I joined the Holidailies portal again this year, because I’m a masochist, but also because deadlines seem to keep me drawing. I’m getting very close to 30 comics over at snooglezoo, which means ten whole weeks of posting with only a few lapses, and I think that’s fantastic.

I’m trying to exercise some discipline lately. If I’m not drawing, at least I’m doodling, because doodling leads to ideas which lead to drawings, which is pretty much what I need to be doing not to be miserable. Also, if I’m drawing I can’t pick on my cuticles because my hands are busy. everybody wins!

Anyway, with Holidailies I’m going to have to post something to this here blog nearly every day from Dec 5 to Jan 6, either 50 words or a photo (or in my case, a drawing). This on top of keeping up with the comic every three days, it should keep those art muscles of mine nice and limber. Here goes!

Tags: art, blogging, discipline, drawing, holidailies, snooglezoo

Okay, folks, consider this fair warning: If you enjoyed looking at SnoogleZoo as it is right now, that is to say walls of text, very small pictures and a really cumbersome system for delivering cute wallpapers, go soak it in because I’m going to take it all down and reboot the whole thing.

It’s not working the way it is. And I mean that in just about every sense. The gallery plugin I was using suddenly decided that it didn’t want to have anything uploaded anymore. I mean the link to the upload screen literally disappeared. In trying to fix it I almost killed the whole site, and had to revert to a couple of days-ago backup to bring it back up.

And in and amongst all this drama of trying to get it back up and struggling with the whole system I realised that organizing the site under a CMS was actually limiting what I could do creatively with SnoogleZoo in the first palce. For instance, I always had the intention to start a comic. And I was having trouble serving up the wallpapers satisfactorally, so I put story development on the back burner. Maybe the characters would just blog, or I’d do online storybooks?

So I was basically letting the Content Management System dictate the nature of the content, and that’s backwards! So I spent my friday night reading comics, drawing pictures and thinking about how to start the story. For now I’m going to leave SZ up the way it is while I work on getting the story and the first couple of comics together. Meanwhile I’ll be looking into a good way to manage a visually-based website with lots of extras (ComicPress is looking very promising!), and once that’s all ready to go I’ll do the official launch!

Honestly? I couldn’t be happier about the way this has worked out. I leared a lot playing with Mambo, even if I’m not ultimately going to use it, and now I have a laser-focus as to what I’m doing with SnoogleZoo. I’m so excited to finally get this party started the right way!

Tags: cms, comicpress, comics, snooglezoo, starting over, webcomics

Yeah, remember what I said about having more time to blog back at the beginning of the month? All those plans were laid to waste when my left elbow started exploding with pain every time I moved it. Yay! A new nerd injury! It’s bursitis; basically, the slippery tissue covering my elbow filled up with fluid as a result of my leaning on it while I’d work on my laptop in bed. Kids, don’t lean on your elbows while working on your laptop in bed. As a matter of fact, don’t work on your laptop in bed- it’s just bad for your bones!

I have, however been working on more cute t shirts for SnoogleZoo. Namely, these cute designs of muffins with faces!

Right now they come in two flavors: The blueberry muffin is cute and sweet, but the cranberry muffin is sassy and a little tart. Go take a look at the cute muffin section of Snooglezoo, and scroll all the way down to see the muffins together. I didn’t do it on purpose, but when I showed the muffin pair to Brad, he cracked up and said that the pair shirts would be bought by boys for their girlfriends. I looked, looked again, and then my ears turned red. It’s classic!

Tags: bursitis, cute shirts, cute t shirts, muffin, snooglezoo, t shirts

This is what I find myself working on in all of my spare time these days. I haven’t done anything with a CMS in something like 5 or 6 years, so this is a fun adventure. I can’t wait until I’ve got the new (and very permanent) SnoogleZoo fleshed out and ready for a real launch. This is just a tasty preview. I love that it’s looking more-or-less like my original design.

Tags: snooglezoo

My buddy requested I make a Yo Yo Neko that’s black and named Suki. I tweaked the kitty design a little, and I like this a lot better- not quite as husky looking as the earlier versions. I think I’m going to put this one up on the SnoogleZoo. I put up some things with this on SnoogleZoo last night!

Tags: snooglezoo, vector