fredart : blogbits

Oh wow, there’s a site here! Imagine that.

Actually, i haven’t forgotten about my poor fredart site. The past few months (FEW?) have been kinda crazy, and i’ve been holding off on bringing this site back to life until i had some breathing room. I feel rather mired in things right now, a feeling that never seems to go away, but i do feel like i have some breathing room for once.

Last week was just a disaster, comic wise. Between returning from Otakon (at which i hurt my back again, and nothing makes creating harder than back pain, i swear) elongated times to draw comics, ridiculous slow downs on my computer (for wednesday’s comic it was taking 18 seconds for illustrator to react to clicks. Try doing something when it takes 18 seconds between each move) and then the final straw being the power outage for over 20 hrs… It was time to regroup.

I finished “friday’s” comic early saturday and decided that i would post it Monday, giving myself a one comic buffer. This has failed to really help me much over the years, but im working hard this time around to see if i can make this buffer last. I’m not traveling again for a while, so hopefully things can settle down for me and let me focus on that comicking thing i’m supposed to be doing. I also did some sketching last night and posted a new sketch to this site in… well over a year?? sheesh.

When i first came across Twitter, i thought it was like the last thing i would ever use. I have trouble getting normal blogs done, never mind microblogging. After experimenting with it and thinking about how i could use it i’ve discovered that it might actually be the perfect tool for me. I’ve been using my fredrin twitter for updates and twits as i go through my day, giving what i hope is a pretty decent idea of what im up to. Since im using Twitterific, its pretty easy, and can be done so quickly it doesn’t interrupt what im doing. I linked it on the SD forums and i’ve had quite a few people following it. Word so far is that it is far superior to the often neglected ’status’ box.

I’ve expanded on the idea a little and registered a twitter for Megatokyo itself that will contain more specific updates related to the comic so that people don’t have to deal with all of the inane twitters about me in general if they dont want to. I’ll be putting this info on the main MT site sometime this week.

So, feel free to check out and follow my fredrin twitter or the megatokyo twitter for the latest (often lame) updates.

Oh, one last thing. I was talking with my sister Jen today and for some reason she’s been getting a lot of really nasty email saying she’s a liar and that she is not Fred Gallagher’s sister. Uhm, last time i checked Jen was my sister and i’m sure that hasn’t changed recently, so lay off. Jen has her own webcomic site over at Swenyars Find that you can check out.

All you idiots had to do was check the whois on Jen’s domain and you’ll see it’s hosted on my servers. In fact, there have been times when the DNS has been borked and going to swenyarsfind.com went to the Megatokyo site. Morons.

Anyways, good to be back, feels good to update again.

I did some free sketching last night, first time in a long time. There are a lot of stylistic habits that i have in drawing that i think have been limiting me a lot, especially when i try to branch out and draw new characters or work on other story ideas. They work fine for MT, but dont give me the flexibility i need to do other things. I started experimenting a little with more ‘realistic’ structures for the face and other things, taking cues from a number of different manga titles i’ve been reading lately that have a bit more of a realistic feel to them (lighter on the puni scale than some of the stuff that has influenced me) and this is one of the drawings i did. There’s some life in this one that feels right.

[link to sketch]