natural Gender" on Monday, along with one for "Girls Only!"
Let's see if I can make it :)