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?

Tags: comic, comics, snooglezoo

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.

Tags: art, comics, doodles, drawing, owls, polymer clay, snooglezoo, works in progress

Tags: animation, birthday, efram, flash, snooglezoo, tori

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

Tags: being blocked, comic, drawing, snooglezoo, work, works in progress

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!

Tags: advent calendars, comic, holidailies, snooglezoo

I’m thinking about closing the comments because I don’t want to feel like I have to answer to my readers on the decisions I make. This isn’t in reaction to anything that happened over at my site, or any of my readers’ comments; it actually has more to do with the way I react to the discussions in other comics’ forums. With the example I just linked to on XKCD, I noticed comments like “you’re insulting your audience! How dare you!” and “I don’t think you ended the strip right. Here, I photoshopped it better!”  I love having people participate, and it’s wonderful that they’re in to it enough to take the time to write a reaction to what I’m making, but It’ll hurt my ability to tell a story if I’m worried about what they think the characters should do in addition to my own thinking about what they should do. I don’t want to write a comic by committee. And I’m not saying that people who have forums like this do that- to the contrary I see that the comicker hard ly ever participates in those threads. But I know myself and I know how self-conscious I can be. I also know that when I post my comic to the cartooning forum on LiveJournal for exposure, and get feedback, I am compelled to respond to the positive and negative, and the negative will tweak me out for longer than it should.

But really, that’s what this project is all about. It’s practice! I’m practicing the act of comic creating, storytelling, ink and color, building traffic and handling feedback appropriately. It’s all part of the process of making and maintaining a webcomic.

Tags: forums, negative feedback, snooglezoo, webcomic, work

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

I’m havin a very hard time with the inking for the comic strip. At first, I thought I wasn’t very nimble with the tablet, and for the first couple of strips I tried some different methods with physical media, and they too came out wobbly and unconfident. I need practice, and it’s a little mortifiying to get that practice in public, but having a reccuring deadline ensures that I’ll actually do it. If I practice drawing in a vaccuum I tend not to draw at all.

That’s part of where the index card project came from. And no, I haven’t been terribly diligent about doing those every day either, but I am doing some, and I think I’ll post them in a gallery of their own once there are several of them. SnoogleZoo is forcing me to draw every day, and that’s what I wanted, so I can relax with the index cards and make them do something a little more fun than random doodles. We’ll see where that goes.

Tags: doodling, drawing, snooglezoo

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

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