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[100727]

For the past couple weeks, the updates have been written fairly early, and automatically posted at 12AM, Monday. This post is probably no exception.

Pieces (for the strangest reason, I was about to type Starcrossed) has been moving along at a fairly steady pace. I don’t think I’m going to finish the entire thing in a month as I’d originally hoped, but I am on the eleventh page after just about three weeks. I’m doing like a page on the weekends, and then another page during the week. Either way, it should be done by the end of summer, and I should have enough pages to last (in posts) through like November or something.

I’d like to point out some references used… in d287/a31 the dining hall is based off of the dining hall in the Schwab residential complex at Stanford. In today’s comic, the room in which the characters are talking is based off of the 220 “flex lab” in Meyer Library. More such references on the way; any resemblance between real people and places is purely coincidental…

I finally got around to doing the “genuine, non-thin client Internet test” on the 200T, and got something like 44 minutes on 8% of battery… which is ridiculous because it’s about 9 hours, just like the thin-client test. I think at least for this machine, I need longer run times or I need to pay attention to significant figures. Either way that makes me pretty happy, though. When you’re in the 8 or 9 hour range, what difference is another hour or so?

Okay, today I’m writing about the Dell Aero.

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J282 – Exquisite Corpse #2

Another pair of exquisite corpses; They’re from the same sessions as the ones in this update.

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[100718]

Last panel here also took forever. I like it a lot, though. They are supposed to be getting off a train, but my hoards of people blocked off what I was going to draw of the train. There’s cameos here too. This is the first time an Enigma class ship shows up in the comic since Starcrossed. This is the first time a Dogma class ship shows up at all.

Anyway, I realize I never got the chance to post a picture of our booth at Fanime this year. Well, here it is.

J281 – RLRAoS: Touch Nothing But the Lamp

Today’s RLRAoS was contributed by Sam.

To clear up any confusion: Essentially, the lighting in Sam’s room is supplied by a sunlamp much like this one. He returned to his room after being away for a bit, and, finding his lamp was on, turned it off. Strangely enough, that’s exactly the opposite of what you would ordinarily want to do on entering a room…

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[100717]

The first panel of this page was one of those pages that just took forever. It’s not that it was particularly difficult and it’s not that it was particularly detailed, it’s just that there was so much junk in it that layering and layering stuff sucked up a ton of time. But I feel that doing these kinds of scenes with a number of “extras” really helps gives the story some depth, so expect to see more. Here and in the NW story arc… if that ever continues.

The two hardest parts about doing these layered panels are the laying itself and then the scaling. I need to put down like a rough outline for pretty much every figure in the panel, and in these panels, they overlap a lot. So it gets really hard to tell which lines are for which figures, and you get a bunch of areas with a bazillion lines going over it, and it’s all just very ugly and confusing. The heavy underlay also has a greater chance of leaving artifacts after I try to contrast it out.

Scaling is tough because I never know how much detail to leave in and how much to leave out. It’s particularly difficult to make anything look convincing when the thickness of your line is about five to ten percent of the thickness of your figure. I wonder if they sell like 3mm mechanical pencils and the appropriate graphite? There’s also less room for error because smaller wiggles in lines show up bigger relative to the size of the object, etc. Overall not very pleasant, but something I’m working on.

Overall this page pretty good. I’m kinda sad that quality really kinda drops off right after the first page, but I suppose it just means I need to try harder to make the pages less fail. Done up to page 6 though; that’s like just about a third of the way through!

J280 – Sandwich; Justice

Whenever it is that we actually start displaying tags, you’ll see that this week’s comic has the “Real Life” tag. This doesn’t mean that it actually happened to me, but that it was inspired by something that did.

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[100706]

I’d mentioned (or maybe just to J) that I wasn’t going to post this – this being pages of the “short story” that I’m tentatively calling “Pieces” – until the entire thing was done… but I decided there wasn’t any reason to hold back. So here we go.

J279 – Bus Sketches

So, I am now effectively working a 9-5 internship. It’s kinda far away, so I have a 1-hour commute each way. Usually I nap on the trip, but I do also bring along a sketchbook…

A shot of the inside of the bus. I’m using a pen to train my ability to put lines where I want them on the first try.

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[100703]

Here it is! the last page of the story arc!