Ruth and Gail wish you a happy new year ... up to a point

Marty experiment

I began with an old student card of mine and put some of Marty's characteristics on. After a certain point it stopped working the way I wanted so I left it unfinished but I know a little more about drawing him now...I think

Season's Gratings!

Gail wishes you as ok a Christmas as you can manage, given the circumstances.

Meg in colour

Freehand from sketchbook (a good thing as my scanner currently won't play nice with my PC) so I had to wing it a little. Anyway, this is the best Meg expression yet despite the asymmetry etc. Anyway.

More cartoony.....?

Very quick 'un with the idea of what the characters would look like if more cartoony. I think I still prefer it a notch or two closer to the previous.

Gail at Costume Party

I had an idea of Gail in this garb in a multi pager. I'm feeling everyone should be a touch more cartoony (ie atouch more cartoony than here).

Ruth Tells Gail an Urban Myth

The main thing here was not the drawing (my impatience left Ruth in the wrong position in the first panel and mangled her face in the last one) but to use the big blue north Queensland sky as a stand in for an eerie silence as Gail lets herself be chiled by Ruth's story. It's probably about 30 degrees celsius on this page.

Marty and Joshua Cross Swords

Working on Joshua is starting to get enjoyable. He is based on a real person but I wanted to avoid a direct portrait as his purpose in the novel isn't limited to my memory of the person. I'm still working on him but the breakthrough was when I realised who I was trying to get him to look like. As an alpha boy he needs to have some hunkiness but a non luggy one. I needed someone from the era. John Travolta has already been taken for Gail's reconstituted boyfriend, Gary. Joshua needs to be vain but also substantial. The other night I rewatched The Parallax View, a great paranoia thriller from the Watergate era. And there he was, Warren Beatty. I stopped the movie and started drawing Warren Beatty. But he can't just be a clone. So ... I'm still working on him....

The Good (if excruciating) Fight

For the last fortnight I have been battling against a number of updates and supposed improvements that threw my drawing routine from being a pleasure into the lightless pit of technoHell. The long weekend that I uploaded the four panelled pages from Marty looking at the dead snake to Ruth taunting Gail in the pool I updated my comics app Manga Studio from 5.0.2 to 5.0.3 and then the drivers for my Wacom Cintiq 13HD tablet.

Either or both or both and Windows 8 conspired to wrench me from ease to struggle. Why? Because in the middle of drawing with the breezy system I had set up my realistic nib pen variable line stopped being variable and was the equivalent of a big flat brush dipped in ink water. The eraser drew the same way. All the other tools created the same horrible looking line. It wasn't just a matter of adapting to the new line and getting some more work done. I simply couldn't do any more work.

Getting straight into forum world I found a lot of people with the same question and a very few offered answers which all proved effectual for a few drawn lines before failing again. I tried a few things but it just kept happening.

This weekend just gone I had my real internet put on which allows me a lot more freedom for larger installations and uploads of material etc. This coincided with the release of Windows 8.1 which I downloaded overnight on to the laptop I use for the comics work.

After some tweaking I was horrified to find that not only did the problem not go but an extra one appeared like a drifter demon riding into town. The cursor was about five cm away from the nib, even after calibration. And Manga Studio looked strange, as though at the wrong resolution.

Hardnosing it, I plunged into forumville again and tried resetting the display of the Wacom to small text and icons and turning all the buttons of the tablet that I don't use off. I've just finished the page below with Marty and Joshua and have been working on another scene with Marty. I didn't notice a single glitch.

I won't be announcing any breakthroughs in the forums nor here for fear of jinxing what might well be the fix. I'll also keep the cork in the champagne until the end of the week IF everything is still behaving. If it is, expect some more of these with any developments I can think of.

Let's hope.......

The Colour of the Sky

Ruth's Poolside Career Advice

Wow! This should've taken about half an hour. Three hours later.... Something has gone screwy between my tablet and my drawing program. I had to do a lot of resetting. searching for answers to questions I struggled to articulate (eg. my freehand lines all begin straight before curving) and having the eraser draw like a pen, among other time consuming disasters. I meant to nail this and get on with another project. But no ....

