docsmachine

Two Bits...

One, my apologies for the "outage" on the comic. Tuesday's didn't update properly, and I only had time to fix the front page. Wednesday's update should have sorted that out, but apparently it glitched too. I went in and manually fixed everything, so it should all be back up to 100% again.

Thanks to everyone who warned/notified/panicked about it. :) I usually catch it first thing in the morning (my morning, not you East-coast types who are pra...

An Update on Commissions...

I've given it quite a bit of thought, and discussed it at length with others who have done such things (or commissioned such works) and I've decided that it basically wouldn't be fair to start accepting commissions of any kind right now.

I simply don't have the time. I have too many other projects I'm already behind on, and it would absolutely not be fair to charge for work I can't promise would be delivered on time.

I will probably start doing commissions eventually, I've gotten quite a...

Not an April Fool's post

Something I sketched up a few months back. Sorry I haven't had time to do much else here, or for that matter come up with some brilliant AF gag, but hopefully this ought to keep you happy for a bit. :)

Doc.

Also not an April Fool's post

Wet T-shirt Version. :)

Doc.

Commissions?

I'll start off by admitting I mentioned commissions below somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as I've offered a couple of times before, when I've needed a little extra bill money or the like, and got basically zero response.

If you're genuinely interested in a commissioned piece, I'll state right up front that I have very little spare time for artwork- or nearly anything else- these days. I'd have to ask roughly what I ask in the shop for custom work, which is generally anything from $25 to $50 an hour....

Rear Window

Another impromptu collaboration. This time he was mainly going for the lighting through the window, which had a good start, but there were enough little errors with the figure itself I "had" to tweak it a bit.

Neither one of us is going to win any art contests, and I still really need to work on my human faces, but the end result (should you pardon the pun) isn't bad. :)

Anybody want to commission or otherwise convince me to work this up as one of the TWB girls? :)

Doc.

Something a bit different...

A friend of mine got into doing art a few years ago, and has tried almost everything from airbrushing to oil paints and does pretty well with most of them.

He sent me this pic, on the left, that he'd been working on using a new Wacom tablet, and while starting to learn Corel's Painter. He was having difficulty getting the pose right, and I agreed- it's awkward and not... dynamic, I guess.

After a heavy day in the shop, I was kind of looking for something relaxing to do, so I spent... wel...

And a little extra...

I was having a bit of trouble trying to lay out the comics for this coming week, so while I was pondering that, I was just idly tweaking the previous pic. Two-plus hours later... :)

Doc.

Sitting Pretty

Needed a quick break from the hustle, put on some tunes and gussied up one of the recent book sketches. Also tried adding a third highlight color to the shading as well, which didn't work out too bad, but wasn't what I was hoping for. Might have to work with that some more.

Doc.

Moar Book Sketches!

Busy week in the shop, had to stop and dump out the camera cards. Here's some quick-and-dirty snapshots of some more of the book sketches from the last couple of weeks.

At some point, when I have a few moments of free time, I want to sit down and clean up and finish a couple of these...

Doc.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Or, for some of us, Happy Singles Appreciation Day, and Happy Half-Price-Chocolate Day Eve! :)

Pic based, of course, off the end of the recent "date night" storyline.

Doc.

Done!

As of today I'm fully caught up with all the book orders! I just have to take the last half-dozen to the PO in the morning and get them fired off, and I'll be 100% caught up.

I do have to apologize to many of you for the additional wait, but I've really done very little else other than print, sketch, wrap, box and ship for the past full week. :)

Not that I'm complaining (okay, not too much complaining :) ) but I've made like 15 or 16 trips to the PO, gone throug...

Book sketches!

Figured I show you ladies and gents a quick sample of some of the sketches I've been doing in some of the books. The one at the top right is the first-ever book sketch of Cara, by the way. :) (And only one person so far has requested Miki. :) )

While I try to mix things up a bit, I do find myself having to repeat poses a lot, simply because I'm doing dozens and dozens of these things, and I can't always come up with a new and unique pose for each and every one. :)

BTW, the one of Sandy i...

Wednesday Book Update:

Figured I'd give you ladies and gents a proper update, since there's a limit to how much I can stuff into a comic strip header. :)

As noted in Tuesday's strip (now switched back to a regular strip-only pic) you people swamped me but good. :) I made three trips to the Post Office on Monday, and three more on Tuesday, both days packing, boxing and labeling as fast as I could.

I hope I haven't made any major mistakes, but if you discover something amiss with your o...

Book Update:

I honestly did not expect so many of you to buy full sets, otherwise I'd have put that option up before heading off to my Superbowl party. :)

I've now added that, and using that option saves you 10%. For those of you who have already made a full-set purchase, I'll be refunding that 10% through PayPal.

For those of you who have bought books already, thank you very much! I really appreciate it! :)

Doc.

