fredart : blogbits

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…

As most of you are by now aware, a little over a week ago our son Jack Obadiah was born. We knew he would probably be coming early (as indicated in the rant that is at this moment still up). I’ve had a lot of crazy stressed out weeks, but last week topped them all.

No, not just because it was our first week as new parents (in and of itself a life changing event) but because Baby Jack came early and we had to deal with a number of potential problems, one after the other, that thankfully has all come around and not become problems or health issues. After a week, it looked like Baby Jack had cleared entry to the world and really is doing fine. His launch crew is tired, worn out, emotionally drained, but very happy. As i said in the few updates i did to my twitter last week, Mom and Baby are fine and doing well, and now are doing well enough that Dad can relax just a little.

I can honestly say that i didn’t even go near a computer for days last week. I really need to say a big thank you to Dom and the rest of the MT crew for covering the site for me this week. I AM sorry about a whole week of Shirt Guy Dom comics. Thanks for being patient as i get my act together and get back to work, this time as the proud dad of a great little guy named Jack.

Now to work on a MT rant to give a slightly better account of how everything went down

This is one of many character design sketches i’ve done for a story idea i’ve been working on - its the character found in the recent colorwork i posted a few weeks ago. Like i said, i’m not going to post much info on this yet because the ideas are still formative, and i don’t want to give anything away yet We can say that its oddly futuristic, but with a particular slant that comes from my particular way of looking at the world.

[Link to new sketch]

Flehf. I feel like i’ve been hiding in a box for the past few months, at least from an internet pov. I’ve had so much going on in relation to the coming of our first baby that not only have i not taken the time to rant or blog about it, but i’ve almost not wanted to. It’s a weird thing, really. You’ll have little details about your life you don’t really want people to know about, and then you will have other more interesting things happen that you would love to blog about but you cant without explaining the things you want to keep private… i suppose thats just the nature of the net - you really do develop a conscious awareness of how people perceive you based on what you put up for people to see, and fears of crosstalk between data sets can make you feel… rather mum.

That said, it was actually a nice release to post my rant on megatokyo yesterday giving people a heads up on some of what Sarah and i have been dealing with in the past few months.

Today’s going to be an incredibly busy day. I still have to get back to work on the next comic, i wasn’t able to work on it at all yesterday, but i should be able to sit down this afternoon. I really don’t know where the days go sometimes.

The real indicator that i’ve been a little overwhelmed lately? I haven’t watched the new Clannad TV series from Kyoani yet. Not even the first episode. That’s telling
I’ll keep you folks posted.

I tend to work from light to dark as i work - i view areas as outlines and tend to apply color and shadow after the shapes are on the page. When looking at painting tutorials, i always note that artists often work from dark to light - creating areas of color and working back from that. That kind of this is not really possible when working with pencil (which is a thin, transparent media) but quite viable with computer art (as well as stuff like oils, etc). I did this sketch while sitting downstairs watching tv with Seraphim, having hooked my Intuos 3 up to my macbook to experiment. The subject of this painting is from a story idea i’ve been working on for several months that i’m not going to talk about yet

link to new colorwork

An odd thing about writing, at least for me, is that most of my best ideas come when i am working on other things. The past few weeks have been really good from a creative standpoint. Putting it all down in a usable form is not so easy, of course.

I’ve ben working quite a bit with Scrivener to zero in more tightly on better writing methods, a better ability to put in information, ideas, etc. Organize and reorganize them as needed to adjust to changes in story details and/or direction. Not so easy considering how my brain works, but i’ve been making progress. The hardest thing to get used to in Scrivener was to break things down into as many scrivenings as possible. I was doing entire scripts in one scrivening, but the way others seem to do it is give each panel its own scrivening, which makes it easier to move things around, and to use some auto numbering… you get the idea.

A few other things i’ve been playing with include Google Notebook, which seems to be remarkably convenient (we’ll see how well it works for me and if i keep using it). i’ve tried Yojimbo and DevonThink but the clipping aspects of them are still somewhat akward for me - yojimbo would work great if you could drag and drop firefox pages to it and have the title of the item match the title of the webpage instead of just the raw URL (this works in going from Safari to Yojimbo but not Firefox to Yojimbo - can’t really figure out why). I collect a lot of random data and bits that i can never seem to find when i need them, so i’m hoping that some sort of clipping/data and indexing program will help. I am probably going to experiment with Yojimbo more… I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve also been using del.icio.us for my bookmarking since the beginning of the year. I wont link to it yet because… i dunno, i hide links or things that i dont want shared, and there’s nothing there i really don’t want people to see, but there is this weird sense that people can build a sense of your thoughts by looking at what you are bookmarking. That’s not a problem, really, but when you are a writer… do you really want people following what you are bookmarking and looking at?

The other thing, the real challenge and the secret to using bookmarking like this well is becoming adept and organized at properly tagging things. The biggest problem with tagging is that you really dont get a sense of what works well until you have been tagging for a while. Revising your tagging schema after the fact is NOT easy, at least not with any of the tools that i’ve seen so far, which is really surprising.

Tagging is talked about a lot as a powerful way of managing data, but there are so few decent tools that seem to focus on how to work with and revise your approach to tagging after you start to get a better sense of what works best for you. You can have all your new tags up to snuff, but the stuff already in there… who has time to go thru and edit every bookmark they have taken in the past year? Where’s the data management tools and rule-based search and change functions to aggregate and combine similar tags? where are the tools that let you look at the structure of your tagging and see where you have redundant tagging and where you are lacking refined tags? Maybe it’s just me.

