Ah, I've been waiting to do this particular strip. i don't know why. I've just drawn myself in a ridiculously silly outfit reacting probably the way i would if in the same situation. There are a number of spoofs in here, ranging from the play on cats chasing tails, to my real life experience of knocking over a display of shoujo manga in a book store in Ginza, to one I didn't even realize till after I had drawn everything. I think i subconsciously spoofed one of Waterson's wonderful 'Hobbs chases his tail' strips. Oops.

I'm hurting a little this morning because i was up way too late last night doing this strip. Wanna know what was most frustrating? You'd think it was the 3 panels of piro bounding about trying to catch the wayward tail - but those drawings actually came out pretty easy and pretty clean. All three of them, including piro sitting on the floor after finally catching the tail took about 3 hrs. Not bad.

For the life of me i couldn't draw Kimiko at all last night.

What you see is the best of the worst of the three attempts to draw her last night. NOTHING is worse than artists block when you are actually in progress. Hey, everyone has bad art days - but when you feel you are on a roll, and have three pretty decent drawings, and the last panel is not looking good... ugh, it's enough to make you want to tear your hair out. i spent 2 hrs drawing kimiko last night. One stupid drawing. It was so frustrating. By the time i finally started scanning and getting the final comic done, it was 2:30 am. This morning, the final panel doesn't look quite as bad as I feared, but i guess Kimiko is far cuter than i drew her today. Perhaps that's what's frustrating me. We'll see how well i can draw her over the next few weeks.

Someone once asked me what kind of 'motion lines' i liked to use - you know, lines indicating motion, running fast, shaking, etc. Honestly, I don't like to use them. If you are going to show motion in your drawings, what you really need to do is imply it with your character's stance, balance, rotation, etc. I don't know if i was really successful with drawing piro spinning around chasing his tail, but at least you can see that i tried. ^_^ I approach motion lines from a cinematic/photographic point of view. You do get streaks in photos and film (which is why i do draw some motion lines) but the motion you are trying to get across has to be implied by the drawing - you can't just rely on motion lines.

I'm keeping this short today because i have yet another of those wonderful deadlines tonight (yay -_-) So i need to get back to work. I'm going to be making a few trips next month - I'm going to Anime Central on the weekend of the 12th (we have a MT panel on saturday for anyone who has any questions about MT), and I am also going to E3 the following weekend. Yea, the Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA. Largo and I have decided that we are going to see what we can do to sneak in this year. Pretending to be Ion Storm employees didn't work, maybe if we pretend we are Bioware employees we might be able to sneak in.... Nah, it'd never work.