Totem Journals

The london expo was awesome! It was very busy but still lots of fun! Sold quite a few issues of Totem Chronicles (now I'll HAVE to update the site =p )and had more interest my manga portraits than expected. Plus got to catch up with Lee and chat to some awesome creators, all in all very enjoyable

Thanks sooo much to everyone who bought something and came up and chatted to me. I don't think I've ever been in a place so utterly rammed with people yet so full of positive vibes. I have whole new list of animes I want to watch

The only downers were the MASSIVE queues that my table minions treasured friends and wonderful lover had to wait in to get into the hall. And the fact that I didn't get a chance to visit the sweatshop table and get a copy of Chemical Blue and some other stuff that I wanted. But I guess there'll be plenty of opportunities at the Japanese Art Festival...if I can get time off work....

The first issue of Totem Chronicles is available in print! It will be on sale at Aya Con on August 16th

Motion computing tablet pc *drooool*

I guess Tide* is not a morning person.....

Chapter 1 cover in progress. You can see some of my influences for character design from the refs

Chapter 1 is FINALLY finished! I'm so proud I finally got the damn thing done. I still need to do a cover for it. But I'm rewriting the script for chapter 2 at the moment. Tide has a best friend that's turning out like a cross between Dee Dee from dexter's lab and Elizabeth from blackadder - poor girl!

Glee! Love to abc for producing this
video. I have coeliac disease and explaining it to people can
sometimes be a bit tricky. Now I can just point them to this video!
whoo!

This is quite possibly the best
invention ever XD

Well.....not really when you consider
life saving vaccines and space travel, but I'm sure the R4 is pretty
damn close. And is at least the best invention on the DS! I am so in
love with the homebrew stuff right now especially “Colors”. It's
a free okekai/no frills photoshop type application , but without those handy
dandy layers.

Still though, the program is exceedingly well thought
out by the developers. I think some times it's painfully clear that
the programmers who design art software aren't artist at all. But not
with colours ...nope! Because of the button layout it's easy to use
weather you're right or left handed. You can also export any art
you've done to your PC to work on it later. I'm not sure if it works
the other way around though. I tried importing a .png I started in
Photoshop into colours and it didn't seem to recognise it.......might
be the encryption I used though.....still.....it's a very cool
program.

Drawing done using colors (you can see the avi file here)

The R4 Chip lets you view movies on your ds too! (but you have to convert them to a different format - dpg I think it was)

Random Tide doodles:

Did I mention I love artrage This thing is sooo easy to sketch with:

Woo! First entry of the 2008, and it's
fashionably late

The site was hacked by some random
idiot, sometime in mid December. Most likely it wasn't even a person,
just some random bot designed to annoy people....Apparently one of my
scripts got hijacked and this guy/girl/program/whatever was sending
out emails through my domain, pretending to be ebay asking people for
their passwords or something. @_@ So I get an email from the hosting
company telling me my account is suspended because of
phishing......And I'm like WTF?!

But anyway....it's all sorted
now.....suppose it'll teach me to be more careful when writing my own
php scripts.

Using Artrage to do this one - it's well good and so cheap! Like around £10! (you can also download a free version) bargain!

Sugarcubes for anyone that can read the title of the firefox app on the start bar......

Uh! The eternal darkness of winter mornings.....I really REALLY don't like getting up in the dark....there's something just so UNNATURAL about it. Then there's the cold – the terrible, terrible cold. I'm seriously starting to wonder if there's something wrong with me. I seem to have like, no natural resistance to winter.

I got super fit in the summer too ( the superness being relative to my previous state fitness - which was not at all). I was going jogging four to five days a week in the mornings. I went last Wednesday for the first time in weeks and ended up walking around the park with a stitch......

I actually can't wait for people to start putting there Christmas lights up this year. It makes the darkness waaaay less bleak. I might actually put mine up before December and become one of those eager beavers.

I started a University course in September....it's just a one year postgrad thing...but the workload is quite high. Plus I had to take on some freelance work at the beginning of school year to cope with the shortage of money that inevitably comes with switching from employment to studentdom. All of this has meant less “me time” and consequently less comic time...

BUT the end of term rapidly approaches and I swore to myself I'd get the first issue of this thing done by the New year, and damn it I WILL! I am going to start working on pages again at the beginning of December and hopefully get another scene posted before Christmas. I guess I could post the single pages that I've been doing but, I've always thought that would fragment the story somewhat. Stuff generally makes more sense when you absorb it in a block, reading one page of a comic per week (or even a day) is sort of like watching a feature film in ten second segments - not at all satisfying.

Currently peniciling pages 20 - 24....then colouring will start and image posts will start again.

On completely unrelated subject, if you're thinking of getting cable TV DON'T get virgin! It's utterly craptastic! God! Ever since Virgin took over NTL the channels crash and freeze all the time! You 'd think now that we're not getting the sky channels they'd lower the price of their service or something. But NO! What they've done is added this thing called "tv on demand", which theoretically means that you can watch episodes of your favorite shows any time you want. In reality however the only shows available are ones over 8 months old, nothing new. If you really wanted to see those old shows again you'd either have bought the DVD boxset or bitorrented them by now!

The one thing I actually like about on demand was catch up TV. Basically a few shows would be left in the database for a week after they aired and if missed a show you could watch it again anytime during that week. BUT now they've deleted a  chunk of shows from that database - including Bloodlines. Bloodlines was this fantastic show about this female private investigator and this shexay vampire....I know it sounds cheesy but trust me, the scripts were VERY good. On top of that my Virgin Broadband been reeeeallly slow for the last couple of days...... I'm sooooo switching to sky....it's cheaper too

"That's the end of the girl's floor exercise. Now, lets bring on the men!"