dupe

notice about update

hey, i already said this on my tumblr but i'm just letting you all know that the page will probably be up a day late. there was a fire in my apartment today and it was an entire ordeal very unexpectedly.
i'm fine, everybody's fine, i just haven't slept at all, my mind is all over the place and i'm exhausted, i'd rather not have people staying up late thinking there'll be a page up at its regular time. it's about halfway shaded at this point, so i don't think i'll have trouble getting it up to...

familial stranger, page 21

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the shading in this page was much less frustrating.
the limited palette makes sugar's design elements like her eye markings obscuring her eyebags much more extreme... you can't even see any tired lines under her eyes, yet i still draw them in every sketch... just i...

7/21 stream (finished)

today i'm just going to be chipping away at that comic tutorial again.

https://www.twitch.tv/wispworst/

stream started at 7:11 pm PST.
stream ended at 9:15 pm PST.

fresh meat, page 9

i'll be glad when this scene is over... it's taking forever. i'm finding myself crunching these deadlines almost every week because i keep trying to cram as many panels as i can reasonably fit just to make it go by faster.

originally, i had written this scene to be very vague, in a format of disconnected panels to emulate total disorientating and fatigue, but i felt it would never get the content across clearly enough.

familial stranger, page 20

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this page frustrated me. the shading on sugar to make it clear that she was in a dark room at night sounded simple in theory... was much more time-consuming in practice.
i'll have to experiment with using palettes in a different way for night/dark scenes... maybe making the lines a light color.

i also broke a few "rules" that i usually have for myself on this page.
one was "don't let speech bubbles intersect with panel borders." this confuses ...

7/14 stream (finished)

today i'm going to try doing a character designing tutorial.

ALSO: if any of you voted for this month's stream winner because you wanted a critique, you can leave something here or dm me, otherwise i'm just going to plan on all of these being tutorials.

https://www.twitch.tv/wispworst/

stream started at 6:34 pm PST.
stream ended at 8:52 pm PST.

fresh meat, page 8

this page was originally going to be a little longer, but i ended up trimming it... about 9 panels longer, if that elucidates why. sometimes the pacing of comics is frustrating, given i have a minimum and maximum for panel count, especially because i usually want the pacing to be very specific, but i want to get through scenes in less than several months.

either way. i'll be playing with the next page's pacing to try to integrate the idea of the pacing i had before i had to trim this page.

familial stranger, page 19

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whew. this page gave me a hard time, i was torn between a lot of different directions i could go.
(EDIT: did not finish that thought all the way... i mean i'll probably talk about it in the afterword post once familial's done)

7/7 stream (finished)

today i will either be critiquing or drawing a tutorial on dynamic poses, depending on turnout

https://www.twitch.tv/wispworst/ 

stream started at 6:33 pm PST.
stream ended at 9:18 pm PST.

filler 52

a folie a dupe strip i've been working on for the last week.

dupe is a very literal-minded person, which has always made the references to god interesting to me.
the interpretation of the word "god" comes from the referential use to explain many unknowable or unexplained observations and phenomena, extrapolated to mean an unknown itself -- probably because the definition of god can vary wildly, making an easy literal understanding from a dictionary effectively useless.

july stream poll

request streams - as a nod to artfight this month (although not the first time i've done request streams), these are streams where you can request something (a character, a scenario, etc.) and i'll draw it.

comic work streams - when i work on comics, i stream it (does not apply to fresh meat work), very to-the-point.

AU streams - streams that focus on drawing or playing with concepts of characters in alternate universes -- usually a lot ...

july 2018

hey folks. new month, new update.
i'll get my thanks out of the way early and say i appreciate the patience, as last month was a very exhausting ride, with a pretty significant fumble at the end.

i'll be taking a break for the first week of this month, as with last month. the positive side to crashing at the end of the month means that i won't be sleeping through half of that break this time around, so i am hoping to actually stay in gear and sketch some pages for the various running comics...

6/30 stream (finished)

today i will probably just be drawing a mini-comic of inconsequential meaning

https://www.twitch.tv/wispworst/ 

stream started at 4:53 pm PST.
stream ended at 7:13 pm PST.

fresh meat, page 7

1) while there was some ambiguity with the intentions of the nurses up to this point, the deliberate mind games start here.

2) i try to go out of my way to make sure i write kim like a teenager... a little immature, a little emotional, a little self-centered. i noticed that she's definitely been (rightfully) upset and pissy multiple times throughout the comic, but her depression has sort of been AFK, at least the classical idea of depression. she is definitely an angry depressed person, as i w...

familial stranger, page 18

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such foul language, lola...
this was a tough page to figure out, because i wanted to wrap it up in 2 pages, but there are still several things i want to canonize. gonna see how well i can pull it together on the next page, maybe extend it into 2.

