I just deleted 98 pieces of comment from this blog that had pooped up since thelast time I visited. Apparently, the spammers have gotten aggressive. I read each one, and two or three comments almost convinced me they were real, but I couldn’t verify the links so I had to delete them as well. If you really are a real boy or girl and I deleted your comment, I apologize. Please contact me privately and I’ll add your comments in the future. Thank you.
Thank you,
the Management.
I’ve been working on a letterface for a new seasonal greeting card, but sadly, I’ve been under the weather for the past few days, and very busy running errands and such previous to that, so I’m truly behind schedule and beyond the likelihood of getting done in time for Christmas Day, and for that, I’m sorry.
I’m also sorry that I utterly failed to capture the spirit of the letterface I’d originally set out (without my handy reference image) to recreate for the new card. So, since I’m late anyway, I figured I’d show you that instead:
It’s from a card design I did back in 2000, but I was looking to expand the letterface. Sadly, even if I restart now following the original guide (which I’m sorely tempted to do), it simply won’t be done in time. But I think it would be great to do, nonetheless.
I hope everyone had a decent year, a fine end of year holiday season, and that you all look forward to better things in the year ahead. Few things are as I’d like them to be right now, but I’m still in the game, so we’ll see what next yeaer holds in store, together.
Lee.
Still dying of Chest Muck Plague. Still tired and dozy. Still drawing lettersets: 
There may be one or two more lettersets to design, once these two are formalized. The first is gonna take me a while (three forms for each letter, and frankly, what I’ve got so far needs work), and the second comes in two or three sizes, and also has a lowercase letterset–most of which have yet to be drawn–though this project doesn’t really need them (yet).
The first set (Limbo AlphansE) is my attempt to modify my favourite Mucha-type letterset, to put my personal stamp on it and claim it for my own, while still tipping my hat to the master.
The second set (Limbo Cornice) is my long-promised full letterset for logos I did for the Tru Treat and Zoe projects. I’m struggling a little with the self-imposed dimensions, based on trying to draw them all on one sheet, but it looks like it will work anyway, and if I need to change teh dimensions, later, I’ll be able to vector thema nd strech them anyway I like. I just need full sets to work from. I don’t want to be stoppign to design all-new lettersets every other day, or this project will never get done. It’s not meant to be a portfolio; it really is intended to function as a proper graphic novel, despite my intention to make it interactive as well.
I’m looking forward to the part where I actually start drawing, you know, the actual logos for the actual splash pages. I’m starting to need to see how this stuff is going to turn out, so I can figure out how to make the interactive part work. the notions I have inmy head are untested, and I won’t know if they’ll work properly until I have finished art to work with.
I was also looking into other Kickstarter-type funding programs, but haven’t committed to any as of yet. I have no idea how credible some of these programs are, and the fact is, Kickstarter has a fair bit of heft in the comics world right now. Asking comics fans to finance a project through something other than Kickstarter might raise eyebrows, but alas, ther eis no Kickstarter for me here in Canada. *shrug*
But what I really want is to sit in my living room and chat with close friends. Alas, everyone has better things to do than spend time with a dead man today.
*waves*
Lee.
The week of no work has almost come to an end. I’ll spend tomorrow trying to finalize the plotform of The Art of Words (or aOW, as I’m starting to think of it for reasons that will soon become apparent), and then begin the gruelling process of thumbnailing, sketching and rendering the many logos I will need to tell my visual/logoform interactive comicthing.
So far, I’m considering somewhere between 45 to 270 logoforms, minus whatever reworkings I do of any repeated words. This project may take upwards of the rest of the year and (hopefully not) some of next year as well to complete, even with my considerable skills as a cartoonist and logo designer.
I’m also still considering Kickstarter funding. My price keeps going up (currently thinking 3K). I’d better get my proposal together and pitch it while I’m still somewhere within the ballpark of sanity.
No work today. Transferred old files over from my uncle’s old computer (formerly known as Zoe mk 2 or 3, IIRC) to my uncle’s new computer (which my wife and I helped him purchase today) and got him set up with a freshly installed dose of Windows XP-the-expurgated-version. There may have also been Guinness consumption. And wine consumption. Two things that don’t usually go hand in hand, here in Limboland.
So yeah, there will most likely be a rough start tomorrow. Don’t expect genius until 3 pm. 4 pm if there’s vomit involved.
Time to take meds and go to bed. Hope all you naked pagans are having fun camping tonight. Think kindly of me, if it helps. If not, you should have known better. Good night.
Lee.
Rescanned an old logo that I want to do a couple of things with. Problem is, I don’t seem to have the original working file from this project, which had an already-touched-up version of the lineart. I don’t plan on spending all day recleaning the whole thing, but I’m fixing up a few patches that irritate me, and then I’m just gonna cut and paste the bits I want. And THEN I’m going back to Illustrator, where I can fix things up properly (and much more quickly).
Anyway, just demonstrating that I’m busy doing different stuff. I’d show you what I was working on earlier, but Illustrator decided that stuff was too hard to look at (RAM problem, which is interesting given that I have 8GB of RAM…), and kept crashing. I’ll probably have to go in and squash a few vector layers together to ease up on memory problems, since I have a lot more work to do in that file.
Hope everyone is having a good day.
Lee.
