amae | Entries tagged with comics

Slowly working on my comic. My goal this time is to make a story that's easy to understand for once. I'm sure I'll get better with time, but a huge problem with my storytelling is that I live in my head too much. I don't realize that some things that are clear to me, are not clear to the reader, and it makes my stories hard to parse. Not to mention, a good deal of them are kind of complicated to begin with, so this becomes even more of a problem.

For my next story I'm trying to do something more simple, to try to break myself from these bad habits. I'm putting the summary here--any thoughts/things that are unclear? Be honest, I don't mind.

( Story )

Pretty basic story. What do you think? Anything you think should be changed/cut out/etc?

SO glad I have the day off today. I was dying yesterday. ANYWAY. People asked me for a report of this weekend, which I shall do!

( About Boy Bands and Comics )

Anyway, I will fanbarf about BIGBANG later. Now I will talk about Comitia, which is why you're all reading this I know.

( About selling stuff at Comitia )

( About the Publisher's Corner at Comitia )

So that was about it. Overall, it was a very good experience! I'll post my comic here later, though don't expect to be blown away. I was working on it until the day of the event, and it shows. Next time I'm giving myself enough time to finish the pages and send them to a printer so everything comes out the way I want it to come out. Uggghhh.

EDIT: Oh, speaking of which, I forgot to talk about the crazy last minute nightmares that happened right before the event!
( About Murphy's Law in action )

Thanks everyone for your feedback on my last post- it was very helpful and I'm feeling really pumped up for chapter 2 of Overland. XD I've been working on the outline for Chapter 2 (which I will use when making the script/name) and after I finish that I'm going to jump into doing the groundwork for the chapter keeping a lot of things in mind. This probably means that there might be a bit of time (I'm hoping to use this month to do it all) in between now and when Chapter 2 starts, but I'm a bit reluctant to put a sign saying "hiatus" up on the comic since it's not really a hiatus as much as it's just me taking time to cover all my bases.

T-though...I'm acting like I don't have that 25 page paper hanging over my shoulder plus the 30 pages of fiction I need to have done by early May...but I will persevere! Dammit!

Let's just all hope I can get a job too. D:

Today we went to downtown DC to see the Sakura Matsuri (bleh), and view the plethora of sakura trees in bloom in the capital (yay!). I took...a lot more pictures than I intended to. Now I'm all nostalgic for Kyoto again. :(

Haven't done this in a while. Put comic pages, starting from er..2007 (ish?) to now next to each other in a feeble attempt to see if I've improved in the past few years.

( Let's take a look.. )

So I can definitely say that I've improved since doing Elliot/Variations on a Theme (the first picture), but it kind of gets hard to say if I've stagnated or not past that point, haha. I guess things have stopped looking as Ribon-esque shoujo as they were for the second page, but that's not saying that much. More blacks, which I think is a good thing, and more backgrounds, which is also a good thing (though I admit that I still need to get better at that...especially how to continually include backgrounds without things looking boring). Anatomy has improved slightly, but that also needs a lot of work. Drawing guidelines for characters' bodies has been a good start and I'm definitely continuing that.

I really need to stop...avoiding drawing things that make me anxious (it's a bad habit that applies not only to drawing, but to just things that make me stressed in general). I want to draw a comic that is mainly told through characters' hands as practice, but the thought is honestly so terrifying I've been putting it off, lol. Maybe I should start a bit slower...

Doing Overland has helped with my mindset when doing comics, and it's become a lot less stressful than it was before but I think I'm ready to push myself a bit more. As soon as I finish writing up stuff for Chapter 2, that's exactly what I plan to do. :)

What do you think?

