Funny – page wrapped, writeup started…. and The Men Who Stare At Goats is on. More appropriate than funny, I suppose. An appropriateness that’s now been name-dropped and will become progressively more obvious as the story unfolds. Whoever said sci-fi gets One Big Idea can jump off a cliff – throw anything of interest on the compost heap. Feed it into the coffee pot, mix with life experience, write. DCR happens to be a place where these things can get called by name. Lots of little ideas, some big ones. Some explained, some taken for granted. Artificial gravity actually being one of the fucking former, eventually. The booga-booga bits? I’d need a Book 1.5 (covering the WGP) for that. And… uh…. no. I’d write one, but fuck if I’m going to draw it.

Too many trees.

Strip 179 – I love the thumbnails for this strip. I love them. One day I’ll scan them and post them, either in a blog post or appended to this entry. Chibi as hell and very emotive – the final strip is similar but serious, much less silly and not nearly as expressive. Also pitch black and a righteous pain in the ass in the shading department.

Strip 180 – Depending on how shot comps for the last couple of pages of the chapter turn out, this could be the last shot of the guitar until chapter five. I hope it is- it’s a brutal reminder of why I moved almost everything mechanical to 3d objects. So many little…. bits. And knobs. And strings. That and the gin bottle were the big slowdowns for this page – I swear I spent more time getting glass to look halfway decent and stringing the strat than I did shading. Or pencilling.

Strip 181 – Subconsciously realizing the previous two strips would be murder incarnate, I cheaped out on layouts for this one and the next. In fact in the original layouts, I’d really cheaped out – Whitehouse had closed the curtain, his hair being the only character art. While a blatant render reuse still feels kinda like cheating, I do feel better having spiced it up a bit. I can’t see this much dialogue fitting into a pair of strips otherwise.

Strip 182 – And man, this volume of dialogue is minor compared to what’s been written for the rest of the chapter and the first scene of the next. Hopefully that’ll translate into a corresponding reduction in linework and an uptick in page volumes. Two to three days running flat-out is too much. I need MOAR COMPYOOTAR at the very least. That or an environment that looks good without global illumination.

One more page till the Modeling And Freelance Catchup Break – while it could happen Tuesday, it could just as easily be pushed back further. My sister will be in town, and I really have no idea how that’s going to break down for time. I do know that Monday is work and Tuesday is laundry and chores. I also know that laundry and chores means a whole hell of a lot of idle CPU time.

Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Tweaked dialogue in panel eight and rewrote almost all of panel nine.