Hoo, am I tired.



This year's Comic Expo was the first to run over two days, because last year's was packed full: 6000 people attended. It felt full, too; our table was frequently crowded. This year probably pulled in eight thousand--I'm just guessing--but spread out over two days it felt much more relaxed. Which I'm sure was nice for the attendees, but for us, sales were slow. Well, Lisa always does pretty well.



We lined up at the table along a spectrum: Marci was at one end, all cute and family-friendly and pure like the driven snow, and then Lisa, a little sassier, and then me darker yet, and finally Kyle and and his evil carnival of divination and sin.

Man, I wished I had comics to sell. Every time Michael showed someone the truncated one I died a bit, inside. But we networked with other folks about printers who are in town, or at least closer to it or, failing that, have phone numbers. I'll still upload books to Lulu so that people in Uruguay can order them, but that's it.

We also networked with the owners of the local comic book stores, who invited us to bring copies of Diaperman in. Which we would, if we hadn't sold out of the collection. But we did! --I think.



Derek France came by to chat us up about getting tables at Con-Version, and god help us, Kyle and I considered it. May Gord have mercy on us.

Comic finished and ordered!

Sketchcards ordered. I wasn't originally going to bother having some for the Expo, but then I spent today setting them up, so I figured the hell with it and got the seven-day shipping on them. Last year I decided I didn't want business cards, and then I regretted that. Better to have them and not need them, than the alternative.

One more print finished today:

I'll probably try to crank out another one or two before the Expo.

The wedding trip is blessedly now booked--almost. The packages to the hotel we wanted from Calgary sold out before we had financing secured, unfortunately. However, the Toronto packages are still available. And, as it turns out, it's $800 cheaper to book a package leaving from Toronto than from Calgary, so we booked that. We'll get a separate flight to Toronto, stay there a couple of nights, see Niagara Falls and what not. And it feels great to have that done.

Rings still haven't arrived, but soon. I hope.

The wedding reception--which is June 21, the week after the wedding--has been moooostly taken care of. The B&B-slash-hall has been booked, for a year now actually. Since the event is still just in the barbecue-with-friends-in-someone-else's-house category, and not the do-the-whole-wedding thing, it makes it a lot easier to plan. Apart from the food, and the shuttling people to Bragg Creek and back.

Right now Lisa is assembling invitation prototypes. Artsy craftsy! And we're sorting out the guest list. Even eloping in a foreign country doesn't get you away from everything.

Took Sheba in for her glucose test yesterday, and it came back as 1.2, compared to 6.5 a couple of weeks ago when she had her teeth fixed, and 22 when she was first diagnosed with diabetes. I could pretty much tell, as she'd drank almost no water for the past three days. So the tech had me take her off insulin completely for a week--which seemed a little drastic to me, but I'm not a vet, and neither was I about to pass up the opportunity to sleep in Sunday morning. Unsurprisingly, going from six units of insulin a day down to zero has made Sheba queasy, sick and miserable, and I've spent the day keeping an eye on the poor kitty.

There, done.



Now I have to get some comic book work done or I'm screwed. Thank blog it's just in black and white.

There, I think I'm done now. I tried to make it brighter and airier than usual. Still a person dressed almost entirely in black, of course.



I'm very much enjoying Christmas break which I am now officially halfway through. I intended at the outset to get a lot of work done on Diaperman 13, to get it done by the Expo. I have inked two and a half pages of it so far, which isn't no progress, but I haven't made a lot of progress. I'm hoping to accomplish more next week.

Had a great Christmas: I got a suitcase from my sister, Tick Vs. Season Two and a future Batsignal from my parents, and $50 from my grandparents. Which I haven't done anything with. (Actually, come to think of it, my boss gave me $100 and I haven't done anything with that either.) Kyle gave me a gargoyle and Jason gave me a collectable card game he transparently hopes to be invited to. And Lisa gave me Doctor Who Season 3, a clockful of Batman for the bathroom, and some minty chocolates which are not for the bathroom.



And of course we bought each other a TV and HDPVR. As things have turned out, the TV is more for me and the PVR is more for her, as she loves being able to pick and choose things to record a week in advance, and she loves no longer having to remember when Ugly Betty is on.

Right now she's not watching it, though. Right now she's glued to the Pokemon Diamond game I bought her, which seems to have been popular.