After party on the Strand

Autobiographical situation

Gail and Ruth in judgement

Still working on how to show the texture of yellowed north Queensland lawn. This one's mainly to get them talking and show something of the relationship between Gail and Ruth. For this and the previous one with Marty I've used real uniform designs from my high school. So far back in time that I shouldn't worry but still .....

Marty Moment

Ok, trying a few things out here. Using background colour to assist pacing, patterns, a little hatching (tending away from it with this look). I'll be putting a few of these up. They will not be necessary to read the novel but will express what I'm feeling about characterisation etc. Most will be from outside of the timeline (usually from school days so earlier). Overall they are helping me to make decisions about the visual style and getting used to getting expressive with colour. So, watch this space and hope you dig...

Ruth the rebel

An old A3 sketchbook had opened at this page as I'd leant it against a chest of drawers the night before. The original is an inked pencil. I scanned it for this and traced it before simplifying the lines and adding colour. No previous character developing process has made me so excited to keep going and get it right. This is a combination of the upgraded Cintiq, Manga studio and the decision to use colour. I hope to be uploading some scenes outside the scope of the book o'er the next few weeks. If you like this, stay tuned.

This is Ruth in something like the girls' PE uniform (without school logo) from my high school against a vague dry grass and sky background. Her rebellion? Thongs. Make no mistake, she thinks that's a joke, too.

Marty reborn

This is the first fully digital Marty. Rough or not it's the first one that looks like the character in my head.  Flubbed the beach when I ran out of patience as this was only a test. At first he had khaki army pants (typical in the north) but I made them grey as his token attempt at being a punk (or post-punk) in North Queensland, a kind of Factory records touch ;)

From old sketchbook

Marty and Gail on the boat towards the end. Just another colour test, this time with a word balloon.

So .... Colour ....

It happened while I was resurrecting my single panel blog Daily Tablet to get back to drawing every day, break in the new Cintiq tablet and explore the new version of Manga Studio. I looked up some famous birthdays to find a subject but instead drew a woman's face and coloured the lips red. It was an ok doodle but I couldn't take my eyes off the effect of the colour against the black and white of the line drawing. So I did some more.

It haunted me throughout the week and the more I thought of it the more I thought I'd made a mistake in the conception of the novel. I had planned on suggesting the heavy glare of the North Queensland sunlight a character in itself, constraining all the human characters by its power to prevent clear vision. To that end I inked without tone and only minimal hatching or feathering to advance the starkness of the light.

At some point (apart from a series of unexpected obstacles that impeded progress along the way) I looked back at most of the presentation sketches I'd done and felt uncomfortable at their flatness which robbed the lines of a lot of their expression (visible in some cases in the pencil lines left in). So I tried some toning. When you tone you have to make a decision at an early stage on how much you want the tones to suggest depth and how much pen work you want to do the same thing. A combination can work but it has to be carefully done to avoid looking like overbaking. Using only tones in black lines is more common but requires expert use of combination to get where you want. And then if I did that I'd lose the glare.

So, I started looking at photos of the real setting, the pale rust of the sand, the bleached high blue of the sky and the jade grey of the seawater brought everything else back as nothing else had. It brought me back into each frame I experimented with. Soon enough I started seeing the whole story in colour and as I draw to get the characters and hues right I am also doing something I haven't for a while, looking forward to working on The Monsoons.

Gail on Jetty

Getting back to a simpler more cartoony line for the colouring and prefer it.

Progress .. slow but progress all the same...

An early try at Gail on the jetty. She's too old-looking but it was an early one and only a pencil until I traced a scan of it and tried some flat colour. Yes, The Monsoons will now be in colour. It will be flat rather than graded and the shading will probably be in the inking rather by tones. More tests as I progress.

Also, the colours are reminding me more and more of the setting and the time. I never realised they would have that kind of effect, almost like listening to music from the time.

Something's happening

North Queensland Irish Family on the Hayles Launch to the Island