i've been holed up writing and whatnot (and making paper dolls, sure ~ and reading comic books). it's been very...therapeutic. and educational as well. and i emerge from this chrysalis with some perspective, i hope. and fresh energy to create cool stuff.

i know you ain't holding your breath out there, but soon i will be back to regular posting and have all new shiny shiny to share with you. meanwhile, here's a cover of sorts (reduced), just by way of proof that i have been working.

hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. i have the four ps: pears, pizza, popcorn, and pomegranates. can't get any better than that.

: D

i dream in black and white. sometimes i can perceive color (i know a truck is red, for example), but usually that's just a perception ~ the dream itself usually has no color. occasionally it will have spot color (i dreamt of being a photojournalist trying to break some story in Iraq and being chased inside a huge scientific military complex. there was an escalator and as i descended, a giant koi was swimming in the air before me. the koi was every color of the rainbow ~ stuff like that). i know other people dream this way too. i wonder if is has anything to do with my inability to learn color theory....

but i digress. the point of this post was to make an announcement.

it's official: my long violent war with color and color theory and coloring is at an end.

in case you are wondering, nobody won.

meanwhile, we have to bury the dead ~ which amounts to six pages of art that i will be posting in installments starting tomorrow and running daily through November 7th. these are very much tweener pages in which the coloring style is going to do some mutating. at the end, the new style will hopefully not be too much of a sudden shock but it will possibly be somewhat more monochromatic (which is about all the color i can handle). Fortunately this is not an art style change in terms of the drawing ~ just the coloring, i promise.

also, the good news is: if all goes well, Reconstruction will continue to post daily instead of just M-Th from here on out.

please remember ~ in spite of my cartoony art style, this series is intended for mature readers and even though it's been pretty pg-rated tame since i began in august, it won't always be SFW (ooo, i used a blogging acronym. i feel so hip). if you need warnings for weeks in which stuff is NSFW, let me know and i will post cautions in advance. if you need to know all the ways in which this story is going to turn down dark paths, please read this.

questions? qualms? wondering where that newly named pony is? i'm so far ahead in the drawing, you won't see the pony until november (sorry!).

hope everyone is having a happy weekend!

: D

despite a decided advantage to Othello, it looks like Chiron has taken the day.

thank you to everyone who submitted names ~ !

i would have been happy with any of the choices since they were all uniquely apropos, but Chiron must have been fate burbling to the top since the name has now inspired me to rewrite the scene a little to include some information that will actually introduce the one theme in this story i hadn't touched on yet ~ so thank you bachsoprano for a great submission! for more info on this great name, check out the king of all lazy-easy references: wikipedia!

i will likely file away some of these other names for other horses/dogs/possibly people ~ so consider your contributions never in vain! and of course, there will be more horses!

: D

p.s. i have also created a tag for "burning questions" (to include calls for names such as this one) since it's more fun to let other people populate and build up your imaginary world sometimes. i get stuck in the staleness of naming everyone John or Bill, thinking in monochrome, and being positively uninspired about certain detail work that i ought to pay more attention to. you all have fresh eyes and fresh perspective ~ why not take advantage of it!

there was a question as to the horse's gender in my previous post, so i am extending the deadline until tomorrow morning. meanwhile, the horse is a gelding (which is male for all you non-horsey peeps).

name that horse <~ !

p.s. yesterday's post was the dreaded corn, as promised. and today is drowning ~ a fun recurring theme (or maybe not so much fun).

i'm drawing page 42 today (sloth that i am) and it's the first page with a horse on it (which is a crying shame that it took 42 pages to get to a horse, but i guess that's the way it worked out). anyway, the horse in the above picture is a fuzzy winter version of the horse in the story ~ dark, sleek, friendly, gentle. nothing particularly flashy ~ just a nice horse that belongs to a very angry schoolmaster.

and it needs a name!

i am notoriously bad at naming horses. to date, the horses in this story have included: Spot, Sport, Dottie, Patches, Dandy, Big Jim, Fiona, Jersey, General Washington, Bitch, and Dung. pretty embarrassing. so yeah. i am no longer going to name any horses in this story. i won't rename the ones who have already been cursed, but i am going to ask you all to name the rest of them (and there will be plenty eventually).

