What I’ve been doing

• Working on an the cover to an EP, and a website for Kirsty Bromley. You’ll be able to buy the former from the latter soon.
• Working on a script for Crash Talyor.
• Doing flats and generally being the not-really-that-glamorous assistant for Mr Andrew Tunney. You’ll be able to see the results of that soon.
• Playing with new materials. A pentel GFKP brush pen, and Manga Studio EX.
• Starting running. I’ve been trying to get on a bit more of a health kick lately. Needs doing. Trying out a neat little app called Get Running, it seems pretty good. I guess I’ll know how good in a couple of weeks.

What I’ve been reading

• The Action Philosophers trade. It’s been out for a while but I’ve always meant to pick it up and it doesn’t disappoint. A fantastic way to learn about the history of western (and some eastern) thinking. It’s funny without undermining its subject, and has a tonne of interesting little details about the lives of philosophers as well as their ideas.
• The New ‘Hark, A Vagrant’ Trade. Sure I’ve read most of it online but it’s smart, it’s funny, and Ms Beaton deserves our money.
• One Piece. Yes, I know, but I only started reading it when I moved back to Manchester and was pleasantly surprised by how wonderful the characters are, and how bouncy, clean and energetic the art is. I was so ready to brush it off as yet another epic shonen saga for me to have no interest in reading but to my horror it turns out it’s actually fantastic. I’m not sure I want to watch the show, but the comics are great.
• Wonderwoman and Justice League Dark. Already spoken a bit about Wonderwoman (see: ‘Yay!’ and ‘SHE HEADBUTTS A CENTAUR’ etc), and JLD is interesting but so strongly entrenched in set-up land I can’t say much about it until it gets going.
• Next up is going to be REAMDE, because there has not been enough Neal Stephenson in my life. (Can there be enough Neal Stephenson in your life?)

What I’ve been watching

• Spinning Penguin Drum. Strangeness from the director of Utena. Deep strangeness. And penguins. And trains. And references to national disasters and hypothetical libraries. And more symbolism than you can shake a stick at. I’ll post about this one in more detail when it’s finished I think.
• Fate/Zero. Oh man. Fate/Zero. TypeMoon stuff has always been a guilty pleasure of mine and this is TypeMoon plus Urobuchi (writer of Saya no Uta and Puella Magi Madoka) plus UFOtable and Kalafina (Studio and Musicgroup that did Kara no Kyoukai) . If you don’t know the Fate universe, the set up is effectively a battle royale between a bunch of mages (who generally keep all magic a secret from the public) who each summon a legendary hero to fight for them in a battle for the ‘holy grail’. It’s a prequel to ‘Fate/Stay Night’, but where that was a grail war fought by effectively flailing newbies getting it wrong, this one appears to be run by cheating assholes and it’s brilliant. The result takes a few episodes to get going but once it does, it’s gotten better every episode. Occasionally the budget shows (it’s TV anime after all) but it’s incredibly pretty, and the story and characters keep getting better. Streaming in a load of languages on NicoNico for 7 days after broadcast, then it’s over to CrunchyRoll. Where you can have it in the delicious high-res it deserves. (If you do plan on watching it and want some F/SN first… do yourself a favour and skip the anime. Find the game or a play through and read that instead, as the show is both the weakest route of the story, and makes the lead character terrible).

LinkBloggy bit

• A Brief Rant on The Future of Interaction Design. What it says on the tin. An interesting look at how we interact with our technology.
• The excellent mr Sam Gwilym carries on thinking about that, and especially about styluses (styli?).
• Takeshi Miike and Phoenix Wright. YES.

(I also grabbed Justice League Dark but I really DO need to read more of that before I can say anything about it.)

Tachikawa School-G Pen

So, over to the left there is a quick sketch of WW, using the School-G for the lines and some Zig Graphic Twins for the shading. The School-G is basically like a cross breed between a cartridge pen and a traditional G nib… which frankly is an awesome idea. I’ve been getting into G nibs lately, and the idea of being able to throw one in my handbag is very appealing.

Now (art quality aside), the WW sketch there shows the biggest flaw with the Tachikawa, and that’s that unless it’s on the right kind of paper, it bleeds massively. This is pretty frustrating because of course, my default sketch book isn’t the right kind of paper.

A quick test on Bristol Board shows its okay on that (but my wallet is pre-emptively crying) and over to the right is another quick test I did on some printer paper. Once I’ve done some more experiments I’ll come back with more conclusive things about it.

The big negative out the way, what about the rest of it? Well, you’re not going to get quite the range of thicknesses that you’ll get from a traditional nib from it, but you can still get a decent range—I’d say between a 01 and a 07 fineliner depending on pressure, if you can avoid bleed. Maybe a little thinner if you’re featherlight and fast, and it is available in an extra fine as well. It’s a little rougher on the page but it’s clean, fast and forgiving; It dries very fast and you’re not going to get an accidental, picture-destroying blob of ink falling off the pen. It plays just fine with watercolour markers. And again, it’s a nib pen you can throw in your bag without thinking about it. You do need to use it at least every couple of days to stop it drying out, but as I want to get better with a nib that’s actually a feature rather than a bug for me.

So, conclusions on the Tachikawa School-G for now: Needs the right paper and won’t replace a G-Nib if you like really high line varience, but it’s a really good tool to be able to throw in a pencil case or when you don’t want the mess you can end up with from the real thing. More thoughts when I’ve gotten more used to it.

Wonder Woman #1 & #2

If I hadn’t heard such good reviews, I’ll admit getting me to buy a Wonder Woman comic would have been a hard sell, especially with the less than stellar portray of women in some recent *coughCatwomanCough* comics. Wonder Woman has never been a book I’ve been hugely interested in, and I’ll admit I’ve maybe unfairly assumed it would be very saturday morning, straight laced superhero stuff, with a character who’s history has been pretty absurd at times.

