Archive for ‘Blog’
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Oh hi. You may have noticed that there is no longer a comic on the home page. That is because Random Assembly: The Comic is no longer updating. However, the archives are still intact if you would like to peruse them.
Random Assembly started as a public exercise in Learning to Draw Comics. While the art and writing skills improved over time, the beginning, much like all beginnings, was kind of terrible. I would totally understand if you skipped straight ahead to When I Grew Up & Finally Bought A Tablet.
If you like, you may start at the beginning. If that is not your cup of tea, here are some summaries of how it all went down each year from my perspective. Each link goes to the first comic post of that year. Please view the Archives to see a list of each comic by year.
2002
First attempt at drawing comics, second year in college. Rollerball pens and graphite. Beginning to learn Photoshop.
2003
Moving on to Micron pens and non-photo blue pencils. Slightly better grasp of anatomy. Trying out different paneling and coloring methods.
2004
Attempting brush pens/brush and ink method on heavier paper stock.
2005
Biscuit Press, guest comics, graduation, cast begins to change.
2006
Experimenting with greyscale tones and modified photo backgrounds.
2007
Newspaper format, graphics tablet, Assembly Required journal comics.
2008
Additional practicing with both digital and traditional inking methods.
2009
Scooters, marriage, homeownership.
2010
Digital ziptones, computer failure, and the end of an eight year project. One straggler comic in 2011.
Comment
Yeah…
So anyway, I haven’t done a comic in months and months and months because… I haven’t. I had a comic all worked up about not doing comics any more, but every time I started to work on it I got super depressed and the pity points for that ran out a looong time ago. So here’s the new deal.
THE NEW DEAL
Random Assembly as a webcomic is essentially dead. It’s dead. Dead, I say. There will be no regular updates. There may be a comic from time to time, and if there ever is one, it will be announced in my twitter feed. I don’t tweet-vom very often, so if you miss it, you won’t have missed it by much.
THE NEW DEAL SUCKS WHAT THE HELL
You may have noticed that I’ve been posting to Tumblr a lot more often. If you’re dying to see the myriad of doodles and things I work on or updates on my new project, you may want to keep your eye on that. It’s a hell of a lot more useful than checking this non-updating site constantly.
WAIT WHAT NEW PROJECT COME ON DON’T HOLD OUT ON ME HERE
The main reason I’ve stopped the comic was, other than being burnt out on it, that I’ve started a new project. You may have noticed an increase in food-tweets in the past few months… this is because I have been writing, cooking, and tweaking recipes. You heard me. Recipes.
WHAAAAT
Yes, that’s right. I’m in the process of writing a cook book. The Husband™ is helping me along in various ways. The plan is to be illustrated and hilarious, so you can see that there is little time for screwing around.
WHAAAAT DUDE WHAAAAT
Oh shut up. Anyway, Twitter. Tumblr. Follow them. I’ll let you know. Capiche?
A while ago, my BossMan informed me that, as an employee of AwesomeCompany, I had an allotted number of vacation days that I was required to use… otherwise they go poof. Poof. They just go poof like that. Can you believe it? Apparently I must use said vacation days to prevent them from going “poof”, so I threw them at the calendar for the remaining year and let them stick wherever they wanted to stay.
Needless to say, I took a long weekend here and there. In fact, I’m taking a long weekend right now. I am continuing to take a long weekend. It’s kind of nice. I am currently chilling my shit at The Farm™, where my Mom built and art studio for the two of us in the basement. It’s got nearly everything for ceramics, painting, and metalsmithing, so I’d say it’s pretty useful. Occasionally I head out here to paint, and that’s just what I’m doing now. Well, not right now. If I were painting right now, this computer would be a mess and covered in paint. I painted earlier.
It turns out that MAB was also out here this weekend working on a new album. Yesss. New album!
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Did I forget to mention that The Farm™ is also the home of Big Walnut Studios? It’s pretty great. If you need to record something in Indiana, you should give them a call. Yes.
