Naked Pixels

2010: Not What I Expected

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! We certainly did! Even though Christmas hasn't been the same without my grandparents these last few years, my sister's kids are turning Christmas into something that is different than it used to be, but no less wonderful. Something about the holiday would be terribly incomplete without them.

My husband and I had a talk after Christmas about how to tackle some long-term goals in the new year. One of the things I'm not verry happy about, but that isn't as bad as it first sounds, is that I need to cut back on my art for a while. This is not what we had planned, and to have gotten well into doing things the way we had planned, then having to stop and say, "No, this isn't going to work," is really frustrating. Almost heartbreaking, really.

Our plans had been based on the fact that, in the past, his physical concerns have been less severe in the fall and winter months. There's a lot to be done around here, and fall and winter was going to be our time to do it! Instead, I spent the entire month of December feeling pretty ill, and his physical limitations have not allowed him to take on the things we thought he'd be able to. There is now enough work to be done that I have to choose between my art and my home.

As I said... it's really not as bad as that makes it sound. It's not like I'm going to quit drawing completely. I'm just going to quit holding myself to a schedule for it for a while. I'll still keep doing the "at least one blog post a week" thing, and any posts that happen on a Wednesday will still be "Webcomic Wednesday" posts. This may even be what I need to help me get back to what I originally set out to do with this blog... talking about how and why the art is done, not just the fact that it's ready to be sold. I haven't been happy about how far I've drifted away from that over the months.

This is why I'm reluctant to announce plans for things. Not everyone's life can fit into a regularly scheduled workday, and part of why I'm able to do this is that I get the flexibility I need. But I don't feel so great about it when it means having to say I'm not going to have to put off for a while longer something that I've got people looking forward to. I can only hope that some of my readers are gamers. That would mean you're used to not knowing when something new will come out, being told it might come out on a certain date, being promised it will be out one month later than that, and then finding out it won't be ready for another year. Yes... I'm working on "game release date" time here.

I'm disappointed, yes, but not sorry. I see how many people feel they can't choose home and family over their work, and they hate themselves for it. I get to choose home and simply scale back work... not having to give it up completely, and not a permanent scale-back. It's not what I expected, but it's the right thing for us for now.

Now let's see where the rest of the year takes us.

Webcomic Wednesday: A Few of My Favorites

To help put you more in the mind of Wednesdays being webcomic days here, I have a short list of some of my favorite webcomics to share. I actually read a lot more than this, but I have most of them bookmarked and have to go back from time to time and read through the archives. There are a lot of great webcomics on the internet, and I could never keep up with all of them!

Digger by Ursula Vernon: This is an on-going story, rather than stand-alone strips, and a difficult one to describe. The tag line pretty much covers it: "A wombat. A dead god. A very peculiar epic." My favorite character all along has been Shadowchild, and I hope we see more of him soon!

Looking for Group by Ryan Sohmer (writer) and Lar deSouza (artist): A favorite among many World of Warcraft fans, and for obvious reasons if you're familiar with WoW. Still, the story stands on it's own. There's no reason you'd have to be a WoW fan to enjoy the comic, although being a fan of the fantasy genre would certainly help. I dare anyone to say they aren't tempted to hug Richard now and again!

Complex Actions by Talthos (writer) and Silkspinner (artist): This one is definitely for gamers! It really is more about gamers than the games, though, and not in a way that makes gamers look much different from anyone else. The way a gamer starts seeing game elements everywhere after a while isn't all that different from when I was sewing and started thinking, "I wonder what quilt that could go in," every time I looked at a piece of fabric. That includes bedsheets and people's clothes. And the frustration over waiting for a game's release can be very similar to waiting for the release of a book or movie. These are regular people... who play video games. And the comic is both well-written and beautifully drawn.

And finally...

xkcd by Randall Munroe: Stick figures are awesome! Honestly, I can't imagine xkcd being drawn any other way by this point. This is very much a math and science geek comic. The alt-text on each one really completes things. I first read xkcd when my husband sent me this one:

(Just in case you ever wondered how geeks say, "I love you.")

Webcomic Wednesday

Now that I'm getting closer to being able to say, "The webcomic is up!" I can at least start by giving you all a little more information about it, and establishing "Webcomic Wednesday" here.

Some of you have read my short story/parody The Call of Sockthulhu. (Some of you have even seen the real Sockthulhu!) The work I'm doing for a limited series webcomic is adapting that story to comic format. If you haven't read it and want to spoil the story for yourself, it's here, through my deviantART gallery. If you'd rather wait and read it as it comes out in the comic... well, I can't blame you for that.

The comic will begin on a Wednesday, and will be updated on Wednesdays. Instead of having a comic specific blog there and this blog here, I'm making Wednesday here the day for webcomic blog posts. "Graphic Content by Rosa Amarilla" is about all of my art, not just the Zazzle store, so I'll do this best by keeping one blog for all of it.

If I get much more excited about this project, I don't know how I'll hold the pen steady!

What is the mysterious "Other Project"?

The Other Project... hinted at, danced around, but never explained. I've brought it up so many times it must have started approaching "never gonna happen" status in some minds. (More than once, mine.) I even recently blamed some of my slacking off on Zazzle designs and blog posts on this Other Project.

Do you want to know what it is?

Do you?

I could tell you to come back Monday to find out. But, while I'd giggle about that all weekend, I don't really want to drive away people who like my work and potential customers. And, as the foundation for this has been laid, art is being done, and it won't be too much longer before you can all actually see the Other Project, I'm pretty damned excited about being able to finally say what it is!

The Other Project is a webcomic!