so what do you think? keep in mind, for this one, the year is 1861. the owner of this horse, Clayton Randolph, is 28 years old, unmarried, unattached, fastidious, probably likes w. c. bryant and shakespeare. he's had some college education and he is stern, fearless, and pragmatic. this particular horse is only briefly featured in the overall story, so if you have a favorite name burning a hole in your psyche, you might want to wait for another opportunity for a horse with more story longevity.

i'll throw all responses into a hat and choose one on tuesday morning, October 13th.

i haven't finished inking this image (you can see my pencil scribbles all over it), but here's a picture of the horse in question if it'll help. and yes, it's smiling, but at least i didn't give it eyebrows.

this week i begin posting the section with my first marker-color experiments (mostly successful, i think). yesterday's not so much, but from here on out things are looking pretty decent. i hope you enjoy!





from LookingLand.com

Nucleus LiveJournal Plugin © Evgeny Lykhin

i went ahead and spent some money and got a handful of markers to give 'em a go. i have mixed feelings of joy and trepidation.

things i like:

1. consistency of color.
2. no streaks/ease of blending.
3. no buckling on the paper.
4. it gives my work polish that i just can't seem to get with paint because of my tentativeness.

things that concern me:

1. Learning to use them. they color pretty no matter what you do with them, which is great, but i don't want to get too sloppy. also, while i like the brush nibs very much, somehow i can't control them as well as an actual brush with paint. i keep wandering out of the lines.
2. cost (?). i bought more colors than I probably really need, though ~ over time i will figure out a palette.
3. colors! zooks, i'm bad at choosing colors. i chose out of the "sepia" family, figuring i'd trust it to be, well, sepia (as i know it), but it's awfully bright. it's not that big of a deal because i can adjust the saturation on the computer (as i did above), but i'd like to figure out a truer color match eventually.

this is all so bizarre. i could color for (technically) free if i just did it on the computer, where i have bajillions of colors at my disposal and can erase my mistakes. but...

it's all about the artifact.

if i don't have something i can hold in my hand, i don't love it.

at any rate, i colored four pages this morning before noon ~ fastest coloring job ever. that alone is worth a lot. now i can spend the rest of the weekend working on totally new stuff! yay!

hope everyone is having a great weekend!

: D

p.s. the panel above is from a page you won't see until october 12th, i think. please note the dreaded corn field!

so in case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging. a while back i suggested (to myself) that i would try to give myself a blogging schedule and have different topics every other day or so.

one of the obvious choices of topics is my desk. i can't imagine torturing you with a weekly image of the rats' nest that it is (yes, we've recovered from the empty void that was last may ~ yikes! what a difference a season makes, eh?). but a monthly post might be in order (in lieu of me rambling on about working on x, y, or z, perhaps). so here it is for September (late in the month, but this picture was actually taken about two weeks ago).



other obvious choices for blogging are book reviews, film reviews, historical blitherage. i'm hoping by the beginning of october, i will have it figured out.if any of you have idea about what you would like to see blogged about on your flist, i'll surely consider requests!

~ * ~

p.s. i am still working diligently on Reconstruction, though bogged down around p. 34. whatever i was thinking when i made Gwilym Fletcher a corn farmer, i clearly wasn't considering what torture it would be to have to draw all that frakkin' corn. is it too late to switch the Antietam cornfield to some other battle as one of the pivotal moments of the story?

i think i hate corn.

socks ~ !


the weather is turning and i had a long day of on and off fighting with the Reconstruction project (and mostly winning, so it's all good), but i thought i should take a little break and work on something else for a while just to get my energy back up.

i could have washed dishes or sorted the laundry or cleaned the bathroom, but that'd be boring, so i tried to watch Lost (everyone and their mother has recommended it to me). i settled in with a frosty Coke and popcorn, put on the pilot, and enjoyed all the way up to where they shoot the polar bear in the second episode.

i wasn't bothered by the polar bear. i was strangely bothered by most of the behavior of the survivors. of course it's a tv show and we have to expedite the shock and horror and move onto monsters and adventure and mystery and all of that, but...i dunno. the expedition leading to the polar bear sorta did it in for me. first of all, they take shannon, who's totally useless physically ~ and they do it knowing there's a people-eating critter in the jungle. of course, she speaks French, so that makes it okay. secondly, they are on a hunt for water (allegedly), but don't appear to have any means for carrying water. what are they going to do, find it, drink some, then come back and say: yep, there's water! likewise, it just rained. does nobody think to maybe set something up to catch rainwater? they are equally careless salvaging stuff from the cockpit and...wait a minute...there's a man-eating critter snacking on the pilot, but they decide to run from the cockpit instead of stay inside where it might actually be safe? oy vey!

