fredart : blogbits

It’ll be interesting to see if i can really manage to get that third comic done early today.  It would not be a problem if yesterday was not taken up by a number of things that kept me away from my desk completely for most of the day, but the encouraging thing is that i am still on track enough here that the possibility of getting it done on time is actually quite good.  ^_^  Jack is doing much better at playing on his own for periods of time, and i’ve learned to anticipate some of the things he needs (like his feeding and nap schedule) which keeps him happy and not worked up trying to communicate such things to me.  This fathering stuff does have a learning curve, one which i think will never actually flatten out.

I’d type more, but jack is sitting in my lap right now and it’s getting hard t \lksfa  klaek keep him f ro msa  hitting the kyeboard.

It’s a bizarre but delightfully pleasant experience to not only have been done with Monday’s comic ahead of time but to be almost done with Wednesday’s comic on tuesday afternoon.  More often than not when ‘missing’ a comic i actually found myself not able to work on it at all until the evening it is due, so there has been little ‘getting ahead’ in the past six months.  Last week, however, i did manage to get most of ‘Friday’s’  comic done and, rather than posting it Saturday afternoon, made a comitment to see if i could use the boost of having a comic done “early” and then diving into the next comic in the framework of my currently “skewed” work schedule.  Trying to work from a positive position rather than a negative one.  It feels good, i’m hoping i can keep it up.

Why is my work schedule so ’skewed’?  Well, it has a lot to do with the fact that Sarah and I are both trying to work ‘full time’ both here and at the warehouse, we both have a lot to do, and we are trying to raise a baby at the same time (and not using day care).  Since a good part of our work (mostly mine) is working ‘at home’ in theory it’s a great idea… until you find out that taking care of a baby during the day can be a full time job, especially when he has a habit of only sleeping for 30 min at a time >_<.

There are two things that are improving this rather daunting issue.  First, Jack has been taking longer naps (mostly because i think he’s taking a breather from some of the teething hell he went through for a few weeks) and we have a baby sitter that is going to come in from time to time to watch him and give us some much needed work time.  Just one day of her help last week really took a lot of pressure off, as you might be able to tell by the rather positive bent on my infamously problematic production issues.

Part of this will also involve more blogging and ranting.  I’m trying to get over the idea that people don’t want to hear my whining by seeing what i can do to reduce that whining and prattle about more interesting stuffs.  This might not bee particularly interesting, per se, but it’s a fair reflection of things at this particular moment.

That said, comic 1137, FMP 09 is just about done, drawing-wise.  I need to hatch and render some things, then put it together in illustrator (the dialogue is already done).  Doing one comic ahead and posting on time is ok.  Doing two is even better.  Three is a real triumph, but what i really want is to find the norm being that comics are posted ahead of time and are availible at 1am like they are supposed to be, on a regular basis.  It’s been the holy grail of my life as a comic artist, as i am sure you all know, but for once it seems oddly possible… and possible without having to seriously comprimise the art or the content of the comics.  So we’ll see. 

And now for some randomness… i’ve been experimenting with notebook applications, not sure right now if i like Evernote or Yojimbo better.  It’s almost like i wish i could mix the two (With Yojimbo it is all stored locally, evernote is on a server (and you have 40mb or 400mb allowances)…  given how graphic-rich my clipping tends to be, i worry that 400 meg per month might not be enough… i’ll blog more about this in my next post.  Anyone else here using similar programs that act as thier brain repository?

Duh. I forgot to mention that a few months ago i started using last.fm. If you don’t know what last.fm is… er, well, its a little hard to describe, but it is a pretty interesting way to not only share and cross reference your aggregate listening habits (”scrobbling” posts your playlists to your site) but it’s am excellent resource for exploring and finding new music.

For example, when looking for some low key minimal techno i came across thinner netlabel and it’s extensive library of downloadable releases. There’s even a Megatokyo group on last.fm. Not sure yet how it’s content is a reflection of megatokyo and the kind of music found within, but it’s still neat to find one there.

Feel free to add/friend/smoohzz me if you are a last.fm user ^_^

It’s been a long time since i’ve done any blogging, ranting or posting, which is silly when you consider how easy it is to post such things these days.  It’s kind of like Kalium said in a twitter response earlier - i’ve got more than enough to blurp about, i just need to start doing it where i’m supposed to rather than just to friends online.  So without further blathering, I’ll put this rather delightful WordPress interface for this particular blog to work.

