Quick Observation: Publishers Like Marvel/DC Put Out A 32 Page Comic Every Month... Those Books Have

Finally, at long last: I have a name for my style of work: Tradigital... Woo! Time to go re-tag everything I’ve ever posted. Fun story: I was thinking about how to categorize my work, and I thought, It’s kinda part traditional, part digital... tradigital! And I thought, I wonder if I’m the first one to think of that. So off to Google I go, and it turns out, I wasn’t! And I went, “Cool: now I have a name for it!

Also picked up a new term a little while ago: “Spotting blacks,” which is where you fill in solid black areas of a comic frame... funny that in the myriad of comic how too books I own, it wasn’t mentioned once. Good thing to know, since spotting blacks is the part that I do digitally.

Some interesting background trivia regarding Princes Taco:

Originally she was going to be a Queen, but Hasbro intervened because Disney had established the trend that Queens were evil and Princesses were good.

Loren Faust came up with the premise for Princess Taco's debut episode, but most of the script and character design was handled by the rest of the crew, since Loren had left the team at that point. She was surprised to see Taco appear as an alicorn when the episode aired, as her original concept was for a unicorn.

Prince Fajita was originally going to be Prince Burrito, but Hasbro had lost the copyrights for the original G1 character. Loren combined the appearance of G1 Burrito and the name of G2 Fajita. Also, he was originally going to be Duke Fajita, but again, Hasbro intervened because Duke sounded evil.

When asked where Princess Taco was during The The Best Night Ever, the writers said that they hadn't even considered giving her and appearance, and she never even came up during production. Fans raged, but Taco's episode in Season 2 was very well received.

Taco's dress appears several times on a rack in the background of Rarity's shop, and is frequently reused as a set piece or prop. However, the taco is in fact her cutie mark, and is so large it just looks like an item of clothing.

True story.

two images for the new tumblr I’m drawing for, AskprincessTaco . I don’t know why I do these things to myself.

During my stream I drew that second picture and somehow that started the legacy of Princess Taco. PrinceShootingStar made the tumblr when I mentioned that I totally would if I didn’t, you know, have two ask blogs and an art blog already. So now I’m drawing somestuff for him and AskPrincessTaco. :P

(Also thanks to Whitefox for all of the amusing hasbro quips during the stream)

I start livestreaming, and what's the first thing I do?

Make a banner for my Livestream, of course. Eyup.

Still streaming!

Man, I've been neglecting my tumblr.

Not dead, just busy. I'm trying to get this comic thing started, which involves a lot of design and concept sketches. Which are messy. So, I'm filling out three pages of sketchbook a day, but very little of it is presentable.

...And drawing dodecahedrons. I'll post about that some other time.

Here's another charcoal thing, I love it. Windy oaks have got to be the very epitome of spooky trees. 

I got an early Christmas present... a set of charcoal pencils and sticks, and a pad of paper suitable for them. Lucked out really: charcoal was the last thing on my list of things to play around with that I hadn't yet acquired the materials for. Pretty well the only thing missing was a tortillion, of which I already had a few.

I spent an afternoon playing around, getting a feel for them, but this is the first drawing I've taken the time to sit down and put some effort into.

The process was pretty straight forward: I sketched the figure with an HB charcoal pencil, then darkened the lines and filled in the shade with a 4B. After that, it was a steady cycle of blending with a tortillion, lightening patches with a light application of 4mm eraser stick or kneaded eraser, laying down more charcoal where needed, and back to blending again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Man, I love this stuff! It's much better for heavy shade than graphite, and it doesn't make as much of a mess as I thought it would. Charcoal doesn't compare to india ink for pure, solid black, I don't think anything could, but the charcoal is so much more workable. I don't mind the time and effort it takes to build up a ton of hatching with a nib pen, but all you can do is build up. Being able to lay down, blend, and erase charcoal was an utter delight. 

I might do a few more pages of that steampunk comic I worked on a while back, just for something to do in charcoal.

Computers Warping My Brain Again

I'm sure everyone has had one of those moments where they did some sort of mistake in real life, and thought "Ctrl-Z!" to no avail.

I was inking something, thought "Where did I put my hawk-quill nib?" and instinctively reached for Google Search.

I'm pretty sure there's just no hope for me anymore.

You're a Superstar

I was reading up on stellar nucleosynthesis today... turns out, any chemical elements other than hydrogen, helium, and lithium are created by the immense heat and pressure in the heart of a sun. Elements heavier than nickle are only created by type-II supernovae. Which means that trace quantities of your body were made in the death of a massive star. A heavenly body that was 8 to 50 times the mass of our sun, and one to ten billion years old. You have some of that inside you. I like to think that's a pretty big deal.

WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

Yay, spambot.

My earliest memory is watching my brother play Super Mario Bros. on a rented NES, and he keeps "throwing" the controller to make Mario jump farther.

Straight out of high-school, he got a job coding browser games at nearly twenty bucks an hour. He got laid off and re-hired twice, and he's currently writing fiction. I've spent the last seven years trying to drag myself out of an addiction to gaming.

Concept art for June and Jove, characters for a sci-fi comic. Same setting as James, but different storyline.

AI's use virtual appearances for things like video-calls and AR appearances. To make themselves instantly identifiable as AI's, but easy to relate to as people, they use appearances that are lifelike, yet unfeasible or "impossible."

The most standard element of this is to use a  hybrid of animal species for a base appearance: June's a combination of rat and eland, while Jove is a mix of cat and dog. June's rigid gauntlets and boots don't cover the joints (knees and elbows, that is), which is a normally an important consideration. Jove's spandex tights... well, most spacers in this setting wouldn't be caught dead wearing something so flamboyant.

These aren't quite final designs... I'm still deciding on how to mix the features. And I'll probably be giving June a tail.

I need to work on those horns, too.

First real piece of MLP fan art I've done.

Ideas are like demons. They can't be ignored, and they can't be destroyed. The only way to get rid of them is to exorcise them. In my case, by drawing.

I don't know why people picture muses as smexy babes in flimsy drapery.