anyway, i was perfectly okay just flowing with all that nonsense until Sawyer pulled out the gun and had his little contretemps with Sayid. instantly i hated Sawyer as a character and dreaded the thought of suffering through untold number of episodes of this guy making trouble for no real reason at all. i took a desultory stab at finishing through the third episode, but it's over for me. i don't like any of the characters enough to stick with it. Hurley and Claire were about as interesting as it got, and i guess Jack was okay, but i didn't like the actor playing him. the rest of them were just cardboard to me.

the show is well put together, but doesn't do it for me, alas. i might give it another go when winter gets dark and cold and there's nothing else to watch. eh.

anyway, so i gave up on that and started digitally painting paper dolls (naturally). and above are some adorable socks to prove it.

hope everyone is still enjoying their weekend!

: D

yesterday we concluded the second week of M-Th regular posting of Reconstruction. this morning I was doing a little cleanup, including making the scene notes a little more detailed, link-filled, and prettier. i think it's not readily apparent that each scene has a notes section because you have to click on the "read more" from the home page to view it. i might need to do something to make it more obvious?

likewise, it's hard to know how much to include in the notes. no spoilers for the story, of course, but how much historical droning is relevant? or how much production bibbling do you want to hear about. i guess no one is forced to read it, but i don't want to make it tedious either.

anyway! this week we started a new scene that will run through next week. these opening moments are sorta flash-in-the-pan. we're going to get into longer sequences very soon.

anyway, enjoy and i certainly welcome your input here, there, wherever, if you have suggestions, comments, etc.

happy friday all!

i can't believe it's been a week since i last posted! i've been working, keeping very busy, trying to build up a buffer. i'm on page 14, so it's going slow, but going. there's so much about digital painting that i'm figuring out along the way that i'm sure the first hundred pages or so are going to be ranging all over the map. style-wise i think there's really only one thing i'm capable of doing, so this is how it's going to look, though it's unfortunately got too much of a Phoenix Requiem-looking influence going. that was totally unintentional. i still really wanted something that looks more like the scribble above, but i seem incapable of scribbling consistently, so there you have it.

and speaking of the above scribble, this was a quickie study i did for a panel on page 13. i like the scribble better than how the painted version came out, so i'm posting this here for my own contemplation. but i won't fixate because that just leads down bad paths.

anyway, we're through the first week of m-th posts! it's been fun writing and drawing the Georgetown College scene that's coming up next week. as a result i have (not surprisingly, to anyone who knows me well enough) revamped the story structure quite a bit. alas, there won't be any exploding heads just yet, but i promise they'll come sooner than in the original plan, so just hang onto your hats.

if you haven't visited the site and seen the week's posts, you can see them all here!

hope everyone is having a great, productive weekend!

the above picture is about the size of a business card (tiny), and when reproduced, it will prolly be even smaller, and yet i put entirely too much time and detail into it (ridiculously so ~ the faces were excruciating).

i'm not exactly sorry that i did because it's an all right picture and i like detail (like the ribbing on Lester Dunne's socks), but if i've got to produce 2-3 pages a week, i can't really afford to spent three days painting only a handful of panels. granted, it's been hot and i've not been feeling like working, but that no excuse for spending what little work time i've had on a single panel!

so yeah. i feel like i need to be cautious of setting a dangerous precedent for expectations that i doubt i can meet consistently. and of course there's another part of me looking at this and thinking: oh wait, i forgot to add the embroidery to Morse's vest. doh!

launch is in three days. i have a ton of work to do still.

hope everyone out there is well!

: D

i painted this panel this morning. sometimes something just comes out right and you can't help but be pleased by it. i'm still pretty tentative with the paints overall, but i have confidence for doing the faces (for the most part), which helps. I'm learning some things not to do and browsing around this afternoon, got some tips on things i can improve (many in the "wow, maybe you should read a basic primer on painting with watercolors!" department). this is one of the problems of being self-taught when you are an incredibly lazy student.

at any rate, i just wanted to share the progress. you will start seeing these pages in all their full glory starting on August 16th.