If you’ve been following MT or reading my blog for any length of time at all, you know that i have some odd and wide ranging taste in music, most of it chosen to either compliment or contrast whatever mood i happen to be in at the time.  I’m a particular fan of various types of Ambient music, running the range from the dreamy, spacey and sometimes kinda silly stuff like John Serrie to the sometimes rather alarming sounds from artists like Infetu and Karjalan Sissit.  It’s really hard to figure out if a particular ambient track or work is going to be something you enjoy or are able to listen to over time because it’s kind of a subconscious listen.  The best tracks are the ones that leave you with the atmosphere and the mood without giving you anything to grasp that sticks in your head and identifies the tune.  Consciously hearing the track as it comes on means that it’s not going to have the effect you are looking for.  You don’t WANT it to grab your attention.

Which is a little dumb if you are creating a track list or looking for stuff to listen to.  :P  I pluck stuff from itunes or amazon or other places quite regularly, but yesterday i picked up download that is something i’ve actually been hoping to find for quite a while: Gas - Pop.  Even better, it wasn’t just Pop, it was three other disks by this guy as well in a ‘box’ set called Nah Und Fern.   Itunes has it, but i got it for a much better price over at bleep.com, a download shop with a pretty specific collection of labels to choose from.

Gas is some earlier work by influential techno artist Wolfgang Voigt who released these works almost 10 years ago (Gas (1996), Zauberberg (1997), and Königsforst (1999), Pop (2000)) but evertime i heard something from Pop on one of the ambient shoutcast stations i listen to from time to time, i would make note of it and try to find it.  Just the other day, when looking at some of my bookmarks on ambient music, i brought up a page on Gas and after poking around for a bit found that some of his work had been released recently on itunes.  Then i came across this CD, and i felt it was one i really should get.  It’s easy on the ears, which just enough structure to it to wander, and it seems to really be saturated with the kinds of moods i am always looking for in ambient music. I’ve listened through a number of times now and it’s definately been worth getting.

Just for the heck of it, i’ll try putting Bleep’s little player here so you can give it a listen.  Lemme know if this thing blows up your browsers

So much for a super quick post.

Temperature control is not only important for things like computers and other sensitive equipment, it’s also pretty important for the organic components of the working environment (namely me).  Now that i am drawing pretty much exclusively on the Cintiq, there is only one little issue i have with it and that is the fact that the area where my hand usually rests has a tendency to get pretty warm.  Hot, even.

This issue is pretty easily solved by directing air flow from a desktop fan over the surface of the cintiq (you can see the fan i’m using to do this in this photo of my work area.)  It’s not something that needs to be on all the time, in fact i hate to have air blowing on me all the time.  It works fine, cools things down, and then i turn it off.

The problem is that this little Honeywell desk fan, as good as it is, is a little TOO good.  Even at it’s lowest setting, the air flow is too high to be blowing on my hand like that.  So as dumb as it sounds, i’m looking for a solution.  Pretty easy, right?  There are lots of fans out there to choose from.

Well, not really.  What i want is a small fan that makes very little noise, is of high enough quality that it won’t burn out after a month of use, and has variable fan speeds (not the 2 or 3 settings that most fans have).  Someone has to make a fan like that, right?

Not that i’ve seen so far. -_-

The closest i’ve come to seeing something that will probably do the job is one of these two Vornado fans, the “Zippi” desk fan or the “Flippi” desk fan (could they have stupider sounding names?).  One of these will probably do the trick, but it’s STILL not quite what i was looking for…

The thought struck me that what would be REALLY cool would be a custom fan of some sort that was made using CPU or Computer Case cooling fans and some sort of control with a potentiometer to adjust the fan speed to whatever felt most comfortable… it might be something i could even cobble together myself.

Any thoughts?

(and this kind of thing is exactly what the fredart blog is perfect for, little stuff like this :P)

I’ve been doing some color studies as well as re-design work on many of the Warmth characters, this is just one of them - the colors are kinda bland, but the real excersize here was the hair - there are about 5 or 6 colors in there.  Not final colors, but adding colors to some of these sketches has had the feel of adding some life to them.

I cringe all the more when i look at the artwork i did the first time i worked seriously on this series. Yeeks.

Yay! it is indeed alive The web guys have managed to migrate all the old movable type stuff to wordpress here, and while it will probably need some tweaks (actually, we’re looking at revamping and rebuilding the entire fredart site) it’s good to have it back up and online.

This is really just a test to make sure it is all working properly, which it does indeed seem to be.

Well, I’d love to say that the start of 2008 got off and running the way I wanted to, but it’s actually been more like what people who’ve had kids before told me - go to 2 comics per week for the next few months. I didn’t want to, but thats where im at, and the past two weeks its been more like one. That’s not good.

A lot of people told me not to discount just how much Jack is going to impact my ability to work. Taking this into account, i realized that the biggest thing i needed to do was get myself organized so that i could work more effectively. This was a lot more work than i anticipated. I finally set up my office/studio (i was in kind of a temporary setup here at the house before, where my drawing table and computer were in two different locations), and i’ve been working to clean up a lot of my development and reference material (i’m getting tired of not being able to find things) and work towards a more manageable production sequence.

