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