: D

home sick today. this is unfortunate because i have a bazillion things to do and am hacking and sighing too much to do any of them. the house is a horrendous disaster and i desperately need to do laundry. the good news is that i managed to dress, put a hat on my greasy head, and wander out to the farmer's market up the street so that i could buy fresh veggies with which to make a cauldron of leek soup.


in case you didn't know it, leek soup is the 9th wonder of the world.

despite the mung, i am going to try to get a good pile of work done. july is at long last over and i can throw myself headlong into working on Reconstruction. i have the first twenty pages (more or less) completed, which is quite the buffer, but i don't want to let the line go slack because i'm going to be posting 4 days a week (monday through thursday) and that buffer is going to get eaten up quick!

yes, you read that right: i'm posting updates monday through thursday with extras on the weekends (perhaps). it's only a slightly brutal schedule, but i decided on it because if i force myself to draw every day i'm hoping i will let go of some of the inhibitions that have kept me from being faithful to this project over the years.

this also means you will be seeing some wildly inconsistent artwork and i am trying to be okay with that. this isn't "real" artwork, after all, right? it's just a storyboard. so i hope you will be forgiving at least. and know that things will even off once i get into a rhythm with it all.

meanwhile, i will share with you this teaser. some of you had seen the digital version of this image. this is the "redo" in watercolor.


i'm really looking forward to the August 16th launch date.

now i must eat my soup and try to shake off the pall of mung so that i can be productive this weekend. if i have to be sick and it means i get a three-day weekend, then i had better make the best of it. later, there will pomegranate ice cream. naturally.

happy friday all!

: D

i haven't posted a picture of my desk in forever. mostly because i haven't been working at my desk and there's been nothing to see. even in this picture, you can see how sort of scattershot it is. i don't even remember why i have all the glue out (maybe i ought to put it away, you think?)


this weekend i managed to get a bunch of stuff done in spite of frittering my time on watching movies (among them: Crossing Over, which I recommend!), spinning about the usual quandaries, eating popcorn, and spending much of saturday running around at booksales and Cinco de Mayo festivities. a good time was had by all and very little damage was done to the pocketbook.

i also want to say that after 20 freakin' years my character's been lugging around a Navy Colt, i officially switched it to a Colt Dragoon this weekend. i had always wanted a heavier, more ridiculous firearm with a larger caliber (.44 instead of .36) ~ the dragoon is perfect. thanks, jamie, it's entirely your fault.


image for an up-coming scene
it's a good thing the dragoon shares a lot of similarities with the navy variety. it made drawing this one much easier than i suspected!

: D

In reorganizing my website for Reconstruction, i decided to put some texture on the page (it's always been too flat for me). i'm also cramming the glug of "information" onto an information page to free up the homepage for the latest updates. not quite sure how this will work, but it's getting closer to what i want (is that even possible?)

i think the only thing i'm fretting about is having a link somewhere to make the "recent updates" more readily available rather than having to paw through the archives (which are still cumbersome, but i'm leaving them alone for now). the "recent updates" menu on the left just feels sort of lost. i feel like i need something a little flashier. what i think i will do is just have a "posting order" update page so it's easy to see what's new. it's one more page to maintain, but that's all right. it's not a big deal to just have piles of links somewhere.

anyway, so there it is. all of the changes aren't "live" yet and i have a lot of work to do still ~ including some slash and burn on the scenes that have already been posted (bad, i know ~ but it has to be done). this weekend, i hope, everything will be more in order. i'll definitely be very glad when all of these technical issues are resolved and i can just focus on the content for a change.

I spent most of Sunday gnashing my teeth. the reasons why are pointless to explain (same o'crud). then I did the stupid thing of reading myself a bedtime story so depressing that it carried my mood overnight and now I am officially in the glums.

The book, Dennis Brandt's Pathway to Hell isn't spectacularly written ~ it's rather short (barely over 200 pages), and isn't exhaustive about much ~ but that made it perfect for me: no long explanations of campaigns I already know too well, no endless nattering about hardtack. instead it's a true chronicle largely in Angelo Crapsey's own words from his letters and diary, documenting in the most painful way imaginable, his slow decline into self-destructive dementia.

