Ahem

To the surprise of nobody who has followed my blog for any length of time, my productivity fell off the cliff right around the first of September. It MIGHT be that it coincided with the start of school. I just checked my history, and I often go from 20-30 posts in August to 1-3 in September, and then I start to slowly tick up again the following spring, peaking in the summer before crashing to earth again.

I managed to get a bunch of Army Ants pages in the pipeline by the end of summer, so I've been releasing new pages every day, and today finally hit the point where I had to go in and start adding more pages again. 

All of my creative energies at present are being devoted to staging our high school's production of "Romeo and Juliet", which I just cast on Tuesday and which has its first read through on Monday. I'm pretty jazzed for it. Maybe I'll share more about this at some point. I don't know if this will make as much sense to anyone else as it makes to me, but the pivotal fight sequence between Romeo, Mercutio, and Tybalt is underscored by the entirety of Ah-Ha's "Take on Me" and it's going to be sublime.

Trust me.

I would love to give you an update on gaming and comics stuff, but there isn't one, and I really just wanted to pop in, say hello, and remind you that the Army Ants pages are being remastered, released a page a day over on Comic Fury.  

I was thinking I might get a little solo gaming in this weekend, and the possibility is still out there... if so, I'll post about it. If not, I'll probably touch base again after "Romeo and Juliet" closes on October 27. 

Be well.

Of Cupcake Scouts and Composition

So, I've been a little bit grumpy about how everything played out with the Kickstarter that I still think borrowed a little too heavily from Cupcake Scouts (and how it raised over $100K with 'my idea'... if I'm being honest). I've kind of avoided Cupcake Scouts stuff for the last few weeks, which has been fine, because I've gotten a good deal of Army Ants '81 stuff done, and I'm very happy with how that's turned out, and I probably wouldn't have started that at all if not for the Cupcake Scouts snafu.

ANYWAY.

Mary is out of images for the Instagram she maintains for Cupcake Scouts, and asked for a drawing of the girls in a cemetary fighting zombies that are coming out of the ground. She really likes Halloween. So, I did this drawing, and as I was working, I realized that the composition of this piece is really strong. I didn't intentionally design it this way, but it sort of happened. But then I realized that 'good design just sort of happens' is what you get when you've been trying to get better at something for a few decades. I like how the whole image uses triangles - there is a line that goes directly from the hand in the lower-left along the arrow, up across Harper's arm, and then across Bri's arm. There is a straight line down from there along Bri's left side and her leg; there is a line back to the hand across the ground. Everything goes to a focus point on Bri's face - everything in the frame directs you back to that. I'm just really happy with how this turned out - when I do a full supplement for Cupcake Scouts, odds are really good that this is the cover.