2nd update to Overland this week! I only feel like mentioning this because finally, finally Lily has been introduced. At the end of the chapter. Serves me right for drawing the chapter title page before I solidified the script. D:

Since it's a few pages before Chapter 1's end, I've been thinking about how this first chapter has developed and I have to say, I'm pretty happy with myself. Not particularly because this chapter is awesome or anything (it's a bit slow, the humor's sporadic, the backgrounds really need to be tightened up...there are a lot of things that could be improved) but because this is the first time I've actually planned a chapter and more or less finished it. Every other time before I just sort of...decided that a chapter was done just because it seemed that way. I don't know, it feels like I succeeded at organizing myself a little this time around, and my product really improved because I did so. And most of all, doing Overland has continuously been fun--I'm glad it's staying that way. :)

...and all of this reminds me, I have to finish the script for Chapter 2 soon. D: And make a character page. And stop sucking at hands, for goodness sakes, at this point it's unacceptable how bad I am at them. At least I'm getting more comfortable with backgrounds, I guess.

...let me show off the reason why I made the flist participate in that picture ranking exercise! :D

I'm featured in this week's "The Gallery" column on Anime News Network. So if you want to read a bit about my boring ass, go there right this instant! I'd say more but I'm currently a bit brain-fried, so I should probably get back to trying to go to sleep.

Though this time it's not shameless!

Alternate. READ THIS COMIC. IT IS MADE OF CONCENTRATED AWESOME. It's been a very, very long time since I've come across a comic that has been able to make me laugh with quite nearly every page, if not all of them. And the girl who does this stuff is 15. Yeah, FIFTEEN. I wish I had an ounce of that ability when I was fifteen, sob. :(

While the art is not all that impressive the for first few pages, it quickly becomes more confident, and then you realize how skilled the author is with her comics. I mean, if you can make pages of talking heads actually work, that takes skill (the key is in the expressions of the characters, and she is genius at that IMO). Seriously, you can really tell this girl has her own style and is probably going to take over the world someday with it.

So go, read!

Heh. I might actually start pimping out comics more often...there might be a lot of crap comics out there, but there are a lot of gems too. ♥

I realized that I haven't yet pimped this out public on this journal so this is for those of you who not on the flist~

What could these guys be talking about?? Why Overland, of course! It's my ultra special new webcomic which you, of course, should check out. I mean, it's awesome, why wouldn't you? HUH? >(

I mean what other genius piece of work would contain doors with eyes, imps, cute little girls who haven't shown up yet *points at the picture*, and potential love-interests with eyepatches who also haven't shown up yet?

You should totally check it out, it'll rock your world.

Ridiculous sales pitching aside, I'm having a lot of fun doing this comic and I think (and hope!) it's showing in the pages. ♥ There are 7 pages of the story up so far (with some filler stuff inbetween), and the comic as of right now updates on Monday and Wednesday with what I like to call as Freebie Fridays on Fridays which is a catchy way of saying I do filler stuff on Fridays.

And just your luck, Viktor (I finally settled on that being his name after pondering for waaay too long) has made his first appearance (of a sort) with today's update!

I won't be talking that much about Overland (aside from the silly in-progress picture and such) on this journal, so if you want to keep up with it, just check the site out~

Current Mood: dorky

So what does Shady do when she's not killing vampires and saving lives? Well I'm GLAD YOU ASKED!

I do SECRET AWESOME COMICS OF JUSTICE WITH

yawmin,

riot_o_curls, and

psychoe! Now why am I telling you this? Because this aforementioned SECRET AWESOME COMIC ANTHOLOGY is now out and about and you, yes you my friend, can have it in your hot little hands now!

The book is called First Confessions and it's a series of short stories from the ~~four~~ three (my mistake,

riot_o_curls did the amazing cover but alas wasn't able to contribute a story) of us about...you guessed it, first confessions! The setting and style could be anything we wanted, so there's an array of different stories for your reading pleasure. ♥ It also contains one of my RAREST STORIES YET. What is it you say? A girls love story! I know, I'm amazed too.

So how can you get a copy of this sexy little book? It's being sold through Lulu, where you can get the AWESOME paperback version, or you can download a PDF of it.

So what are you waiting for? Go on, check it out!