Pssst!

Don't look now, but all seven TWB books are now live in the Online Store!  :)

Everything should be 100% functional, but please let me know if you see an error, a typo or other issue. I don't have sets up yet as an option, those will go live later today. After the Superbowl. :)

Thank you!

Doc.

Book Update:

I know I haven't given many updates on the books, but believe me, there's been plenty going on behind the scenes. :)

That photo above shows just what I finished up TODAY. (Saturday.) On Friday evening I whipped up a quick fixture to help staple the page bundles more neatly and evenly, and it proved to work like a charm.

I stapled, bound and cut what you see there today, and now have nearly 500 books on hand, ready to go.

If all goes well, I hope to finally launch on Monday.  2018-02-04 11:02:56 +0000 UTC View Post

A little something extra...

... To go with your cream and sugar. :)

Doc.

Beachball

Another heavily-reworked old book sketch. The original did not include the 'wardrobe malfunction'. :)

Doc.

I survived the 8.2 Earthquake...

... And didn't even get a lousy T-shirt. :)

For those people asking, thank you, the shaker was exciting for a few moments there. Probably the strongest 'quake I've ever sat through, even if they did downgrade it to a 7.9 from the preliminary magnitude 8.

But I suffered no damage, nothing fell off the walls or shelves, the cat was largely nonplussed. A floating NOAA bouy out in the ocean a few miles north of the epicenter DID, however, supposedly record a "ten meter" spike in water height...

Helping her with that snarl...

:)

Doc.

Rubber Duckie

We haven't had an art-for-art's-sake post in entirely too long, plus, let's just say I needed to take a nice break, put on some tunes, and relax a bit. :)

This is a rework of an old book sketch from 2009. I always liked the pose and wanted to see it cleaned up and colored.

I am definitely going to have to do a beach-cookout scene in the comic sometime. :)

Doc.

Continued Apologies...

Sorry ladies and gents, I don't know why the comic hasn't been updating on time. We are, in fact, looking into it. Please bear with us.

Doc.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I actually had a pretty decent 2017, and I hope yours was as well. I'd like to thank you all again for your support, it's been incredibly helpful and I'm still incredibly grateful.

Even if you're not a patron, I'm glad you enjoy the strip, and hope you'll keep reading. I've still got a LOT of story ideas to work through. :)

Sorry today's comic is kind of a cop-out, I spent the evening at an undisclosed location, alternating between stuffing my face, watching Not-Top-Gear, and detonating ...

My bad, my bad...

 This one was very much my fault, guys- I mistyped the file name for the strip into the scheduler and didn't catch it.

Instead of "twb2511.png" I missed it and typed "twn2011.png". I  temporarily renamed the image file which will get us through the day,  and then the system will right itself with tomorrow's update.

Blame Christmas. I ate too much and just wanted to go to bed.

Doc. 

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Digging through my files to find what I need to put the books together, I ran across this bit of clip-art I whipped up for TWB, probably back around Christmas of 2005. We were probably doing the first or second T-shirt run about that time, so it doubled as a promotional for that, too. :)

But hey, it still works! Have a Merry Christmas, everyone, and Happy Holidays! I'd like to thank everyone again for all their generous support- I couldn't have built my Giant Orbiting Space Laser Platform with...

Apologies on the update issues, updated!

 I/we still don't know exactly what's wrong with the updates. We thought  it was some kind of outage between my server and the remote server that  does the actual updating, but this is getting to be too regular. We're  looking for a glitch in the software or some other explanation.
 

[Update, 12-21:]

I've been given assurances that the issue has been identified and fixed. Hopefully we'll be back to regular updates from here on out. :)

Thanks for your pat...

Book Update:

A few weeks ago, I sent out early copies of the all-new Book 7 to the $25-and-up Donors... and have gotten two of them returned as undeliverable.

Aaron of Oklahoma, yours was listed as "address not known", and Nicholas of France, yours was listed as "two different addresses" and returned "due to export control regulations".

If either of you would like to provide me with a different or corrected address, I'll be happy to send them off again. (Although Nick, the Priority mail to France cos...

Just in case...

Friday's strip posted, both a tad early (yeah, like a few minutes :) ) for you nice people, and in case my hosting service decides to flake out on us for the third time this week. :)

Not 100% happy with the perspective of the scene, but really, it took a lot of fiddling just to make it look that good. 

In case the layout isn't clear, the round thing at the far end indicates where the High Energy Physics Lab used to be, and the pass...

An update and a big thank you!

As most of you have probably already heard, Patreon is backing off their recent revamp for the donor system, and has apologized quite profusely for the... well, let's just call it boneheaded way they tried to roll it out.

There's still some issues with the overall Patreon system, and they're still going to try and work those out- but this time, at least according to the apology post, they'll shoot for...