For now, my data collection and management is more organized than it used to be in the past for me - urls dragged to the desktop and dumped into a ‘websites’ folder. This is much better.

Oh, and if you are newer mac user and are looking for some of the great aps to experiment with, here’s a really great list of what really are some of the best aps for macs. Have fun.

Bweh. Last night i found myself twicking and twicking at the drawings over and over again as i adjusted and erased and modified the expressions, getting hung up on details and discarding frames and redrawing frames on 2nd and 3rd sheets of paper to be merged into the final comic when i scanned… and as it got later and i wondered and worried as i often do about the time it was taking.

The comic has been going well, but i’ve had a lot of trouble getting other things done. I’ve been trying to squeeze things into the day or two worth of time i have between comics - things like new products, a 2008 calendar, a few doujinshi projects i want to get under way, dealing with the Kodansha translations, trying to get to things with the new website, etc. My stubbornness about insisting on doing 3 comics per week is admirable, but looking at it from another point of view i wonder if i’ve been shooting myself in the proverbial foot all this time. Like that FexEx commercial where they wonder why they aren’t more productive. The woman suggests they get rid of the halfpipe, but the boss says no, the halfpipe stays.

There are two things i can do to make the MT comics work - by that i mean, I produce MT comics for free and i need to start working on other projects while MT is still going strong. I can simplify the art, reduce the time it takes to do them, or reduce the number of them that i do per week. I keep trying to simplify, but when i’m producing them i just can’t help but indulge in them - basically nullifying all attempts to reduce the time investment. Very noble, i suppose, but there are a lot of things that suffer. Rants, Blogs, Products, the Megagear store, products that i need to get designs finished for (so i can, like, support a family maybe?), personal life, getting things ready for our new baby… you get the idea.

The thing is, i don’t think that its the actual *production* time that is an issue. When i know exactly where the comic is going, when the script is solid and my vision of it is clear, it goes quickly. A fully developed comic with a finished script and layout can take 6-7 hrs to do, even with full backgrounds. I typically roll a lot of my development into the production, kind of a parallel processing thing. It’s very nice, but im beginning to think its a little indulgent and incredibly inefficient. If i am going to do 3 comics per week, i cant do long story development, short story development, dialoguing, drawing, and finishing all in the same day. That’s my halfpipe, and i think its got to go.

To do that, i think i need to do the one thing i have always considered off the table - go to a 2 comic per week schedule for a while. Each comic is taking a full day and a half to produce right now. thats 5 full days per week. Add all of the stuff we have to do related to the pregnancy, and… there isn’t anything left. No time for the store, no time for freewriting, sketching, story development, product development, ranting - anything. I need that time to add some balance and breathing room to the equation and stop being the indulgent, suffering “artist.”

I haven’t decided if im really going to drop to a 2 per week schedule yet, or for how long. I am this week - i need to regroup, finish the hatch on mondays comic, etc. This comic is mostly done, i have two frames to draw and dialogue to nail down. I’m gonna jump in and try to see if i can make some progress with some other things, things that have been needing attention for weeks.

Maybe it’s called getting realistic, im not sure. But maybe 2 regularly delivered comics with everything else you expect from these websites - rants, updates, etc - including some other projects like maybe ‘warmth’ getting off the ground (and that endgames doujin i want to do)… we’ll see.

I do work pretty hard, it’d just be nice to feel more of a sense of accomplishment more often. It might be more workable than than the way i normally deal with my productivity issues.

And one final test to see if i can get these trackbacks working to communicate with the MT site.

I’m working on a post for MT that talks about some of the differences between the kinds of pencils and erasers you can get in Japan compared to the pathetic selection they sell here in the states. I’ve been using .4mm pencils for my drawings lately, and i really like working with them. Since i can’t buy .4mm lead here in the states, i had Asmodeus pick up a selection of it, as well as some of the nice erasers (which you also can’t get here) and send it to me.

The fact that he sent it with a copy of Little Busters was really nice of him (I begged off getting the new key game because i have to start planning to buy toys for our little one, not toys for daddy :P) Even so, its a pretty nice little game, and oddly enough i was suprised to find myself seeing things in Natsume Rin that really clicked for me (maybe it’s the cats). (Wikipedia entry on Little Busters, and a really nice review of the game on Canned Dogs).

Sad thing is, i’m not even going to load up this game for a while, i just don’t have time to get sucked in Reviews from friends are good though.

Anyways, i took some pictures of them to use as a rant image, but you can go ahead and look at them if you are nice enough to be reading my poor neglected fredart blog. You’ll also note that i’m using a new camera, a Nikon D40x, which I just recently received as a gift (takes much better pictures than my first generation Canon Rebel :P)

Getting used to Quicksilver, and i’m finding one particularly nice thing about it - it’s helping to reduce my distractions. How? because i don’t have all of the programs running looking at me at the bottom of the screen all the time. I go and use programs when i decide to use them, not because i see it sitting there unlooked at for 10 minutes It’s really helpful in ignoring instant msg posts

And… this is the first post i’m trying with the alpha release of Ecto 3. So far so good, we’ll see if things explode when i post this