Weekly Challenge 22/03/09

[grasshopper]

Hurrah! I can come up with a great idea!
_{Even if it was an idea similar on another site that I hadn't heard about before that did it years ago.}

[grasshopper]

Well, I must admit this is taking longer then I thought, so I'm really going to have to step up my pace quite a bit.

Cover and third page )no text. Don't think I'l colour it, at least not now, I'd like to take my time with that, and this is my first time using my stylus to do something from scratch, so it's a bit of a learning curve.

[JTagmire]

That looks great so far. Mine has been an absolute disaster, so I'm trying a new approach.

[grasshopper]

Sadly, I'm not going to be able to finish it thanks to a wonderful flu that has knocked me out for the last two days (and I don't see myself getting much done today either as my head is positively swimming at the moment). So I'm going to put this one on the back burner (I'm on page 5 now), and go with my 'B' concept, that I was originally going to do as an extra if I had time.

[grasshopper]

Well, due to three days of illness (and the fact that I am still sick today but I refused to not get anything in) I was unable to finish my comic (in my defence, it ballooned from 6 pages to a good 24 if I've scripted it right).

So I did the next best thing, I took a panel which I had already done, and did something else instead (originally, what this is, was going to be a single page-B story at the end of my other comic, but I decided to put a bit more effort into it).



My first drawn animation since 2000! Woot! Now I must go lay down, three hours on this is not good in my state.

How's everyone else going? And don't forget to vote for next weeks theme!

[Suzanne]

How about Serpentine for a theme?

And mine for this week is coming! I've decided its the endless project but I want to do a tiny bit more before I photo/post. I will! Promise!

[Luke]

That animation is great, Chris. Awesome stuff. Thanks for sharing.

I have failed to rise to the challenge this week. I found it difficult to get inspired. Plus I bought a Wii. Time is absolutely flying by at the moment and I haven't even thought about sitting down to work on something (although I did spend four hours working on editing my grandfather's book which I needed to do).

Suzanne's submission is a lot of fun and shaping up well.

[grasshopper]

Mar 29, 2009 6:49:17 GMT -5 @Luke said:

That animation is great, Chris. Awesome stuff. Thanks for sharing.

I have failed to rise to the challenge this week. I found it difficult to get inspired. Plus I bought a Wii.

Tell me about it, I just installed an application on my Wii this week that makes it now region free for GameCube games, I have over 50 of those! Some of them I never was able to finish before I moved here!

Thank for the praise, I need whatever I can get.

[JTagmire]

Love the animation.

I decided to go with a Lego interpretation. I thought I was this expert builder until I started actually working on it. But I may try Lego again.

[JTagmire]

All of my closeups were way out of focus, so I had to mess with it in Photoshop, but here is the set without any editing.

[Suzanne]

this is going to be - a long and ungainly post.

So there's a stationery shop near my work, and inspired mostly by Linda Footes receipt comics, I decided to start a drawing at the beginning of the roll and draw down towards the end. The receipt roll is fifty meters long. Thus I certainly have not completed the whole roll, but I'm on the way. I'd like to do bits and pieces towards it and eventually wind up a long, long drawing into a neat little roll. Here's how it looks rolled:


And how it looks unrolled and hung from a wall:



And from the top, rolling down:







and a few closeups, since my photography/lighting/drawing is atrocious:





So essentially, here's what I've got so far: Up the top is Alice under a tree looking down a rabbit hole, below that is pirate treasure on the right and an entombed Sleeping Beauty on the right, a skeleton, a pair of giant fighting earthworms (just roll with it, okay?), three dinosaurs, an antechamber containing an imprisoned Golem and the four men who have created him (and a tiny, tiny kabbalistic Tree of Life), Old Man Time and an hourglass that has run out, The Holy Grail, a sleeping Kthulu (he doesn't look great. looked better in my head), Excalibur and four knight protectors, Aladdins Cave and finally, the Mushroom King and his mushroom followers. I don't know why they made the cut. I blame Dungeons and Dragons and their Myconid fighting class.

So yes. Its done in fineliner and shaded with grey comic marker and HB pencil. Basically I'm going to continue down and down and down until I hit the end of the roll. Whereby there will be a beautiful technicolor garden of Eden. I figure everything, eventually, ends up underground and that's why I can justify half of this crap.

I enjoyed it, and it looks awesome rolled up. I hope I manage to hit the end of the roll eventually. Check back in in a year.

(And apologies to all the real artists on the board)

[grasshopper]

I like the lego idea. I also like the idea of people falling so long they've rotted into skeletons. I gotta say this idea had more legs then I thought it would. Like, had I been feeling better, I would have continued my animation with the stone and body falling from the sky and into the well over and over. Another idea was, if it's bottomless, and you drop something down it, wouldn't it fly out the other end? So I got his idea of things flying out of holes, or in the case of the animation, it would have followed the rock down and down and down until it came out the other side (which would have been an upside down image of a person at well being hit in the face by a rock flying out of the ground).

I'm going to post the pages I had done for the comic so far, the text is incomplete, but I'll explain the basic premise afterwards (pages are in order, unlike above posted images_:









The basic story was going to be that the narrator went to the well as a kid. After climbing down, there was rung missing so he couldn't touch the bottom, and each time he came back as he got older and taller, the well always just a little too deep for him to be able to touch the bottom without letting go of the ladder (it seemed to always get a bit deeper just to mock him, even though it always had the same number of rungs).
He becomes obsessed with it, especially as he gets older and more depressed with his life, as he's always believed that there was always something magical/life altering/super important at the bottom of the well (the well has a wooden bottom, so he believes that it can be removed).
So yeah, that's where my story was going.

Gorddamn Suzanne, that's an awesome idea. It seems like as if we may have bitten off too much too chew though with the scope of out projects. One of the things I like about your idea is that you could, theoretically, carry it around with you and keep working on it whenever you have some free time.

... why did the word 'cockhole' pop up in my post?

[JTagmire]

That receipt roll is really cool. Such a great idea, and seems like it was a lot of fun to do. I think the Mushroom men are my favorite part.. or maybe the Golem. Anyway, nice job.

[Suzanne]

Mar 29, 2009 9:44:49 GMT -5 grasshopper said:

... why did the word 'cockhole' pop up in my post?

bwa - you just got caught by the wordfilter. You'll discover many more of those fun idiosyncrasies as you go. Arent we mature?

And J - I'm very glad you like my mushroom men. They were by far the weirdest moment in that process.