HOLY SHIT FINGERNAILS. I almost never color them. Heck these days I rarely even draw them. The site search function shows fingernails last mentioned in post metadata back in August of 2012. And that may well have been it if I hadn’t spent the last four hours or so alternatively noodling at bits of the page and trying to deal with my damage. Which today is the usual smorgasbord of my own with an extra helping of hand-me-down garbage I have no interest in dealing with.

I’m really not a fan of holidays, and the page blurb keeps turning into a damage rant that has nothing to do with the page or its production – though the rant that wants out does have a lot to do with my struggle to get anything done over the past couple of weeks, my general inability to deal with pretty much anything at the moment, and how in my amateur opinion my upbringing has conditioned me to just dig in, keep my head down, and suffer. And oh yeah it took me years – like, until 2013 – to realize that my tendency to dig in and put up with this shit might actually be a bad thing. That it might be detrimental. That there might be alternatives to being miserable all the flippin’ time. But fuck if I know how to do anything else.

Next weeks page is a bit more complicated than this one – it’s bendier and blurrier and this one was ultimately kind of a test case for what I’ll be doing there, and that page will be a test case for the next few. It’s been a good long time since we’ve Gone Astral – and I don’t mean James-influenced remote viewing, I mean the “proper” astral craziness that defined the first half of The Dualist.

The downside of astral – I call ’em “bendy” – pages is that while it’s generally obvious what most pages are going to look like during the rendering process, I never know if I’ve pulled off a bendy page or not until it clicks into place as a finished thing. This page, for example – I hated panel three for a good long time. Then character shading and then like five minutes of screwing around with effects work behind and above the line art and click. And that was around six this morning. Then the morning walk OF DOOM and then some cleanup. Quite a bit of cleanup actually but the overall image is very nearly what it was this morning.