Most of these efforts have really gone quite well. I feel pretty refreshed about what i’m doing and i’m ready to dive in and write and draw like a ‘professional’ comic artist (AKA ‘madman’)… if only Jack would give his dad more than 20 minutes at a time to do so.

Jack is 2 months old today It’s hard to believe that he joined us little over 8 weeks ago… honestly, it feels like its been more like six or seven months. He’s over 8 lb. now and is doing well. For the past few weeks he’s had some very uncomfortable digestive problems that have made him fussy, irritable, and in need of constant comforting. It was keeping him from sleeping for very long, and for the past few weeks one of us has been up at all times for when he needed attention. Thankfully, with some dietary adjustment, he’s doing much better and is starting to feel more peaceful more often, and now and again IS sharing this peace with his parents. Last night he slept through the night for the first time… and so did his Parents.

I have not been posting big apologies for not being able to get on track with the comic the way i need to and planned for 2008, but I am getting there. I appreciate your patience and have been as frustrated the lack of finished product as much as you all have.

It’s only January 9th, i have the whole year ahead of me. I’ll get there.

I’m not really sure what it is about having Jack around, or the transition into fatherhood, but it seems to have sparked in me a far more serious and orderly approach to writing. This might not be evident from the long delays in getting comics done (much of this is due to JackCare, but not all of it), but for the first time in a years I’ve been able to step back from the nebulous quagmire that is the Megatokyo story and try to knock some order into it - with some actual success for once.

Oh, I’ve attempted this many times before. Sort of like my attempts to use personal organizers and planners I have had nothing but failed attempts to apply order to my brain’s murky and muddy effluent. (The whole issue of how to better organize for “creative” people is not something new. One program I have used in beta and felt like might work for me is Omni Focus, but the two months before Jack was born was not a good time to be testing organizational software :P) I spent some time researching how other people write and organize themselves, and took a far more serious look at how to actually use some of the basic tools Scrivener gives me to organize better. I also fine tuned the script features to better automate script writing so that it helped rather than hindered my thinking process.

I’ve had a lot of real conundrums to consider recently, in regards to the story. There are a things that have been worked out for some time that I am quite happy with, but then there are other things that I am not very happy with. It’s not because they are particularly bad per se, but because they don’t feel as inspired as they should be. Not everything you write will tilt the moon and move the earth, but it should at least advance the growth (or decline) of characters in ways that make it worth drawing (and reading). Some of my writing for this chapter, produced in the midst of a somewhat difficult and worrisome pregnancy, is certainly not up to par. Some of it falls really flat for me, and some of it is just not worked out sufficiently. Some of it is little more than problems getting from point A to point B, where B is pretty awesome - but it diffuse the impact of “B” if the readers mind is numb from the journey there. I can do better than this, I hate it when I’m not able to before the comic goes live.

It’s nice to be making some progress in getting better structure to my writing, over time is is sure to result in a more reliable flow of comics from me, but the killer is dealing with muddling through it while trying to produce comics you are not yet really happy with. What’s really weird is when I find myself just not able to really click with a comic I’m trying to draw. That’s usually a sign that the subconscious writer that lives somewhere in my brain is trying to tell me that I’m getting it all wrong, and that its not part of the “Story” that he has already worked out and so jealously guards. I wish he’d just tell me where he wants things to go sometimes trying to figure out what he wants results in much hair pulling and agony. I usually get it at some point, which makes it worth it in the end, but I’d like to try to start figuring that out before I am in the middle of drawing.

That said, back to work on Friday’s comic. I said I’ll do three comics this week, and I am. Once I get this one posted, I’ll roll onto Mondays. I should be able to post this sometime this afternoon. Stress and hair loss aside, it always feels worth it when things finally, inevitably, click into place.

It’s amazing how much time babies take up in the first few weeks, till you learn how to multitask better. You sort of have no choice, and i’m getting there but jeeze, everytime i turn around it’s something else (in one instance this morning, i had to change my own shirt as well as Jack’s outfit - something he seemed to be quite proud of ^^;;)

Today is Black Friday again, and you may remember this rant from last year. Funny, we weren’t getting much sleep last year either, but for totally different reasons. Needless to say we weren’t going out at 3am to wait in line for any Black Friday specials this morning. Hell no.

Though I have a feeling i might be doing it next year… ^^;;;

I’m working on a christmas ornament for this year, as well as some dog tag designs to go with the zombie ranger shirt i’ll be posting probably tomorrow in the MegaGear store. Ugh, so much to do.

You can tell i’m a positive thinker though, because i went and started the downloads for the Clannad episodes that came out since Jack arrived. Haven’t watched a one of them yet, but maybe at some point i’ll be able to…