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Monday, November 30th, 2009
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As per my last post I've been doodling in my lunchbreak recently, to try and get some ideas for this comic I've decided I'm putting out for the end of March next year. It's been fun so far in that rather than trying to come up with full-length stories I've just been tossing out ideas for one or two pages, including a couple of silent or mostly-silent comics, which is a nice change.
( This is a rough sketch of a page from one of the silent strips I'm working on )
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Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
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Ye gods and little fish, it's been 13 weeks since I posted here?! Evidently my previous notion of "journal comics" has failed.
Oh well.
( Cut for TL;DR )
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Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
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I don't have many scars. I'm generally not prone to the sort of adventurous behaviour that leads to striking scars and exciting stories. Sure, I have a few, but I've got nothing on a Sagat or The Joker; heck, I've barely got anything on Harry Potter.
The only scars I have with any kind of story to them are the series of pink blotches that are spattered along my left forearm, from the one on the back of my hand to the cluster marching their way to my deformed left elbow (which should be an interesting story, but isn't - the bones in my arm are slightly twisted and the joint is wrong, so I can't turn my left hand all the way around. Sinister indeed).
Those are the series of scars from the summer of 2001, I think, where I got more drunk and miserable than usual one night and decided upon the obvious solution of spending the rest of the night drinking, smoking, and then stubbing out cigarettes on myself. I'm lucky that the scars aren't too bad as they are now, since my immediate reaction the next day was to try and hide them, because I wasn't really sure why I'd done it - or more accurately, I had some idea of why I'd done it, but didn't really know how to put that into words or what I should do about it. So instead I popped the blisters that had swelled up overnight (bad idea), slapped sticking plasters over the popped blisters (worse idea), and pretended I'd had a very unusual skid off my motorbike which led to very very localised grazes (worst idea). This went on for, oh, a couple of weeks, until one of the friends I had at the time spilt the beans to my folks, leading to exactly the conversation I'd been trying to avoid.
I don't remember how it went; I remember that my dad took me to a chemist to get some disinfectant for my arm and proper bandages so that the sores could heal properly. I remember trying to pretend it wasn't something serious and failing, then lapsing into silence.
The sores healed up, but for a long time afterwards I felt very self-conscious about them. For a good while since then, I would realise if I had had one too many drinks because the scar tissue would be bright pink as the blood vessels near the surface of my skin opened up. I started wearing long-sleeved t-shirts a lot around this time, which drew less comment than you might expect considering I was living on the Coast where temperatures regularly went up past 35 Celcius during the day and didn't drop much at night.
As a result of that incident, I realised that I obviously wasn't happy at the time - partially this was down to my social life, which was built up around a few friends who I liked, but routines that I absolutely detested. Dressing up smartly to go to tacky tourist-oriented bars, drink shit lager by the gallon, lurch around in an allegedly rhythmical fashion to the same shit music day in day out, and in my case frequently end up bored because everyone else is on the pull and I'm uncomfortable and don't know what I'm doing. So I said "fuck that!", and started going to a couple of other bars I knew of down dingy back alleys, that served good (and cheap!) beer, played good music, and had a different atmosphere. I knew one or two people who frequented them, and gradually got to know more of them.
This had all been coming for a long time, but I'd been ignoring the problem - partly because it wasn't such an issue when I was in university, but partly also because I was lazy and taking action seemed hard. Heck, even admitting that I needed to properly sort out the mess I'd made on my arm took nudging.
Unfortunately, I didn't admit to myself that part of what was making me unhappy was also that I was out of my depth in college, and hadn't really admitted that to myself (or tried applying myself fully, because deep down I think I was even more afraid of trying my best and still struggling). Which was a bit of a shame, since it led to me nearly failing my exams and still doing pretty badly.
In its own way, though, the whole thing was a learning experience. I've started using Bio-oil a few months ago to try and reduce the visibility of these scars because I don't like seeing them - they remind me a bit too much of feeling unhappy and lost. I don't want to get rid of them completely, though, because they're a useful reminder of what can happen if I ignore a problem.
(The other scar that serves as a reminder of a useful lesson was acquired the summer before the above story took place; I acquired it at the business end of an empty bottle of Smirnoff, after having unsuccesfully tried to prevent an acquaintance from starting a fight with a young Spanish chap and the thirty-odd friends of his my acquaintance hadn't noticed around the corner. Upon failing to prevent the fight, said friends assumed I was involved in the fray as well and clocked me atop the skull. I was fortunate to fall in such a way as to have a low wall and a car between me and the fight, so I got away, and managed to get several metres before realising that I was feeling dizzy and there was blood pouring down my shirt. Upon phoning the emergency services to report the incident, I realised I could probably walk to the nearest hospital faster, and got a taxi there instead, whereupon I got four stitches. After the 48 hours of concussion-watch were up, I realised that the evening's lesson was that sometimes it's not worth trying to stop someone from doing some damnfool thing that'll earn them a kicking.)
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So anyway, I mentioned Wii Fit earlier and figured I'd write a bit about it.
( Read more... )
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T-mobile bugged me about renewing my phone contract so I now have an Android G1. So far it's fun, though getting used to a phone whose battery life is 2 days or less and has an inferior camera to my old Cybershot will take a while. On the other hand, I've found brain-training games and a crude Mahjongg game, which will clearly consume what litle free time I have leftcontribute positively towards my life. Not to mention being able to use Google Maps on the go for the many times when I get lost...
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| Subject: | Thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eddirt... |
| Time: | 4:31 pm. |
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...I have discovered the undiluted glory of ginger snaps and coffee. Yum!