This is something I've been wanting to do for quite some time, but it didn't look like I would have the time for it. Only so many hours in a day, you know. I miss writing the way I used to, but there's a good chance I'll never get that back. The communication skills just don't work the same way in my brain anymore. I started looking at the idea of comics and graphic novels as ways to tell a story without having to communicate every word clearly to the audience. Certainly, it needs to be clear to me, but then I can convey much of it through the art rather than text. I'd rather do this as a webcomic, putting it out there myself, than going through the traditional process.

There was still the concern about time for doing this, and I kept mentally pushing it to the "someday" category of things to do. In the past couple of months, though, since the browsing changes that Zazzle implemented, I've seen quite an increase in orders from my store, and some of those orders have been designs that have been there over a year and were never purchased before. I don't feel like I have to push the store as hard as before to be able to make sales.

Doing a webcomic will also bring more stability to my work schedule. I know when I'll update it, and that means I know when the next one needs to be ready by. Working from an already written script means I won't be sitting up the night before the update mentally kicking myself for not having any ideas yet. Part of what I've been doing to prepare is getting a head start on this so that falling behind means it's the comic two weeks into the future that I'm running a little late on, not the one that's supposed to go up the next day.

I'm starting with a limited series comic to test the waters. If, for some reason, the whole process doesn't work as well for me as I expect it to, I only need to finish that limited series, and then I can quit without it meaning abandoning the project in the middle of it. If it does work as well as I think it will, then I've already got plans for an on-going story done as a webcomic.

Either way, I will still be doing things on Zazzle. New designs will be less frequent, but the store will be there and will be added to. And if the webcomic really is something I can continue doing, I'm sure there will be shirts, posters, and the like at some point. I would sell those through Zazzle, as well.

Rather than looking at this as changing what I do, I see it as growing from what I've been doing. I'm taking what I've learned from doing random pieces as the ideas hit me and giving it some direction, channeling it into something that follows a more clear path. I like to think my work is growing up. :)

Keeps your eyes open for an announcement for the webcomic!

Artists: Bernie Wrightson

The "Artists" posts are about artists that have influenced and inspired me. There are so many artists that will never be featured that way, though, and maybe they should be. Maybe they would inspire me, as well, if only I knew about their work or were shown their work from a different point of view. So if there's an artist you think should be featured, please consider submitting a guest post.

I was sixteen years old the first time I knew I was looking at Bernie Wrightson's work. I know that because I was sixteen years old the first time I heard a song by Meat Loaf and immediately felt like I needed to start buying Meat Loaf albums. (I can't explain this. I can only point out that if Meat Loaf, Tenacious D, and Spinal Tap would tour together I'd die of a broken heart if I didn't get to go to a concert.) I like to read the liner notes on albums. There's some interesting commentary sometimes. And there are a lot of people involved in an album that you may never hear of otherwise. That's how I found out Bernie Wrightson had done some of the album covers.

I also spent a big part of my high school years building a collection of Stephen King novels, and I found out Bernie Wrightson had done illustrations for Cycle of the Werewolf. Somehow, this is one I've wanted for a very long time, but still don't have. I've had the chance to look at it, though, and can't imagine it being quite as good with someone else's art. He also did the book adaptation for Stephen King's movie Creepshow, which also goes in the "Why do I still not have that?" category. (I have the movie. Just not the book.)

What I didn't know when I was sixteen was that I'd actually seen Wrightson's work several times in comic books. At this point, his style is recognizable to me. And it's a style that works, though I like to call it the "Too Much is Just Enough" style. It's not a visual assault for me, but something of a mental assault that I start to pull back from and look at a little at a time... and that's when it disturbs me. Which is a good thing. After all, most of what I've seen is his horror work.

There are just too many muscles, and too much bulging! Too many bits of flesh and stretchy mucus-like strings of goo! And how many colors can human flesh really be all at one time?

But instead of being visually "busy", it just seems a bit unreal. Then I take another look... Okay, so there's the werewolf. How many teeth does a werewolf have? Oh God, the teeth are sinking into the... Oh! That's blood. And internal organs. The art flows like that. What was "too many colors" at first becomes a mix of flesh, fluids, and light reflected from terrifying sources. Yes, there are too many muscles. Yes, it's unnatural. And that's how you know the victim isn't just screaming in pain, but also because their mind is at that point where it would be a mercy if their sanity would just go ahead and shatter.

Seeing something will always disturb me more than reading about it. It keeps me from being able to watch gore-filled horror movies, no matter how much of a fan of the genre I am. Wrightson's work has always been something that lures me back because I have to take it in small doses. I want to see his use of color. I want to take another look at how he does detail. I know I could learn from his use of lighting and shapes. But taking another look always means I can only look for a little while. Sure, it's just a cartoon... doesn't look real at all. But it sticks with me, and the themes turn themselves over in my mind for a little while. And isn't that exactly what art should do?

According to the Wikipedia article on him, Wrightson did production design for the Reavers in Serenity. I think of Zoe explaining what a threat Reavers are by saying, "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into our clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order," and I have to say Wrightson is definitely someone I would have wanted involved in creating such a creature.

Horror isn't everyone's "thing", though monsters do serve a purpose. They give us something to look at that can be defeated and destroyed when all of our real life worries and fears seem overwhelming due to their intangible nature. Some of you may find yourself wondering why someone would want to create such things, and why someone else would even want to look at them. Well... he also gave us Swamp Thing. Not exactly winning any "Cute and Cuddly" awards, but dude... he's Swamp Thing!

Geek Note: One could say it was Alan Moore who gave us the Swamp Thing I first became familiar with and I wouldn't try to ignore that, being a fan of his work, as well. But there had to already be a Swamp Thing to be handed over to Moore, and Wrightson was one of the two original creators.