And the season of giving continues: the BBC gave me a new Doctor Who Christmas Special (click the link to watch online, provided you live in the UK; if you don't, adjust your proxy settings accordingly). My orthodontist will be giving me lower braces next week. And, just now, I have given you all an image of a heavyset man in his jim-jams in flagrante delicto with a cardboard box.

No need to thank me.

Lisa bought me a sticker at Comic-Con, and I just finished off a sketchbook, which means that I now have a new sketchbook on which to stick the sticker.

Anyway, in the interest of generating prints for the comic expo, I wanted to draw my own martini girl. Who more logical to fit inside a martini glass than the Wasp?

Colour to follow.

Kyle kept confusing this with a champagne flute. Don't try to wedge your butt into a champagne flute ever.

Work continues! I always have trouble lighting leather and vinyl.

Also I have braces on my top teeth, now, and they hurt.

Shaded! Now I need to put in the lighting, and put in a background of... something. That I'll have to... draw. I guess.

In the long-held tradition of sketching while the DM is droning on with tedious exposition, here's The Chosen One, my Eberron paladin.

	Scott Pilgrim Fanart Too bad I've drawn the title character terribly!
	Catwoman Drew this while not really paying attention. She's not putting enough weight on the whip.

Since my initial proof of my colour art book had had some problems, I had ordered a second proof. Unfortunately I requested standard shipping, which can take up to thirty business days.

Whoops.

Michael's and Lisa's and Kyle's books had all been fine, and since the plan was to do a joint order to save shipping, I took the gamble and placed the order.

So, naturally, my second proof arrived today. Luckily it's fine! And so now my book is available for everyone to order!

Lulu is awesome. Michael and I are working on another, recurring Lulu project.

I think I'll do another Vistaprint order. I only did one, and Michael and Lisa placed three. Each. We're going to need a bigger table.

Every so often I tiddle around with that other program that the people who make Illustrator also make.

At the Maple Ink art night, I finally finished that drawing of Supergirl I'd started at the last Maple Ink art night, a month ago. As for the art night itself, Kyle was the second-most gregarious and social person there, which should really tell you something. Most everyone kept their head down and sketched. I sat in the corner by myself because that was where the power socket was.

Of course, not social enough is better than enforced social. So that didn't suck.

Kyle made fun of me for putting a lot of effort into drawing Supergirl and then making her an inch tall, so here you go.

Today my VistaPrint order arrived. And it is awesome. I bought 50 magnets, and in a separate order 50 large postcards and 100 normal-sized postcards, because apparently I like to pay extra shipping. (The real reason is that I'm impulsive.) But now, a quandary: do I give them away for free at the Expo, or do I sell them for a buck? Or do I sell them for a buck but give them to people who buy my book? I am unsure. I think they're highly lickable, but I recognize that that's subjective, in part because they've got my website on them.

My Lulu book also arrived yesterday. This was quite a bit more disappointing. To light things in Illustrator, I like to use objects with gradients and a Screen transparency setting. This works fine in RGB, but when converted to CMYK the objects become white instead of transparent--apparently because the black in the gradient wasn't 100/100/100/100. Anyway, it doesn't work. Many of my earlier Photoshop files were RGB, as well, and they became muddy. One of them turned purple. I'm used to that sort of behaviour in offset printing, but I figured that Lulu, being a digital printer, would be able to render an RGB PDF. It can't. At least, not reliably. Lisa also had some trouble: she'd used some of InDesign's special effects, and whatever Lulu uses for rip software couldn't render that either. It's not a big deal--I mean, I can fix it--and it's kind of my own fault really. But that's why I only ordered one proof copy. Once I make all the troublesome artwork into nice safe CMYK bitmaps, I'll send for another proof. And then things should be fine. In the plus column, the printing itself is top-notch: it doesn't have that weird feel that digital printing often has, and of course it doesn't suffer from registration fuckery and coarse linescreens like offset does. So I suppose I'm halfway happy with it.

Lisa told me I draw women's hips too narrow. So I started pointing out slim-hipped women, including those of her band conductor. She amended her statement to that I draw women with overly wide shoulders. That I conceded.

Apparently I cannot draw men with beards who don't look like Tony. This sketch has almost entirely failed to not completely look just like him.

Weird Al has posted tour dates!

Bruce Timm is joining Paul Dini at this year's Calgary Comic Expo. I've already met him, in San Diego, but what the heck! I have a wide assortment of Batman things for them to sign.

I finished my Phantom Girl. (click the thumbnail for full size.)

