My kingdom for a scanner!

My art goal over winter break is to finish next quarter's Nathan Pretzelberger strips, which will keep me from being forced to work on them (or more likely, decline to work on them in the interest of other work and then feel bad about doing so) during school. As I am apparently stuck with three studio classes this coming quarter, as well as for the following two quarters I will be at SCAD, it will also assist in preventing me from going any more insane than I may or may not already be. I've got a couple of weekends for getting stuff done, but I'm having trouble getting myself to work for more than an hour before / after work during the week (generally about a panel's worth of pencilling for a snail in winter like myself). I'm finding that it's hard working in a house that feels like it must be a consistent 55 degrees--makes me wish I was back in Savannah.

Anycrap, to that end I've been spending a lot of time dicking around in my sketchbook these days; mostly working out new character designs for the Nathan strips. I'm introducing Nathan's rival this quarter (the OTHER future greatest sequential artist in the world, natch), something I've had floating around in sketchbooks for a while. His dealie is that he possesses both the most obnoxious, irritating personality in the universe, but is also quite artistically talented (which he loves to make clear in subtly arrogant ways that are superficially self-deprecating). Obviously, every person in the strip, other than Nathan, thinks he is perfectly wonderful. I've tried to make his physical appearance the embodiment of irritating. If it is the case that he closely resembles yourself and/or one of your friends/relatives, apologies in advance :( But not really.



I've also had to come up with a bunch of relatives for Nathan's extended family, who will be in a Thanksgiving-themed strip (a little late, but I do not care). My favorite is his teenage cousin who refers to everything she dislikes as either "gay," or one of a surprisingly large number of more offensive synonyms thereof. Sometimes I wonder if I'm getting a little iffy with some of the jokes I want to use in a strip that runs in a school-funded paper; whenever I do, though, I just remember Jonchad's Frm_Bhnd.Thrst and Ben Passmore's chocolate and vaginal flavored presidential candidates and immediately start to relax. If you don't know what I'm referring to, you may be better off, depending on when you last ate.


Finally, I'm working on a new header for this very blog (as may be noticed in a few of the above images). The text title was always supposed to be a placeholder, but I just haven't gotten around to sprucing things up around here until now--it might be nice to play around with the layout a little bit too. I ain't too much good with th' HTML an' nunnathat, though... web design skills sure would be nice to have right about now.

The Nathan thing is cute and would probably look fun after a little work, but putting him in the title of something like this lends him some sort of prominence in terms of my artwork that I decided I don't want him to have. Sorry Natey.

Oh, and let me just mention that Achewood has been absolutely hilarious this week. More so than usual, even. For shame if any of my Sequential Art brethren are not reading this regularly!