LookingLand

Lester says eh ~

2009-10-18T17:47:19Z

i dream in black and white. sometimes i can perceive color (i know a truck is red, for example), but usually that's just a perception ~ the dream itself usually has no color. occasionally it will have spot color (i dreamt of being a photojournalist trying to break some story in Iraq and being chased inside a huge scientific military complex. there was an escalator and as i descended, a giant koi was swimming in the air before me. the koi was every color of the rainbow ~ stuff like that). i know other people dream this way too. i wonder if is has anything to do with my inability to learn color theory....

but i digress. the point of this post was to make an announcement.

it's official: my long violent war with color and color theory and coloring is at an end.

in case you are wondering, nobody won.

meanwhile, we have to bury the dead ~ which amounts to six pages of art that i will be posting in installments starting tomorrow and running daily through November 7th. these are very much tweener pages in which the coloring style is going to do some mutating. at the end, the new style will hopefully not be too much of a sudden shock but it will possibly be somewhat more monochromatic (which is about all the color i can handle). Fortunately this is not an art style change in terms of the drawing ~ just the coloring, i promise.

also, the good news is: if all goes well, Reconstruction will continue to post daily instead of just M-Th from here on out.

please remember ~ in spite of my cartoony art style, this series is intended for mature readers and even though it's been pretty pg-rated tame since i began in august, it won't always be SFW (ooo, i used a blogging acronym. i feel so hip). if you need warnings for weeks in which stuff is NSFW, let me know and i will post cautions in advance. if you need to know all the ways in which this story is going to turn down dark paths, please read this.

questions? qualms? wondering where that newly named pony is? i'm so far ahead in the drawing, you won't see the pony until november (sorry!).

hope everyone is having a happy weekend!

: D

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son of markers: return of the nib!

2009-10-03T17:53:26Z

i went ahead and spent some money and got a handful of markers to give 'em a go. i have mixed feelings of joy and trepidation.

things i like:

consistency of color.
no streaks/ease of blending.
no buckling on the paper.
it gives my work polish that i just can't seem to get with paint because of my tentativeness.

things that concern me:

Learning to use them. they color pretty no matter what you do with them, which is great, but i don't want to get too sloppy. also, while i like the brush nibs very much, somehow i can't control them as well as an actual brush with paint. i keep wandering out of the lines.
cost (?). i bought more colors than I probably really need, though ~ over time i will figure out a palette.
colors! zooks, i'm bad at choosing colors. i chose out of the "sepia" family, figuring i'd trust it to be, well, sepia (as i know it), but it's awfully bright. it's not that big of a deal because i can adjust the saturation on the computer (as i did above), but i'd like to figure out a truer color match eventually.

this is all so bizarre. i could color for (technically) free if i just did it on the computer, where i have bajillions of colors at my disposal and can erase my mistakes. but...

it's all about the artifact.

if i don't have something i can hold in my hand, i don't love it.

at any rate, i colored four pages this morning before noon ~ fastest coloring job ever. that alone is worth a lot. now i can spend the rest of the weekend working on totally new stuff! yay!

hope everyone is having a great weekend!

: D

p.s. the panel above is from a page you won't see until october 12th, i think. please note the dreaded corn field!

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i just don't know when to stop ~

2009-08-14T00:28:41Z

the above picture is about the size of a business card (tiny), and when reproduced, it will prolly be even smaller, and yet i put entirely too much time and detail into it (ridiculously so ~ the faces were excruciating).

i'm not exactly sorry that i did because it's an all right picture and i like detail (like the ribbing on Lester Dunne's socks), but if I've got to produce 2-3 pages a week, i can't really afford to spent three days painting only a handful of panels. granted, it's been hot and i've not been feeling like working, but that no excuse for spending what little work time i've had on a single panel!

so yeah. i feel like i need to be cautious of setting a dangerous precedent for expectations that i doubt i can meet consistently. and of course there's another part of me looking at this and thinking: oh wait, i forgot to add the embroidery to Morse's vest. doh!

launch is in three days. i have a ton of work to do still.

hope everyone out there is well!

: D

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in the grip of the mung ~

2009-07-31T17:27:06Z

home sick today. this is unfortunate because i have a bazillion things to do and am hacking and sighing too much to do any of them. the house is a horrendous disaster and i desperately need to do laundry. the good news is that i managed to dress, put a hat on my greasy head, and wander out to the farmer's market up the street so that i could buy fresh veggies with which to make a cauldron of leek soup.

in case you didn't know it, leek soup is the 9th wonder of the world.

despite the mung, i am going to try to get a good pile of work done. july is at long last over and i can throw myself headlong into working on Reconstruction. i have the first twenty pages (more or less) completed, which is quite the buffer, but i don't want to let the line go slack because i'm going to be posting 4 days a week (monday through thursday) and that buffer is going to get eaten up quick!

yes, you read that right: i'm posting updates monday through thursday with extras on the weekends (perhaps). it's only a slightly brutal schedule, but i decided on it because if i force myself to draw every day i'm hoping i will let go of some of the inhibitions that have kept me from being faithful to this project over the years.

this also means you will be seeing some wildly inconsistent artwork and i am trying to be okay with that. this isn't "real" artwork, after all, right? it's just a storyboard. so i hope you will be forgiving at least. and know that things will even off once i get into a rhythm with it all.

meanwhile, i will share with you this teaser. some of you had seen the digital version of this image. this is the "redo" in watercolor.

i'm really looking forward to the August 16th launch date.

now i must eat my soup and try to shake off the pall of mung so that i can be productive this weekend. if i have to be sick and it means i get a three-day weekend, then i had better make the best of it. later, there will pomegranate ice cream. naturally.

happy friday all!

: D

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