Got this idea from Dresden Codak (one of my favorite webcomics btw):

For the nominal donation of any amount whatsoever, including single pesos, you can have an extremely high resolution wallpaper of either of these images:




From now on I'll post a wallpaper a month. It won't always be clouds, but I bet you that it will be sometimes. Tell me which one you want with the Paypal message and include an email address.

(If you're curious what I'd do with the money, at the moment I am saving pennies to do one big print run of Cloudhopper. So let me know if you know anybody who wants to invest a couple thousand dollars).

With this page Dan is done wandering aimlessly around on top of clouds.

Forever, actually.

Story's a year old now. Look how far we've come!

It occurred to me the other day that the part we just read is about freedom, and the problems of freedom.

Ka-CHUNK! Another tooth in the gear that is this story.

It's at a difficult, labor-intensive stage right now. I expect when this story is done I will have taken apart the Campbellian storyline as thoroughly as ever I could. It all feels a little tame these days. In a world with stuff like this:


Terrifying Sniper Prank on Japanese TV - Watch more Funny Videos

I bet you the people who made this aren't in jail right now. I bet they got rich even if they are.

What this demonstrates is that narrative can now reach right out and grab you. Art is interacting with the audience in new and unexpected ways, and it's certainly unpleasant at first.

The poster and page 124 are on the way.

Zach and I are working on a comic called The Red Calf. It could be described as "Flintstones meet Deadwood." It's easily the strongest collaboration I've ever been part of and we got all sorts of pages done. Post it as soon as he's ready; I think the general plan is to make it an Iphone app.

Cloudhopper: The next three pages and the poster, which all need to be done at once, are the most complex pages yet. So they take time. The poster alone has absorbed twenty hours and forced me to relearn perspective drawing.

So when you see them, yer gonna plotz.

But it's taking a minute.

To tide things over, here's all of Cloudhopper book Two to review. Please, y'all, you know how I love art criticisms. If you like the work, please be generous with critiques and paintovers and the like, so we can take this thing to the next level of awesome.

( Read more... )









oh and I am not exactly sure what this is but what the hey, vote for it:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/unnecessaryg.com/artwork/

Please? And I'll do my part and update my art portfolio web pages very soon, I promise. It's only a couple years out of date, anyway...

I am giving away free Cloudhopper posters to anyone who would like one. Message me below (or email, facebook, whatever) with your snailmail address and I will mail one to you.

I have also dropped the price on Book One substantially -- it's $12 now, shipping included (if you live in America or it's not too expensive). Here's a button you can press to buy it:

Considering the vile and uncouth nature of my next project, and the ease of doing so, I have made Cloudhopper kid-safe. Which was not very difficult. I just went back and drew little lines over the curse words. There are only three.



That's page 007, which is funny because it's Dan's least suave moment, ever.



Seriously good to be home.

This one took forever and I don't even know why, it's not the most complicated or anything. And I'm still not precisely satisfied with it.

Other stuff is happening fer shure. There's a lot been going on since I got back to town.

I did a bit of the music for one piece in this here modern dance performance:

http://www.nowplayingaustin.com/event/detail/440121943

That was very interesting. First time I've ever heard my music played for an actual audience, it went better than I could have hoped (in that nobody stood up and said BOY THIS SONG SUCKS. So my expectations were low).

Zach Taylor and I are working on a comic right now. It's about cavemen in Kentucky, seven thousand years ago.

And there are all sorts of other excitements about right now. Oh, we're riding our bikes to Enchanted Rock in October. And there's the ASG art show! And Alicia's wedding! And the glow-in-the-dark party at my house tomorrow...

Yes, this is probably why the comics are a bit slower...

Happy memorial day.

I know some of you are thinking, why did it take so long? It's been two weeks since the last one. Certainly he can't have spent all that time drawing this one page.



Yes I did. I think I put fifty hours into this page, when it's all said and done. And there's still more I want to do, but I've finished the basic construction and will fiddle with it as I move on into the story.

