Author: Cynical Woman

Cartoonist, Artist, Geek, Evil Crafter, Girl Scout Troop Leader and Writer. Also, a zombie. I haven't slept in I don't know how long.
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WIP – Medusa and Bats

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Slowly, pixel by bloody pixel, this thing is getting done. I’m squeezing in 15-30 min sessions of work on this between other projects, which is partly why it’s taking so long. The other reason this is taking forever is that I’ve never done something in this particular digital painting style before. But I like what I’ve done so far, and I think I’m learning something. I think once I get a few things cleared off my plate, I may reserve one day a week just for personal art so I can finally knock this sucker out.

What’s changed since the last version? More blending on Medusa’s dress, plus I’m playing with the color a bit, adding highlights and shadows in complementary colors. The cool colors are getting a bit of warmth and the warm colors are getting a bit of cool. I think it makes things pop a bit more. I added faint yellow highlights to Medusa’s hair and purple shadows ot the dress. I still think Bats’ hat is the best part of the painting so far though, with the very bold contrast between the purple and red. Makes me think I need to ramp up my contrasts in other places as well.

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Cover Art – Best S&M III

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I’m in the process of updating the art gallery with some of the cover art I’ve done this year. This was a book cover I did this summer for Best S&M Volume III, an anthology edited by the very talented writer M. Christian. When the publisher, Logical-Lust.com, and I tossed around ideas for this piece, we kept coming up with the standard images – a cropped photo of woman’s corsetted torso, a close up of handcuffs on a woman’s arm, etc. I hate the anonymous, cropped woman image. It makes it seem like BDSM is only for submissive women, specifically those who are too ashamed to show their faces and acknowledge what they enjoy. So I decided I wanted to do a fun piece of artwork, showing both a man and a woman laughing and having fun themselves, and maybe the woman is the one in charge here, or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter so long as all parties involved are having a good time. With all those elements in consideration, this is the cover I came up with.

The image was first rendered in DAZ Studio, then taken into Photoshop for postworking and effects.

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Rats! Episode 43 – Let’s party!

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Yes, I’m posting late again today. Blame the holidays and my workload. I am up to my armpits in a novel I’m rewriting, plus I started a new project last week called Very Scary Art. It’s a website devoted to children’s drawings of all things scary and spooky and it’s done in support of DonorsChoose.org. Stop by and take a look!

As for this week’s comic, yes, Irwin is not a rat who can handle his liquor. There are a few more of these strips, then we move on to other subjects. I can’t remember which subjects at the moment, but this party storyline does eventually end. When these cartoons first ran, a lot of folks didn’t like it. They prefered the single gag comics rather than an overarcing story that ran several episodes. All I can say is, I had to come up with two comic strips a week for the Collegiate Times, so I went with what I thought would work. I still think the comics are funny, even if others didn’t care for them. But then I drew them, so what do I know?

I’ve recently been reading Scary Go Round by John Allen, a very fun web comic about a little town called Tackleford in England. It’s a bizarre comic with all sorts of oddities like pretty but troubled women, wendigos, zombies, fish men and evil scientists. John Allen included his comments in each book about what he thought worked and didn’t work, and I was amazed to note that he also had storylines that he thought did not go over well with his fans. I had a hard time imagining it, because I thought each and every page was pure gold.

Cartoonists, like all artists, can be a very self-critical lot. We do the best we can, but we rely on an audience to let us know if we’ve succeeded or not. That’s both great and not so great, but either way, I’d still rather draw cartoons than get paid to work a day job.

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ACW Episode 94 – Why November is the WRONG month for NaNoWriMo

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Let me just say, November is the wrooooooooong month for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I thought this last year when I was working on PerNoFiMo (Personal Novel Finishing Month), which is my version of NaNoWriMo, only with the purpose of finishing a project I started but never got past the first few thousand words on.

The thing with both NaNoWriMo and PerNoFiMo is that you have to, HAVE TO, write every day, and not just a few hundred words either. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to complete a 50000 word draft of a novel in 30 days. The goal of PerNoFiMo is to come as close to finishing the first draft of that uncompleted project as I can get, and that usually means 30-40K words. That means on average 1000 words a night minimum for PerNoFiMo and 1700 words a night for NaNoWriMo. That’s a lot of words to write. And yes, they do have to be actual words! And of course, everybody is writing during the month leading up to the big holidays, and then there’s Thanksgiving when the kids are home for four days driving their hard working, frantically writing parents crazy. And then how can anyone possibly sit down to write after eating all that turkey?! Seriously, all I wanted to do after Thanksgiving dinner was curl up in a cave and hibernate for the rest of the year.

However, neither NaNoWriMo nor PerNoFiMo require that the novel being written be a perfect final draft. In fact, I think both events are ideal for banging out that very ugly first draft. You know what I’m talking about – the story so ugly only its author could love it, and even he or she might just set fire to it, it’s that bad? But that’s what first drafts are about, and you can’t get to the finished product without bringing that ugly 10 lb. baby first draft into the world.

