Fun Fact: I am using the same ink-and-brush combo to ink my comics as I am to paint my birds. If anybody tries to tell me that comics aren’t hard, I have a portfolio full of wobbly-lined comic pages and sharply detailed birds that prove otherwise.
I’m lending Scruffy MacRuffin my birds for his field notebooks, so I thought I’d include a closeup of that panel here. Anyway, new page is up, and it’s glorious! Why not go check it out?
I made my little owl buddy out of polymer clay today. He’s tilted at an such an angle that he’s looking right up at me when perched on my tilted drawing board.
I also did a bunch of drawing for SnoogleZoo today. I have a one-off, and part of a longer story arc in development, and I just need to get them out on paper. It’s hard starting over, but I’ve missed those little guys and I only ever stopped because I set the bar a little too high to begin with. So I’m taking more of a quality-over-quantity approach this time, which means I probably won’t manage a regular update schedule for a while, but at least each strip will be something I can be proud of. 
I’m working on drawing everybody consistently, and trying out a couple of different ways of inking- I think it’d be neat to ink SnoogleZoo with a brush because it seems like all the fur on the characters would work well with a fluid line, but then there are small details like the little round eyes that I’m worried I won’t be able to pull off with a brush. Plus, technical pens are just so darn comfortable. But really, how am I supposed to get comfortable with a new tool without using it?
I have to be careful about letting all this noodling get in the way of my actually moving forward with the project. I can keep practicing forever and never get a strip together If I’m not careful. So I’m aiming to at least start posting little paintings, if not a proper strip, by May 3rd. Yep, that’s a week from tomorrow! I’m going to be pretty busy this week making that happen.
It’s my sister’s birthday! Yay for sisters! I made you a thing, Tori, starring your favorite SnoogleZoo friend. I didn’t have a tremendous amount of time, so the animation’s a little rough, but I hope you like him anyway:
I’ve started doing this exercise that sits me down in front of pen and paper every single night. I’m making more drawings than I’m posting on the blog here, and I’m okay with that. I’m making doodles that I can see developing into stuff and that’s good, too. Then I did this last night:
I haven’t forgotten about SnoogleZoo, I just needed to take a break. I don’t think doing a serial webcomic is for me- it’s not exactly the time commitment, like I thought it was, because doing all this constraint-free drawing is taking up the same kind of time that working on SnoogleZoo was. I think it’s more like feeling trapped within a certain framework. It felt like homework and I think it was stifiling the art. Not to mention all my other art that I wasn’t doing.
I’ve been kicking around a couple of ideas of what to do- I miss the characters more than I thought I would, so I’d rather not abandon them to the realm of silent, one-off illustrations. But I don’t want to get trapped slogging through an un-interesting story arc just to meet a deadline. I’m thinking I should just do stories on a whenever-I-feel-like-it basis, which I think will serve my desire to do something of quality, and also prevent me from growing a readership of any respectable size.
But you know what? I don’t really care about that right now. I really need to be making art before I can concern myself with things like making art on a schedule.
So don’t worry, Pan. We’ll be back soon enough, and you can pick on Efram and get extra whipped cream from the Kitties’ cafe and have all kinds of fun and silly adventures with the rest of the gang real soon. But sometimes I will have to give my attention to killer robots and pin-up girls, too. It’s better for everyone this way 
My blog posts will occasionally suck so that I can manage to get an episode of my comic out on time:
Today’s comic is kind of related to today’s Holidailies prompt; my family never did Advent calendars when I was a kid, but a lot of my friends did. I think they’re neat, particularly the ones that are permanent and meant to be refilled and reused every year. Someday I want to make one!
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This is my sketchblog, which is for doodles, comics, essays, and other stuff that an illustrator and comicker might blog about. I'm Veronica, and I run this joint. All the artwork is copyright Veronica C Guzzardi. Please don't use it without permission from me. Please contact me if you want to pay me to draw for you; that's my favorite.
