I'm going to try updating single panels instead of full pages. I'm only
getting these out every 8 or 9 days, which is not really frequent
enough. The single panel idea may not be great either, but it's the
price of getting a painted comic. IIRC Dead Heaven updated a panel at a
time, so perhaps it'll be o.k.
I'm considering recording my paintings and posting them to YouTube, or
Patreon. A ten minute clip takes several hours to upload though, so
it's not a trivial thing to do. There's a couple ways I could go with
the audio. I could talk about the painting process, but it's going to
be super-repetitive if I do that every time. I've thought about doing
philosophical commentary over the paintings, but world events are
getting super-dark and I'm dubious about whether people want to hear me
talk about it. The impression I get is that people would rather ignore
reality and hope it goes away.
About this page, I could have done a better job with the layouts. I'm
not happy with the compositions of the first and last panels. I made a
bit of a gain in painting knowledge however. I figured out it's quicker
to paint in soft light than to alternate between dodge and multiply.
If you use soft light you only have to switch between the background and
foreground colors, so it saves the step of changing the color mode.
It's not entirely necessary to pick the right colors either. You can
hit the magic letter d and and paint with black and white. It may not
be what you always want to do, especially if you have a saturated
painting style. It's fast though and that's great in and of itself.
I'm happier with the writing on this page than the art. I'm happier
with the writing for the entire comic than the art. On this page, I
managed to work in the idea of living in a simulation, without
explicitly writing about living in a simulation. In the past I thought
the "right" way to write is to create custom characters and worlds
around story ideas. Now I think grafting new ideas into existing I.P.
works just as well. Working with existing characters can create as many
happy accidents as problems. The idea of a simulated world works just
as well in XTIN as in a technological sci-fi story, and I can skip the
techno-babble and go straight to the people-babble. In the next few
pages the Guru will put out a view of the human ideal that is a little
different than the one of infinite technological growth.
That's all for now. Feel free to comment if you have an opinion on potential videos, or single panel updates, etc.
Replies
ralphosn - Thanks mate. The designs could be more detailed, but on the other hand it's good if I can remember what this stuff looks like too.
I'm going to try updating single panels instead of full pages. I'm only getting these out every 8 or 9 days, which is not really frequent enough. The single panel idea may not be great either, but it's the price of getting a painted comic. IIRC Dead Heaven updated a panel at a time, so perhaps it'll be o.k.
I'm considering recording my paintings and posting them to YouTube, or Patreon. A ten minute clip takes several hours to upload though, so it's not a trivial thing to do. There's a couple ways I could go with the audio. I could talk about the painting process, but it's going to be super-repetitive if I do that every time. I've thought about doing philosophical commentary over the paintings, but world events are getting super-dark and I'm dubious about whether people want to hear me talk about it. The impression I get is that people would rather ignore reality and hope it goes away.
About this page, I could have done a better job with the layouts. I'm not happy with the compositions of the first and last panels. I made a bit of a gain in painting knowledge however. I figured out it's quicker to paint in soft light than to alternate between dodge and multiply. If you use soft light you only have to switch between the background and foreground colors, so it saves the step of changing the color mode. It's not entirely necessary to pick the right colors either. You can hit the magic letter d and and paint with black and white. It may not be what you always want to do, especially if you have a saturated painting style. It's fast though and that's great in and of itself.
I'm happier with the writing on this page than the art. I'm happier with the writing for the entire comic than the art. On this page, I managed to work in the idea of living in a simulation, without explicitly writing about living in a simulation. In the past I thought the "right" way to write is to create custom characters and worlds around story ideas. Now I think grafting new ideas into existing I.P. works just as well. Working with existing characters can create as many happy accidents as problems. The idea of a simulated world works just as well in XTIN as in a technological sci-fi story, and I can skip the techno-babble and go straight to the people-babble. In the next few pages the Guru will put out a view of the human ideal that is a little different than the one of infinite technological growth.
That's all for now. Feel free to comment if you have an opinion on potential videos, or single panel updates, etc.