This page has drastically changed my expectations of the story. For one thing, modern stuff it a bit trickier to draw than natural stuff. For another, doing the colors better takes more time. For a third, I had not realized how insanely intricate color crowd scenes are. Making sure crowd scenes have a flow and do not clash with themselves...it's a whole other world from monochrome. So there will come a time in about...oh, twenty or thirty strips...when this story will slow down dramatically. Dramatically.

So I think I really am going to slow it down and do a "prestige" (heh) web relaunch very soon, start posting (in English again! With substantial revisions, too, because I have very deeply revised the first pages already and I'm gonna do more) on a thrice-weekly schedule and spend as much time as this series is very apparently going to take.

I'm scaling back from "done in a year" to my original expectation of "done by July 2011." Let's see how close I get to that...

My visual memory and senses have really woken up in the last few weeks. Since SDCC. The combined experiences of watching people read Cloudhopper #1 (I couldn't have asked for a better laboratory of honest reactions), the glimmerings of an understanding of color and light, and the simple epiphany that caused where I shook myself awake and actually began to look at the things I saw around me have made the last month very pleasant. It's a lot of fun to just look at things right now. Yes, shadows are more saturated than bright areas. No, I have no idea how that is possible. But it's incredibly pleasant to perceive.

This has brought with it a sort of gift of visual memory, which is not something that I possessed ten years ago. It's been building since I began to learn to draw, but now I can activate it and use it, sometimes. Not the way my brain normally works. It's basically my synesthesia running backwards -- instead of visual things creating auditory cues in my head (which is how I draw, when you get right down to it -- I throw lines down on paper and pull out the ones that "sound" wrong. I know it's strange but that's how it works. I also "hear" words and dialogue when I read them, which can be distracting and may explain my habit of arguing with signs), I hear a word and get a mental "image" attached to it. Usually a memory image -- you'd be surprised how quotidian my mental imagery is. I don't have nightmares, I don't see monsters or fanciful beasts, I rarely imagine things that don't exist. It's very Kubrickian in its way. That very rarely used to happen -- it gets to the point where I can do it by choice now.

So there is such a thing as learning.

This whole "learn-to-draw" experiment has been very fruitful.

Sorry this took so long -- it wasn't actually this one, but the one after it. 114 will be mind-bogglingly complicated.

Below the cut is a Giffen art retrospective I did for scans_daily. I'm posting it here in case you would like to see some of the art of Keith Giffen, one of my favorite comics artist.

I wanted to do an entire page where he looks at lichen.

Sounds exciting, right?

I still might do it.

Is Glenn Beck the conservative Stephen Colbert?

Philip K. Dick was right when he predicted that someday the news will be read by clowns.

Have no idea why this one took so long (worked on it for days) except to say that I've changed the approach to shadows and it seems to open up a lot of possibilities with depth. Do you think the subtle change in POV works from panel A to B?

Too subtle to even notice?

Anyway, I feel safe asking, because I checked my friends page and lately the only people posting are the artistic types and the political types. The folks with the more "casual" approach to the internet tend to comment on Facebook.

It seems that LJ has become an excellent artistic platform.

Turns out that clouds are so white that they have all sorts of hues in them. They're so desaturated you can get away with almost anything.

How to make word balloons instantly.

*letter everything so it fits in ovals.
*use the oval tool to make the word balloons. This bothers some people, but I really like the effect. You can use a lasso select and then smooth it, if you prefer wobbly edges.
*make a new layer, fill the area with white.
*use the straight selection tool to draw a triangle from the center of the word balloon to the center of the speaking character's mouth.
*shrink it until it's a tiny little wedge. fill it with white.
*if you must curve the wedge make a second layer, fill it with white, and use the warp tool, then merge them.
*put a 10pt (frex) center stroke style on the layer.

That is so easy that it took you longer to read it than it does to do it. If you don't mind oval balloons then you can do the most complicated page in less than a minute.