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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
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So I've been very bad at updating this lately, but am making efforts to get better. Since I haven't had much time for comics recently, I thought a couple of photos would be a better idea:
We've had some awesome weather lately, and my parents came over to visit so we took the opportunity to go up to Hampstead Heath. This picture is from the top of Parliament Hill, a spot popular with kite flyers.
This is an older picture I took a couple of months back, on my way home from work. I like the colour and something about it seems representative of Kilburn as a whole.
(On another note, I finally wrote up our second week in San Francisco - the entry, complete with pictures, is here).
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
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Just a quick thing I dashed off while trying out the demo version of Manga Studio, after hearing Bob Byrne (hereby known as The Spunker speak highly of it.
I'm not too convinced. I like the variety of brushes, it's the sort of thing that I can use to hide the various flaws in my technique to add a bit of flavour to my drawing. But I don't like the interface, and I say that having played with several different packages. I might spend the $50 on it when payday arrives, but thus far I'm not convinced I should abandon Photoshop Elements or Paint.NET just yet.
(The sketch is a preliminary thing trying to settle on a character design for a script a friend asked me to draw; if it works out it'll actually end up in print, which seems more of a baffling notion than an exciting prospect, but there you go...)
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My last post about San Francisco ended with a somewhat lazy Sunday where we waited for our hangovers to lift. Now to move on and recount the rest of the time we spent there.
( The adventures continue... )
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Just over a week ago, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I had an got to spend the day travelling to San Francisco, for a two-week holiday wrapped around a wedding reception for a friend of mine.
Here's what we've been up to:
( Here be pictures of a worksafe nature )
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Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
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I haven't been very good at posting here recently, which is a shame - I've already mentioned about going to the Thing last weekend (where I took barely any photos, hence not uploading them), but I haven't been doing anything much comic-related. Well, other than getting people to contribute to The Book O' Flange at the post-Thing pub session. (On which more when I've scanned it and assembled the pages in Photoshop - I now regret choosing to use an A3 sketchbook for it, but there you go...)
Anyway, after finally finishing the next Fyshbowl Comics strip (only a month late!) I figured I should do some sort of sketching, and decided to sketch the central character for a project I've been planning for a while. I've got the script side of it worked out properly now, so hopefully it should start to take shape soon.
Enough of my rambling, and on with the sketch:
( Pay no attention to the man behind the cut )
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Excuse the lame south-park-based joke in the subject there, I couldn't think of anything less stupid. The new series of South Park has been unexceptional, although it did offer unexpected gold in the line "You shouldn't use the word fag, it's a hate word and it's insensitive to butt-pirates".
Anyway. More important is the fact that last weekend I attended the UK Web & Mini Comics Thing, as well as the Post-Thing Thing. Much fun was had, chiefly with the creation of the Flangethology - a sketchbook in which a whole bunch of people contributed doodles, sketches, and short strips. It ended up at 12 A3 pages + cover, which will be scanned and uploaded for your viewing delectation in the next few days.
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So with relatively little pomp and fanfare (unlike, say, Gabe from Penny Arcade) I have succesfully achieved a +1 to my age. You'd think that I'd have a more interesting thing to associate with getting older than "Hmm, I guess I'll definitely be older than my brother was when I finally get a full driving licence". Nothing about, you know, maturity or any of that gubbins. Wheee! BUMS! And other such guff. I guess the whole "Growing old is mandatory. Growing up? Not so much." thing is true.
No illustration this time because I've got no time. New comics soon though.
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Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
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It's been interesting to realise over the last year or two that I hold a few convictions which would probably make a significant number of people categorise me in the same mental bracket they reserve for those homeless guys who shout, in a Foul Ole Ron manner, about being spied on with invisible pink unicorn lasers and how monkeys stole their face. Or perhaps those people who think that they've seen the Virgin Mary's face in their faeces after going for a particularly hearty bowel movement.
Then again, a lot of people are pretty damn stupid. But anyway, ( I figured a list might be interesting... )
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Monday, February 16th, 2009
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This is just a short update. I'd planned to do a longer update over the weekend including a couple of Valentine's Day themed doodles I'd drawn but frankly I couldn't be arsed spending the energy on commenting at the time. my_window_seat had the funniest take on it I've seen in a good while, which is online over here.
( But anyway... )
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Monday, February 2nd, 2009
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So I woke up this morning to discover that it's still snowing, to the extent that the bus network is suspended. The tube network is mostly suspended. Trains aren't running. Which means that neither myself nor She Who Must Be Obeyed can make it to work. I'm curious how this is going to work out, since the weather reports suggest that there's going to be even more snow during the day - up to another 5-10 inches. It's not much, but in a country not particularly adept at handling snow it's enough to screw everything up.
That said, as I was taking photos this morning I heard a passing individual mention to someone else that he'd never seen so many people smiling in the morning.
( And suddenly the world has become a winter wonderland... )
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Sunday, February 1st, 2009
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Sunday, January 25th, 2009
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It's funny how some things can seem utterly normal to you until you explain them to someone else. This came around after a lengthy conversation about teachers, which made me realise that the secondary school I went to had some real weirdos there. Some great teachers too, but even so....
( Cut for length - text & illustration below cut )
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
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I was planning for the next update to be a bit lengthier, but then a really stupid joke occurred to me. I was working on some comics for the Comic Challenge, and the trailer for Frost/Nixon started playing on TV. Not the full one I've just linked to, but an abridged one. And I'd swear that they picked Nixon's lines in the ad to make the film sound like something between a serial killer thriller and a slasher flick - an impressive way of selling a film that's effectively about interviewing a corrupt politician.
Anyway, the ensuing conversation between myself and She Who Must Be Obeyed led to the following:
( Cut for size and stupidity - seriously daft comic below the cut )
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