NOTE: I wrote this on Monday and then totally forgot to post it.

The Christmas break is the longest continuous period of vacation leave that I take in the year. During the summer, I parcel out my vacation days to have three or four day weekends throughout the months of July and August. This year, for Christmas I took a solid week and a half off. During that week off I went to bed no earlier than 1am every night and woke up well after 10am most days. It was nice. REALLY nice. Going back to work this morning was therefore a shock. That it was raining didn’t help as I had to walk fifteen minutes on slippery sidewalks to buy my bus pass for the month which I had foolishly neglected to do when I went out on the weekend. Oh well, the routine has been reestablished now. It should be easier tomorrow (HA!).

I spent the better part of Thursday drawing a mash-up. Normally I draw mash-ups on the Friday but the idea I had for this one was ambitious so I thought I’d start early just in case I wouldn’t get it done in one day. I started around noon and by 8pm I had finished inking it and took a break. I did a little colouring that evening, leaving the bulk of it for Friday. I started around 10:30 on Friday morning to find that the driver for my bamboo pad wasn’t working properly and the other end of my pen (that normally works like an eraser) wouldn’t work at all. I spent at least a half hour downloading an updated driver and installing it which required multiple reboots. I ended up fixing the problem although the sensitivity of the pen changed and I had to adjust accordingly. By 2:30 I had about a third left to shade. That’s when disaster struck.

When I draw mash-ups I start by sketching out the rough shape of the character I’m drawing large enough to fill the screen. Then I zoom out and sketch the rest of the body. That makes for a decent sized picture of one character. Well for this mash-up I was drawing two characters and then several other things around them so the picture was huge. To speed up the colouring, I tried using a larger brush. That combined with the size of the picture was apparently too taxing for my computer and the software stopped responding. I tried saving and closing the software and it crashed deleting the file leaving only a tmpsave in its place. MyPaint wouldn’t recognize the tmpsave and no other software I had uses the .ora format so I had effectively lost all the work I’d done on the picture. 10+ hours down the drain.

Sometimes the mistakes we make work in our favour however. Normally I save the open raster file in a particular folder and then the finished jpeg in a different folder. Well, in this case, when I had finished inking the picture I saved the raster in the wrong folder and instead of moving the file over to the correct folder, I saved a separate copy in the other folder, leaving the first copy in the incorrect folder. So while I had lost all the colouring work I’d done on the file that was saved in the proper folder, I still had the black and white picture at least. I did try to recover the mostly coloured version because I didn’t really want to start colouring from scratch. The attempts I made were unsuccessful however and I finally resigned myself to starting over. This time, I reduced the size of the picture so that it would be less taxing on my system. Even then, there was a point when I used a brush that was apparently too big and the software lagged, but I was able to finish the picture (and it’s awesome!). I also discovered GIMP which is another application that recognizes .ora files (and the software I used to shrink the picture) which seems like a nifty program if a little more complicated to use than MyPaint.

If I hadn’t had the backup raster file, I still would have had another out, because I had saved a jpeg of the black and white picture  to show a friend what I was working on (again, something I don’t normally do). Colouring the jpeg would have been different than what I normally do and I’m not sure I would have gone through that hassle, but again, I would at least have had SOMETHING to show for the hours of work I put into the piece.

Saturday I took a break from drawing. I went to Zone 51 to pick up all the comics that were waiting for me and since I hadn’t been able to go to the Zone since Halloween, there were a LOT. While in Trois Rivières, I was able to pick up some new Skylanders as well. So it was an expensive trip. Saturday night I went to see Hunger Games: Catching Fire which I enjoyed.

Because I hadn’t drawn anything on Saturday, I had two strips to draw on Sunday. The first featured 11 different characters (sometimes all in the same panel) and the second only featured 4, which went a lot smoother. I had problems with my keyboard which frustrated me to no end because I’m constantly using Ctrl-Z to undo lines so it’s critical that my keyboard works properly when I’m drawing. I was already on edge because of all the problems I’d had on Friday and I got so mad that I smashed the keyboard against a box in my office. Not my proudest moment, but the funny thing is, it started working properly after that. I was really happy and relieved when I finished the second strip. I don’t think I’ll be drawing anything before Friday.

You’ll get to see the results of this weekend’s work in three weeks’ time but I’ve got some good stuff coming up this week too. Be sure to come back and see! I’m back down to two strips a week, and with Flashbacks on Fridays, there won’t be any Wednesday updates for the time being.

Have a good week!

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.

So there’s this thing called Christmas, right? I hear it’s a pretty big deal.

I got a good chunk of my Christmas shopping done this weekend. And BOY was it difficult! I mean, clicking on my mouse to order things off the internet? Killer! Whew! In all seriousness, there were some transactions that were more difficult than they needed to be and some sites aren’t as transparent as to their operating practices. Bottom line, if you’re advertising a product and there’s a big $100 price tag on the page and in the small print at the bottom it’s written that that’s only for the first installment, you’re being pretty shady. Actually, I didn’t even see the small print at first! It was only when I was halfway through the payment process that I saw that they were giving me the option to pay all three payments at once (for a grand total of $300). That made me go back to the front page and scroll around until I finally noticed the small print. Seriously?! I’m not going to name the company because a) I don’t want the person I was shopping for to deduce what they are (or in this case are not) getting and b) I don’t want to give them any publicity on the page.

I have the Crismus week strips drawn. That leaves one more week of three strips to go.

Speaking of strips, pretty big cliffhanger on Thursday huh? What? You haven’t read it? You’re waiting for the storyline to be finished to read it all in one fell swoop? Well, there’s still has a LONG way to go before the storyline is done.Are you sure you want to wait that long?

I was able to get most of the work done on a new flashback piece last night. I just have the shading left to do. My goal is to do one flashback from each theme I feel need to be revisited and then jump between the themes as I choose. Three weeks of Star Wars followed by a week of DC and then a week of Avengers before jumping back to Star Wars? Maybe! We’ll see how it goes! This week’s Tron flashback will likely be the only Tron revisit. The original theme was a small one to begin with and the flashback is kind of a two-for anyway.

Okay, that’s all for this week! Have a good one folks!