I’ve got more plans for this first logo, but I just wanted to show off the fact that I’ve actually made a start on the new project:
The next stage for this logo is going to take me some time, and I also have to work up a logo for the actual series it’s featured in (The Art of Words is merely the title of the episode; it’s actually going to be a side tale from my so-far-untold Gas Mask Chronicles series).
Seeya in the funny pages.
Lee.
tl;dr Version: Fat people are beautiful, too. If you agree with me, prove it in your next creative piece.
‘Splain, Lucy Version: I’m issuing a challenge to any creative people who read this, to create a beautiful piece of work, be it art or prose or comics or games, that favourably portrays a woman or man who is overweight. Details below.
Boring Version: My wife came across a website news article proclaiming some guy as a nutritionist who is starting a new health trend; something to do with blood type. He’s not a medical professional. He’s just some huckster with some bogus letters after his name, and he’s using them to bilk poor people (obviously and especially women) who are barraged daily by messages from the media and everyone they know that there is something WRONG with them for not being thin.
We’re all guilty of feeling this way. We’ve been doing it for decades. It’s the last non-criminal taboo that stand-up comedians feel safe poking fun at. Fat people are funny shit, right?
Right?
Trick question. The answer is ‘No’.
Maybe you don’t agree with the arguments about glandular conditions or genetics or the BMI being a crock of shit. Maybe you’re happily thin and have never had a problem with looking the way we all know we’re supposed to look. Or maybe you were once overweight or clinically obese, and after years of being made to feel like shit, you fought your way down to a reasonable weight, and now count yourself among those who have the right to tell everyone what ‘ideal’ is.
This is the world we live in, and we all have our own vision of what the ideal human form should look like… and we all have an inkling, right or wrong, of whether we fit that mold or not.
The thing is, it’s all bullshit. Oh, sure, there are morbidly obese people whose health is severely threatened by their size and lack of mobility. Perhaps these people need help. Perhaps these people would change if they could. One thing they don’t need is self-righteous people making them feel like shit. That’s not tought love; that’s prejudice, plain and simple.
Anyway, I don’t mean this to sound like an accusation. We all do this, to one extent or another, either to other people, or just to ourselves. We all fear being told that we are substandard because we don’t have the physique of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie.
It extends to other things, too, and most of us spend most of our lives trying to cover up the sordid details of our imperfect lives, so people who are just as flawed and scared as us don’t turn against us to give themselves an artificially-inflated sense of self-importance.
My thinking is, it’s time for a change, and we can’t expect Hollywood to make the change for us, so we have to start doing it ourselves. Starting now.
MY PLAN: My next creative project is going to be an interactive comic book using illustrated logos to tell a story. It’s going to have branching paths. It may have some unhappy events, but I’m going to do my best to make every outcome a relatively positive one. But the main point is, it’s going to be a story about one of my favourite characters from the Gas Mask Chronicles: The Moustress, a very intelligent, charming, and sexy woman who happens to be what some folks mock-kindly refer to as BBW (Big Beautiful Women). And it’s going to be as positive a portrayal, both visually and narratively, of this character as I can manage.
I’ve been meaning to tell such a story for a long time, and I’ve been trying to decide which story to tell with my Art of Words interactive comic concept for days now. And I think The Moustress is our winner.
THE CHALLENGE: While I’m working on this project, which will take me months to complete, I want to see my creative friends and acquaintances do something in a similar vein. It can be about a man or woman, or both, or more than one of either or both. No limit on the amount of fat you portray. Aesthetics are a personal thing, so I won’t dictate that, except to say it would be helpful if you didn’t deliberately make your characters repulsive. It can be any medium, in any style, with any theme you wish, so long as it achieves the main objective, which is to portray an ‘overweight’ person in a positive manner.
Strictly speaking, I’m not objecting to people deliberately telling a story about someone who is badly underweight, either, but I think such an approach would miss the point of where I’m going with this. Underweight people look unhealthy and need help too, but they’re still basically acceptable to the majority of our society, where overweight people simply are not. I’ve dated and lived with people of both categories, and I can tell you that even the skinniest girls I have ever dated were frightened of being overweight. That pretty much says it all right there.
Now, I’m not ignoring the fact that this is not a new idea. There have been plenty of artists and writers over the years who have worked to portray overweight people in something other than ugly, lazy and useless. However, something I haven’t seen is a proper social movement to get other people involved in the discussion.
And it is a discussion. Every time you hear yourself comment about a picture or appearance of a person who is overweight, you are contributing to the overall statement about what this society find acceptable or unacceptable.
Isn’t it time we started addressing the topic openly, with an honest effort to diffuse some of the negativity and prejudice that comes out whenever a thoughtless person says something derogatory about overweight people? I mean, seriously, what century are we living in, anyway? This isn’t the statistically perfect 1950s, here. We’re all human beings, and we come in all shapes and sizes. Isn’t it time we learned to live with each other without sneering because most of us would look out of place on the cover of Maxim (as if that’s some kind of virtue)?
My one request is that, if and when you create this piece of work, that you come back and give me a link so I can show it off. I’ll create some sort of Wall of Fame for any pieces that succeed in presenting overweight people positively.
Lee.
Saving the gag for later, but here’s a hint of what I’m doing now:
I should have started doing this stuff ages ago.
Lee.
Okay, Illustrator is fixed again, hopefully for good, this time.
As you were.
Lee.
ETA: Nope, I was wrong. Teh Borked again. Maybe I should just give up and start saving pesos for CS5.5 instead. *shrug*