(also:...

6/23 stream (finished)

today i'll just be working on comics... SOME kind of comics.

https://www.twitch.tv/wispworst/

stream started at 5:36 pm PST.
stream ended at 7:50 pm PST.

fresh meat, page 6

definitely need to touch this one up... here it is tho!

writing by hand always seems like a really simple, easy panel, but it honestly takes forever to do well.

--OH, and i keep forgetting to show this nurse's design outside of the green lighting:

she's actually pretty purple! i didn't want her to be the same color scheme as the meerkat.

this pag...

side comic poll

you can look at the preview snips and general summaries for this poll's options over here
(honest to god never going to understand why they don't let you add splash images or cover art to any type of post instead of just image posts)

side comic options for ~august

familial stranger technically isn't done, but it's coming along,  and i've been itching to work on something besides that and fresh meat. i figure maybe with the breaks, maybe THIS time i'll be able to build up a buffer!!! (familial stranger actually did have a sketch buffer at the beginning, but it eventually dwindled.)
i ended up tweaking and nitpicking the color palettes for these quite a bit, but... there were improvements.

anyway. both of these comic options feature felix. i figur...

familial stranger, page 17

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this scene will last ~1-2 more pages, and then there will be a closing scene, with lola and sugar again, which i'm guessing will be ~2-3. so this one will finally ca...

6/16 stream (finished)

today i'll be drawing... something alright. either toons or comics, maybe both.

https://www.twitch.tv/wispworst/ 

stream started at 5:10 pm PST.
stream ended at 7:25 pm PST.

fresh meat, page 5

and we're back on track... i was not very happy with the lighting and coloring on this page, but i've been rendering for hours and my brain is mush. i realized while i was working on it that the lighting was intentionally "ugly" and rather unflattering, as florescent lights tend to be.

the original line that went in place of "watch your tail" on this page was "you can sit in the chair by the wall" -- which confused kim, because both chairs are by the wall. as i was drawing it, i became more "s...

character comparison 1

so i've been wanting to make more posts to the $10 tier for a while now, and i know that i originally wanted to do more... writing and analysis for this tier.
one idea that i had was comparing characters who had similar roles or personalities. in this case... 

it's that sugar and jason have similar personalities.

i guess i'll start by outlining how their characters are similar. this is a bit of a challenge...

familial stranger, page 16

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this page was interesting to write out, mostly for lola's lines. lola's been such a well-established character for so long, it's been a while since i thought i could ...

6/9 stream (finished)

today i'm going to be messing around with drawing a tutorial about comics.

https://www.twitch.tv/wispworst/

stream started at 6:00 pm PST.
stream ended at 8:30 pm PST.

fresh meat, title page

whew! been a while since i had to use all 4 of my color mixers working on a piece. this is the update for the week.

i was really stumped for a title page for this comic, although now that it's DONE of course i have more ideas of what i could've done. i started working on this about a month ago and sketched out 2 other ideas.

this one, the one i went with under the advisement of my wife, isn't like drop-out's title page, where it's from a scene that's going to happen in the story. instead...

june stream poll

most of these are self-explanatory, please keep in mind that comic work streams will probably not include work on fresh meat to avoid spoilers, etc.

june 2018

it's a new month, and that calls for an update.

as mentioned at the beginning of last month, my current work structure is nnnnot quite sustainable, and i really felt it throughout the month. even making this today was difficult, and it's a pretty simple illustration.
more specifically, i mentioned that i'd be experimenting with break structures, and so far the most appealing option was a week off at the beginning of the month. so... that's what i'm doing. no updates of any kind for a week.<...

fresh meat, page 4

i am very, very tired, i haven't slept since 2 am thursday, i'll fix anything wrong in the morning, as i'm not even lucid enough to be able to tell anymore, but enjoy as-is for now.

(the lighting in the hallway bit was pretty interesting to do, because i wasn't using a light source color concept or photo reference, just a visual memory mainly i'd describe as "dirty florescent light")

EDIT: OKAY, i'm awake now, so i wanted to say some stuff about the page that i wrote notes abouts, y'know...

filler 51

this comic turned into something very long and challenging (i've been working on it on and off for about 10 days now). by the end i was very frustrated - my version of paint tool sai had recently started to give me an error that says i don't have enough memory to open it, when i clearly do.
i downloaded the 32-bit version, which opens, but my license for the program is for the 64-bit version, so it opens as the "demo" version, which doesn't allow me to save files larger than 10,000 pixels (i'...