I've nearly completed the Arcadia strip, and I've also managed to squeeze in a Cameo for Matt, Jack and myself (Scott was too hard to draw... I'll just have to say he was in the shop during this carpark scene and thus wasn't visable...) on a full page reveal shot that I fought for to get (it was originally meant to be the last panel on page 2 but I felt it deserved much more space) and I feel the strip benefits from it. I've just got to finish the majority of Page 2 and one panel on Page 1 and it's complete. The deadline isn't until April but I can get started on the Misspent Youth strip once I get this out of the way - and my week off work than I'm now a day into is the ideal time to begin.

 

I've started work on Arcadia, a project I'd almost completely forgotten about... it's going to end up in Something Wicked, a FutureQuake production (the independant comic that I got my first comic published with), sometime early 2008. I've gotten into it quite a bit - I'm trying a slightly different art style and it's helped get me in the mood again. It sounds absolutely insane and I'm sure that no-one I ever explain it to will fully grasp what I'm trying to say, but the style has kind of been influenced by chunky video game graphics that lose their detail with distance.

You'll just have to trust me with this one.

On a non-related note, I've completely lost all my enthusiasm for the Art of Self Destruction project, even though I have around 30 pages for it so far. I don't know why it is exactly - maybe the novelty of having it printed in book form (I've been through like four test-prints already) has worn off, but it's very much on the back burner for the time being. But it's no bad thing - if the project never gets finished, I'll have atleast have bulked up my portfolio a little bit.

I'm not sure what the future is for the Violet comic strip. Racket Magazine is apparently changing its format and will now be printed around six times a year rather than monthly as it has been up untill now. What this mean's for our monthly, story-driven strip I don't know. Ariel hasn't said anything about it getting cancelled (mainly because he hasn't been told anything himself) but it seems likely to me. I guess we'll see.

Not all doom and gloom however - I'm on the verge of signing up for another comic strip entitled 'Misspent Youth'. Yippee.

I've put work on 'The Art of Self Destruction' on hold for the moment untill I get the test print from Blurb.com through (I like the quality of Lulu.com but Blurb is easier to do, I want to be sure I can trust it will full-bleed properly otherwise the whole thing will look like shit!), I thought it was gonna arrive today cos I've had UPS hammering the door down all week while I've been at work but it turned out to be a couple of test print posters that I ordered from Lulu (you keeping up?). I was dissapointed with one of the two which was darker than it looks on screen and didn't work as well as a poster as I thought it would but the Violet one turned out great - except, as I said, for it being a tad too dark. But I can remedy that at the source. This is what test prints are for, after all.

I've also been playing with the idea of publishing a proper comic of some kind. 'The Art..' (or atleast what little of it I've worked out so far) is something a little more experimental in that I'm not even sure it can be classed as a Graphic Novel, plus I want to do something a lot simpler in drawing style - like the kind of stuff you get in webcomics. I have a few ideas, like ressurecting and re-drawing some of the old blog-comics I used to do and expanding them to a graphic novel, taking the idea I have for 'The Emo Dead' (a horror movie parody animation featuring me, Matt, Scott and Jak which as an idea is pretty much dead itself, atleast in animation form) or coming up with something new.

And this is all alongside a proposed return to FutureQuake and Violet which, lest us forget, is the one I actually get paid for...