Only two shopping days before Christmas! Hopefully you don’t actually have any shopping to do because the stores be nuts.

Most of my shopping is done. I only have assorted little things to get for a game I’m preparing. I’m hoping that the last few items I’m waiting for will pop up in the mail today or Friday. Fortunately, they’re gifts I wasn’t going be giving until AFTER Christmas, but it’s still cutting tight. Other than these last postal holdouts, I’ve only got (a lot of) wrapping left to do.

I was on a two-strip schedule this past weekend and I was much happier for it. I was kind of tired when I was drawing the first so I made a LOT of time-consuming mistakes. I draw every character on a separate layer. This allows me to play around with the composition of the panel. I would draw a character, click on the wrong button and start drawing the next on the same layer and only realize it when I tried to move one around. Eventually I realized/remembered that I could select parts of the layer and copy it and then paste that part as a separate layer, so that saved me from having to redraw those parts again.

There are two panels that I decided to draw in MyPaint (the software I use to draw all the mash-ups). Actually it was only going to be one, but I ended up drawing two versions of it, and while I opted for the second, I still liked the first, so I decided to use it in another strip.  It’s now the cover picture for the Age of Animus Facebook page actually. I experimented with another brush to draw it. It’s called a slow ink brush and it’s interesting because there’s a slight delay between my movement and the line appearing on the screen. My curves ended up being a lot smoother. The line width tapers and expands depending on how slow and fast I go. I want to experiment with it further because the results are really promising.  I haven’t finished the second drawing yet. I really want to get that one right, so I put it aside. I have until January 6^th to finish it (the day before the strip is due up).

I’ve been visiting the local Wal-Mart every week to see if any new Skylanders were in. Sadly, other than Jolly Bumble Blast, it hasn’t been the case. In other Skylanders news, I’ve been playing Lost Island…up until my phone’s last update. Since then the game won’t load. If I had known that was going to happen, I wouldn’t have installed the update. I’m hoping that Activision releases an update soon. I had a couple of quests that were timed. I’m going to fail those unfortunately.