But I’ve heard good things and it’s about time I read some main stream DC, so I picked up the first 2 issues and was pleasantly surprised. Here’s some reasons why:

• Rather than straight punchy-punchy heroism (which for the record is fine), we’ve got mystery/horror with a dose of greek myth thrown in. I mean, I knew she was greek based but this is nice and heavy on the ‘gods and goddesses being jerks to humanity’ side of things, and Diana getting lumped protecting Zola feels almost more like something out of a noir story to me.
• On that note, Diana’s attitude. She’s kinda surly and no-nonsense, and just gets on with things. I like that a lot.
• Also she is huge. With muscles. She feels really powerful even without gimicks.
• Also despite having a scene where she’s completely naked, she never feels that sexualised. She’s not ashamed of her body, but she’s not flaunting it either. With recent comics news, that’s just so refreshing.



• And she head-butts a centaur.
• Not knowing much about the series beforehand isn’t getting in the way, we get a little dose of backstory in #2 and it looks like the rest is incoming.
• The art is decent, the colouring isn’t afraid to be moody, there’s bags of energy and nice bold inking. The dialogue is solid too and the characters are all interesting so far.
• And she head-butts a centaur.

My only big negative is not really the team’s fault and that’s the huge amount of ads in there. If I didn’t want to support the singles due to it being good (usually my real reason for buying singles) I’d be waiting for the trade to escape having my immersion broken every 3 pages.

So yeah, I think this will stay on my pull list, and hopefully the quality stays up. As this is interesting stuff indeed.

I don’t want to do a big new years retrospective this year, but I’m gonna say this: 2010 has been a weird one, but it’s been all about the people. For all the wheel spinning I think I’ve done, I’ve met wonderful people and had friendship and support from the utter stars I already knew. I don’t like being super super soppy but when I couldn’t sleep last night, the only thing on my mind was how grateful I am for the amazing people in my life.

I think you already know who you are. Thankyou, so, so much. And lets make 2011 the year we get out there, kick some ass and take some names, yeah?

Have a great day. You deserve it.

Cheers!

–

KT

MG&GL has been going pretty well so far, although the slow speed I’m able to work on it is being a little excruciating. Jack and I actually have quite a lot of story planned out for the thing that I can’t wait to get to. And in the mean time it’s been fun to draw, and an interesting challenge adapting his prose into single-page suitable scripts (when I’m much more used to working long-form.) Makes me want to break out and re-read the Nikolai Dante that much more… there’s something really special in the pacing of stuff like that series, where you have these great on going stories that also have to work in 5-page chunks so every single page has to be spot on. I don’t buy the progs, so when I read them I get the story all at once but because or the original form it’s pretty much super-condensed. You don’t see that much in mainstream comics outside of 2000ad and print versions of web comics. Unless I’m wrong, in which case give me links, people.

(Interestingly, I’m not sure FreakAngels does it. I love it, but then I also love decompressed storytelling too. Instead of cramming in a tonne into 5 pages, FA seems to just flow from one intense moment to the next, it always leaves you wanting more without that hyper distilled storytelling you get in something like Dante.)

Back to me (egolicious, mmm) and comics though, I’ve been having great fun with a series of workshops I’m doing with the lovely Andrew Barton for CYC. The deal is this: For Culture Shock festival this year, we’re making a comic. A massive comic strip, on big banners to go up in the camp-site. We’re taking the banner to schools and youth clubs and each group is adding on, continuing the story. This has been some of the most fun I’ve had in a workshop, and the banner is looking great so far. The next date is this Saturday 2-5pm at Harrogate Trax, followed by another in-school one on the 15th. The Trax one is open to anyone, so come along and join us.

In other news, the web design work I’ve been doing has been making me want to spruce this place up again… but I’m gonna give it a wait, lest we have yet another thing where I spend more time doing redesigns than actually updating the thing. Online content wise, I should hopefully be doing some more streaming in the next couple of weeks as well, for a couple of commissions and possibly for colouring a MG&GL page, if people are interested in seeing that.

Meanwhile, I’m going to leave you with some sketches and pieces I’ve been doing lately. Enjoy.

(Granted, an incredibly silly story, but hey.)

It’s a pulp-parody, possibly to be a webcomic, and we’re throwing it around under the working title of “Bulletwitch Baretta and The Gentlelady Thief”. I’ve been really enjoying drawing up the characters, combining Jack’s design ideas with my own. They’re all done in brushpen and photoshop, and I’ll be covering the colouring method I used in the next part of my Masks tutorial.

No good will come of this. But oh is it fun. Enjoy.

PS: Gun-shoes are still stupid.

Oh boy.

And with that in mind, the more I think about it, the more insane it is that I never went to Musicport before.

If you don’t know the festival, it’s a weekend long celebration of world and trad music that used to take place in Whitby but this year took over Bridlington Spa. The atmosphere was great, really friendly and up for anything, and some of the music was top notch. Artists from all over the world, with music ranging from straight up traditional, through jazz and dance of all kinds from tribal to tango to techno. I paid my way by running a small workshop on the basics of manga drawing, which was a lot of fun and I’d love to do again some time. (Perhaps with more than an hour to do it in next time, although some of us relocated to the bar afterwards for more doodling.) I had been a little concerned it was a little unusual to run at a music festival, but there was a decent turnout and it was great to see people of all ages having a crack at drawing. I helped out with the artists’ green room as well, and then spent the rest of the time hanging backstage or being out there enjoying the music.

Suffice to say, I’m more than geared up to go again. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with some of the photographs I took while I was there.