Crapsey's story is unique as far as books of the war go, though there's unfortunately nothing unique about what happened to him. It tells the story that Paulson's Soldier's Heart tries to tell, but doesn't.

When I think back on the origins of Reconstruction, I think i wrote it in part because this book hadn't been written. Crapsey's story is more heartbreaking than any novel anyone could ever write: a disaster that could have been avoided a hundred different ways. The circumstances of his bizarre upbringing at the hand of a religious whack-job father, his fervor for the Union, his abolitionist sentiments that sour after emancipation drags the war into a seemingly endless slaughter, the shame of his surrender and imprisonment ~ all of it horrible, horrible ~ and then to come home to the father-figure and friend he looked up to the most only to find himself rebuffed, feared, and ostracized. And finally the everyday event that led to Crapsey's end is so banal, almost ~ so utterly human in its simple cruelty. It isn't any wonder he blew his brains out. Twenty two years old.

Of course I imagined a different end once upon a time for Reconstruction which is in many ways this same story: an endless cycle of addictions, an abusive marriage, desolation, death. Even I was never so brave to actually make any of that stick, though. I had to find some hope in there somewhere. So I did.

But there was none for a lot of young boys like Crapsey. Even Howard Bahr didn't shrink from drawing us a picture in The Judas Field (which is maybe why I didn't like that book as much as I wanted to ~ it hit a nerve with me).

So yeah. I don't know why I am writing this except to wonder at the meaning of it all. I really seem to be out of touch with the world in so many ways. I don't see that improving, either, and it concerns me from time to time.



from LookingLand.com

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this is what i am working on, so this is what i am posting about, insipidity and all (and when i ought to be writing, of course).

the hardest thing about Reconstruction sometimes seems to be that I'm just not in the mood to draw certain things on certain days. i've been trying to draw a close-up on a stagecoach for two weeks (with horrific results on a variety of dreadful drafts). i was about ready to chuck it all and go with something else when i forced myself to commit to a composition just to get it down. well, i'm mostly okay with the results (not shown in full here) and i think once it's inked, painted, and tinted it'll be just fine ~ but boy was it a fight every step of the way.

my favorite part of it is the detail of the dog, buster, sitting at his master's feet (which is shown here!). i didn't think i would be able to draw a convincing bloodhound, but i did (yay!), and he actually came out rather adorable, which is good because i really like buster as a character.

dog lover that i am, it's always been odd to me that more of my characters aren't dog people. James is. Preston is. Whit is (well, he is ~ geh). Sid is. That's four out of about a bazillion. most of the rest of them are either cat people or wouldn't know what to do with a pet if they had one. so i guess i better make use of the handful of dog characters i have to work with.

and, of course, i have to share a picture of my own dawg. because he is adorable, after all, even if he is sooo hard to photograph that this picture surprised even me!


: D

i originally made the threat here, and then i followed it up by actually conceiving a character here. but i put it all in the back of my mind because i wasn't quite sure how to fit this strange outsider into the careful epic that i had spent so much care constructing.

well thanks to a wretched sinus infection and a lot of medication that has made me both loopy and cranky (and i mean really cranky ~ like, sleepless, homicidal cranky), i think i've solved all those niggling problems and whitney ballard will be making his debut this weekend (Sunday) on Reconstruction (in his own words, no less, which is utterly terrifying to me!).

i have to say, spending time with ballard, getting to know his particularities has been very disturbing, but likewise very rewarding (especially in terms of bringing together a few loose sheep in the story ~ if i ever thought the plot was intertwined in an impossible complex fashion, it's now ridiculously so). but even more gratifying, perhaps: it's not often that i challenge myself to write a character so utterly repugnant and try see things from a point of view I couldn't disagree with more ~ and to find good in someone whose whole livelihood depends on a gross systematic bigotry.

i actually found qualities to admire in ballard, which is frightening, but i hope good for the story. and i'm proud of myself that i am not going to shrink from putting this character front and center in his own little opera.



a rather cleaned-up whitney ballard
and his long-time nemesis (unfinished),
the mysterious "reverend" luther.
three guesses who the dashing mister luther really is
(and the first two don't count)
( some slightly spoilery background for the truly masochistic )