From my sketchbook - Sirena

From one of the sketchbooks I carry around with me.  This was drawn with a mechanical pencil then inked with the Faber Castel manga pen set I bought recently.  I love working in shades of grey, especially with pen and ink.  I’m going to have to stock up on those pens since I think I may use them up pretty quickly.

I actually started drawing this one over a year ago, but then set that sketch book aside for a while and didn’t come back to it until recently.  I think the original inspiration may have come from “Bizenghast” but I don’t really recall now.  I just know I like drawing weird, creepy, flowing things, and I think this one certainly qualifies.  My five-year-old likes this one a lot.

The Adventures of Cynical Woman - Episode 16

Another episode in my new webcomic.  Yes, I’m posting this everywhere.  It’s been a great promotional tool for my writing, and yet has also been fun to work on.  I love using Manga Studio Debut, but I wish they had a rounded rectangle tool.  To make word balloons I either have to use the circle tool or the curved line tool.  The curved line tool seems to work better – I can get the balloon to the exact size and shape I want – but it takes so much longer to make balloons this way.  Also, I wish Manga Studio had some way to adjust the spacing between lines to below 100%.  This would go a long ways toward making all that text fit in the panels.

Froog the Weird

Now that I’ve got some blogging software (namely BlogJet) that will actually let me upload my images to the FTP of my choice, I feel ready to resurrect this blog.  Here’s today’s image:

This was done with Micron Pigma pens, no pencils, and Faber Castel’s Manga set of grey-scale brush pens, plus one Prismacolor marker for the background.  No pencil drawing in this one. I just started randomly doodling and this is what came out.  I’ve saved a large version to my computer and have separated out the background color in Adobe Photoshop so I can do some better color on the background. Actually, this isn’t even the final image.  After I scanned this in, I went back with some of the pastel colored Faber Castel brush pens and added some orange to the shirt and the tentacles.  I’ll have to show that version later.

Recent Project - The Adventures of Cynical Woman

I’ve been working on a web comic called The Adventures of Cynical Woman.  I’m using Manga Studio Debut to do the artwork and lettering.  I like the final results but it sometimes it takes forever!  Especially this one.  I had to pencil, ink and tone four characters plus all those seats.  Like I said, the end result was worth it, but if I’m doing this every week, and that’s the goal, I need to speed things up.  I’m thinking of doing the pencils by hand on real paper, and then maybe upgrading to Manga Studio EX to see if having the vector tools will make the inking go faster. 

By the way, that hottie in the passenger’s seat? That’s Orziel, the main character from my erotica e-book, Demon By Day.  (Insert shameless pimping here!)  Demon By Day is available from Mojocastle Press.

Cartoon up! The Adventures of Cynical Woman

Well, Picassa has effectively killed my incentive to use it any more for posting any further artwork there, including the cartoons I've been doing. Sometime in the past week, they changed how they handle links to web albums, so that I can't simply e-mail the link from my computer, but have to do it from the Picassa website instead, meaning I have to have addresses set up there, probably need a Gmail account (which I don't have and don't plan to get at this time), etc. And it looks like if folks want to see the cartoon, they now have to log into Google as well, which don't work if folks don't have a Google account. Basically, Google took what used to be a simple, handy operation for me and made it useless in their attempts to pimp themselves.

Fortunately, I think I have found a way around that.

I'm testing out Zoundry's Raven this week, to see how it works for posting blog entries and images. What I like best is that I can upload images from my computer to a designated place on MY webhost, as opposed to some third party service like the aforementioned (and now useless) Picassa. So let's see how this works shall we? I'll upload my cartoon with the click of a button and...

Presto baby! Now if you click on the thumbnail below, you get the cartoon but not the Picassa album. Looks like this will work just fine for now. Still need to get a regular web comic site set up though. I'm working on it...

Test post using Zoundry Raven

Last week, someone on the Marketing For Romance Writers Yahoo group asked if there was an efficient way to post the same post to multiple blogs. I've been wondering that myself, since I have three blogs and am considering starting up a fourth. I did some digging around in the Blogger help section and came across a list of third party utilities that offered such services. I decided to give Zoundry's Raven a try. This is the first test post to see if it does what I need it to do.