convergence -15-
posted 2009.02.07 at 18:29
More headspace for the top two panels; not much change for everything else. This wound up creating the right amount of space for West and a bit too much for Raven. Tantek's fingers on the bottom panels never made much sense, so they're gone now. Less cleanup time on this page than the last two - while it arguably needs more love, I'm trying to get my scrub time down to something resembling reasonable. Which means minimal turd polishing when I can get away with it.
First Edition Metadata
OPD : 2003.07.06 @ 05:09
20070723 : Scaled and rewritten. The previous mess of mealy-mouthed dookie is here.
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I have some serious incentive to get to page 19 ASAFP. And 20. If for no other reason than to flush this one out of immediatly viewable space. Hard night on the brain.
Despite three redraws on West and one on Raven, things still turned out pretty shitty. Much less so after some serious photoshop work, but bottom line, I botched this page hardcore and it took some serious effort to get even this much out of it in terms of quality. Chalk it up to being too stressed out, not enough leisure time, or maybe too long since I've either last had sex or had a meatspace experience with people that didn't leave me despising the race just a bit more. We all have off days. The average person mithers and whines and does nothing. Off days fucking piss me off- if I'm set to do something, it is fucking. Getting. DONE. Even if I'm the one getting in my way. So I had a very painful time with the pencils and inks and generally couldn't produce anything the likes of p.17 to save my life. I left work in a stew and wondered why this city continues to exist. Catch a bus halfway home and walk the rest of it, irritated by pretty much everything but the weather. Why don't people leave me the FUCK alone? was the brainthread keeping the crazy out.
Just to drive the point home, some fucking dickwad unloaded a cup of beer on me on my way over the bridge, at high velocity. My Fear Factory shirt and backpack now smell like the pisswater that fuels this town's endless aspiration towards idiocy. Yay. Just when I didn't think it was possible to have a lower opinion of the pants-clad apes that call themselves Pittsburghers, one of them goes the extra mile to give my mysanthropy a big helping hand. Gah.
In other news, I'm basically on schedule. There's a certain point I want to be at with the story within a certain timeframe, and I'm willing to tolerate a few ass pages if that's what it's going to take to get me there. Doubtless you've seen a lot of "art days" or "dead $artist" days on other webcomics- in this case, you'll get one of two things- either NO PAGE or a page like the above with a rant of similar quality. Fuck filler. In the ass. With a two by four. That space is for the story, and that's what goes in it, at least twice a week, regardless of rather or not I can draw a straight line to save my life. :-)
We all have our off days.
And I had a lot more ranting to plug into this space, but hey. I need to sleep and there are certain problems that just need to be worked on, rather than bitched about.
Oh, happy fun technical cheat: West is a righty. I'm not. I can't even figure out how to hold a pencil in my right hand without my brain tying itself in a pretzel. John's signature hand was done the easy way- using my left hand as a model while I was drawing and then flipping it around so it looked right. About the only thing that turned out completely fine on the whole page. :-)
Whee.
I can't wait to consistently not suck.