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Anyway…
I don’t know if I’ve blogged about it much, but I love coming out here. It’s the kind of place that’s so isolated that it takes half of an hour just to get to the nearest town to get groceries or gasoline or what have you. Imagine being thirty minutes away from the nearest McDonalds. In turn, you’d be thirty minutes away from insane traffic and obnoxious youths with loud speakers (or whatever it is obnoxious youths are carrying with them these days). It’s pretty great if you like to actually relax when you’re trying to relax.
This is just one of my many vacations I’m taking for the second half of two oh one ten. The next big run-away-from-work-and-still-get-paid time is in November. What is in November, you ask? Why, the Up! Fair.
The Husband™ and I will be going to Up! Fair with a few members of IWG. It should be pretty great. I’m working on some neat and extra special prints for Up! Fair, and I may even do an ashcan to hand out to really cool people. (If you’re not cool, you may not get an ashcan. Dude, you’d better be cool if you want an ashcan.) If for any reason you already are or will happen to be in Lexington, Kentucky, then you should stop by the Up! Fair and see what everything is about.
To sum it up: The Farm™ is awesome; come to the Up! Fair in November!
GenCon is probably the biggest convention in Indy… well, I really have no fact to back that up, but it is definitely the most visible. You can always tell when GenCon is in town. For years I’ve seen Storm Troopers moseying down the street to get a coffee or a sandwich or to just, you know, march around the place concerning everyone, and this year I finally decided to see what it was all about.
Squirrel Dan comes in to town to see it all go down, and I hadn’t seen him in a while, so I decided to acquire him as a guide to GenCon. Seasoned Pro and all that. We got a one day pass and I think it was pretty neat. Keep in mind that this is coming from a Very Boring Person™.
Aaaanyway, links to stuff as described in the GenCon Report:
The Tall Leprechaun was pretty creepy.
Geeky Clean is the best soap. Seriously. Go buy it now, bitches.
Jennie Breeden, previously met at Wizard World, continues to be the nicest lady ever.
Video Games Live is a great show, and I recommend it to everyone that has a chance to see it.
I have no link for Fat Magneto because we could not find him. I suppose you can Google him yourself if you’re really that curious.
Like a fatty-fat fatty, I was inspired to draw by a dessert I had the other day. I was so excited by my dessert that I had to draw how excited I was about it.
Anyway…
I ended up drawing it very, very large. This means I could print it. Should it be printed, it would be 11×17.
I just wanted you to know that.
Alright. Ok. So.
I got my computer troubles sorted out, I think. I’ve replaced the G5 with a new Mac Mini. It’s more powerful than my old machine (I never got around to upgrading the damn thing) and it feels like there is a lot more space in my work area now that the computer takes up a fraction of it. Yessss.
The nice Tech guys at Best Buy managed to get the files from my old hard drive for me, but I did lose a few things… like my Monkey Island saves. Dammit. Now I have to do all that work again. Blargh.
Anyway, I went and re-installed all of my software and updated a lot of stuff and the new work station is running pretty smoothly. I even have an external hard drive for Time Machine backups (thanks Tech guys!) so I’m pretty pleased with the way things turned out. The only thing that kind of sucks is that I couldn’t really claim any of this for insurance because, frugal as I am, I didn’t go over the deductible. Daaaang.
Hopefully I’ll be able to get some dang comics out like some kind of dang comic artist or whatever, and maybe I’ll stop sucking so bad at this whole being good at doing stuff I like to do thing. Maybe I’ll eventually be able to form coherent sentences.
My G5 tower kinda sorta got fried earlier this week in a storm. It’s a five year old machine (archaic, really) and needed a lot of upgrades, so I’m getting a new one. The most pressing problem is getting my files from the unresponsive mac onto the new one.
For you, this means that the comic files I was working on are effectively buried under ten tons of rubble. Boo to that.
Hopefully I’ll have everything new and shiny and rarin’ to go by next week, but I’m not going to make a promise that relies on other people to keep it. So! Watch the twitter feed, yo, thar’ll be updates before you know it.
Sooo, did you know I did a print? Did you know you can purchase it through my Etsy store? Did you know these things? Well, you know them now! I’m working on another awesome print as we speak, for reasons. Oh, what glorious reasons they be.