Next up: Supergirl, which I'll probably do during the Maple Ink sketch night downtown. Supergirl's not as cool as Batgirl was; maybe I'll draw Batgirl kicking her ass...

"What do you think of DeviantArt?" I asked Lisa today.

"I don't like it," she said.

"That doesn't make any sense," I said. "If you don't like it, why are you on it?"

"Because it's the responsibility of an Internet Citizen," she replied. "Same reason I'm on MySpace."

So, because I'm working up to my first convention table ever, I set up a DeviantArt gallery, because Lisa and Kyle and Shonna have one and it seems to be the Thing that one Does.

I'm still evading MySpace, though. I can't see anything useful or good about that place.

Oh, also finally I accepted that I won't be able to host my website on my own server for at least the near future, and have actually done something with the space Michael has lent me. If I'm going to tell people where my website is there should be something there. Happily, it updates itself from my LJ automatically so I don't have to pay attention to it.

I've ordered a proof copy of my book. Assuming it's not hugely screwed up, I'll open it up for orders soon. Of course, if people buy it from me instead of from Lulu, I can do a sketch in it. So, don't follow the link I will someday post.

Through Lisa's work, Kyle, Lisa and I are doing tote bags for the Comic Expo, and we're splitting up the design into three panels. I pretty much had to do a gargoyle chick, and I'll be surprised if Kyle's doesn't incorporate Elvis or zombies in some fashion. I dunno what Lisa will do. It's weird that it's only until after I scanned the pencils that I noticed her mouth needs to move slightly to the left. And I'm outside the crop lines way more than I planned to be.

Lisa finished drawing my head, so last night I traced it and coloured it, and the front cover is done! Now we just have to take the photo for the back cover and I can post the sumbitch!

As planned, I used the holiday time to finish my Lulu book--mostly. I still need Michael to write the Foreword and Lisa to draw her part of the front cover and take the back cover photo--but here's a peek at the cover so far. The idea came about from a request one of Lisa's ex-coworkers made of her: could Lisa use a picture of a horribly destroyed cake the coworker had baked and create a fake lifestyle magazine cover around it? I suggested Modern Oddity as the name and then liked the sound of it. What do you think? Too girly for a book of art? Would you pick it up at a con?

Happy ho day!

Last weekend was our gaming Christmas party at Jason's house. We decided that Lisa would drive, and therefore I could drink--drink like I've hardly ever drunk before! In a fit of insanity, I even decided that I'd let Jason mix most of them.

That's not something one should ever do.

This was taken in the brief period between when I was awesome fun drunk and when I was flat on my ass. See how I'm green? That's not from gamma rays. Though I did hulk out a few times.

It's been about twelve years since I did that the last time. Hopefully it'll be twelve years before I do it the next time.

Everything's pretty much set for the holidays: I even got my MacBook back from the repair shop the day after I took it in, which has got to be a new record. A few weeks ago, the battery suddenly died--as in, it worked on Friday night and on Saturday morning it refused to believe the battery even existed. It's apparently a new and common problem.

"You're cursed," Mom said. Nine logic boards on my old iBook, two repairs on the new computer so far--it's a good thing the damn machines kick so much ass otherwise.

I took the computer in a couple of weeks ago and switched the battery with one of their MacBooks to make sure it was the battery that was at fault--and sure enough, my computer charged their battery, and their computer wouldn't charge mine. So I left them with just the battery and kept my computer, congratulating myself for my cleverness.

Ten days later I phoned and Alan said that they actually did need the computer, too, thanks so much. So, so much for that. However, evidently it just needed its power management system tweaked and that was it; now it's back and my replacement battery is on order.

Ten days off work! Well, nine days now. I plan to use this time to finally put up my surround speakers, assemble the Lego and My Little Pony cabinets, and finish putting together my full-colour, thirty-four page Lulu book of artwork. There's four months still to go before the Expo, but writing all the blurbs is pretty hard.

We're also going to drive to Medicine Hat to visit my grandparents, who are getting pretty hesitant to make the drive themselves. Can't really blame them. Plus it'll be our first road trip in the Caravan, which I'm looking forward to. It's like we rented a car a month ago and never took it back!

They still owe us a personalized license plate for it, too. Any suggestions?

I have officially purchased my first convention artist table! Well, sort of, Kyle and Lisa and I went in on one together.

Friiiiiightening!

Calgarians, I'll see you at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo on April 29th. They're filling the Roundup Centre with comics--do you have somewhere better to be?

Must publish!