Anyway, my sympathies and my encouragement to all you NaNoWriMo participants out there, and my congratulations to all you winners (including our dear friend Nobilis Reed!). I’ve reached a point in my PerNoFiMo project, The Little Death, where I’ve at least outlined the whole plot and I can see where I need to start doing massive rewriting. No, I didn’t really write out those final scenes. Probably about the last eighth of the book is only in very rough outline format. But it does have an ending now! Which means December is now PerNoReWriMo, or Personal Novel ReWriting Month.

And let me just say, December is a lousy month to be rewriting a novel…

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Sunday Contentments – The super-secret-special project revealed

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I haven’t done a Sunday Contentments in a while, I’ve been so busy writing this month. So I just wanted to put one out real quick. I started a new website this month with Mich, called “Very Scary.” It’s an online gallery of children’s art, all drawings about things that scare kids the most. We found these drawings at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last month. DonorsChoose.org was handing them out to people to say thank you for all the donations raised by the rally. Unfortunately, they had no means to get all the leftover artwork home, so yours truly decided to take what was left back with me and do… something with it.

It turned out I had over 500 very scary drawings on my hands, and not nearly enough refridgerator space to display it all. So I talked to Mich and then I contacted DonorsChoose.org to let them know we wanted to put all the artwork online. After a month of communicating with them, DonorsChoose.org gave us the go-ahead. They were very nice and supportive about it, too. Then last week I started setting things up. The result is the website which we launched late Friday night. You can check it out here.

I had planned to do a simple WordPress blog, but ended up buying a URL so I could host the site myself. I’m just too picky about how my websites look and WordPress won’t let me customize the CSS without paying $15 for it. The URL was only $12 a year, so I said why not. Then Mich came over Friday evening and we spent many hours setting up the site template and uploading files and swearing at the computer (that was mostly me, Mich doesn’t swear that much). Around 1AM Friday night/Saturday morning, we finally had the site up and running.

And you know, in spite of all the hassle, it felt really, really good to get this done. If we hadn’t grabbed that artwork, DonorsChoose.org would have had to have recycled it, and I hated that idea. There’s some really fantastic artwork in the pile of pictures we got, some absolutely surprising and amazing stuff. I just can’t get over how creative these drawings are.

So there’s the super-secret-special project I’ve been working on this month, in between bouts of writing for PerNoFiMo and doing art commissions for LL-Publications. I’d say the new Very Scary site is probably my favorite project in a while, and I’m looking forward to working on it for a long time to come.

After all, I have over 500 images to post… 😉

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WIP – Medusa and Bats

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Here’s the latest update on Medusa and Bats. I haven’t had much time to work on it lately, so I stole half an hour this evening to do some more blending on the characters. I can see a few places where I’m going ot need to add contrasting colors, and for the life of me, I don’t really know what I’m going to do about the bat yet. He’s really, really awful looking, but I’ll figure something out eventually.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the announcements I made on Twitter yet, I have a new project up and running. It’s the Very Scary Art website, a gallery of kids’ artwork about things that scare them. The site was set up in support of DonorsChoose.org. Go take a look!

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Rats! Episode 42 – We have created a monster…

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Oy! I’m running late today with the cartoon. My apologies. It’s Thanksgiving and I’ve been busy cooking this morning, getting ready to take a few dishes with me to my best friend’s family’s house for dinner this afternoon. But I managed to catch a few spare moments to post today’s comic.

A few notes about this episode. Alcohol and nerves never mix well, in my experience. People go from scared to stupid in one drink. Yeah, yeah, I keep harping on the “don’t drink” message, but honestly, I saw far too many people in my years at Virginia Tech do stupid things because they had too much to drink. It can cost you your scholarship, your military commission, your degree, your life, everything.

So there’s my public service announcement. Now please notice the cockroach and Space Bunny posters in the background. Looking at these, I’m guessing I drew this cartoon around the time Technicon was about to be held. And it looks like it must have been Technicon 7, maybe. Yes, I was a sci-fi nerd and a hard core member of the Virginia Tech Science Fiction and Fantasty Club, better known as VTSFFC. That’s how I met the Hubster, in fact. I got elected club president one year and my girlfriends decided to make him Vice President because we looked so cute together. Honestly, I think we were lousy at running the club, but we have managed to stay happily married for the last 17 years, so there’s that.

Have a happy Thanksgiving! Some time later this weekend, I hope to make a big announcement about a super-secret-special project that I have in the works. I can’t say what it is yet, but whatever it is, it will be VERY SCARY! Stay tuned 😉

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Personal Art – Aphrodite in Stone, 2005

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Aphrodite in Stone, 2005

This is another rare ZBrush image for me. I had no idea what I was doing when I started it, and I’m not sure what I learned from it other than the fact I find ZBrush to be very confusing. I so wanted to learn how to make poseable 3D figures, but doing this piece hurt my tiny little brain. I did like the end result, however. I especially liked the hair and the sea shell she’s holding. That blue to yellow blend worked wonderfully. I think that was a texture map I painted in Corel Photopaint, so this one wasn’t entirely done in ZBrush, but 99.9% of it was.

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Personal Art – Innana

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Innana, 2004

After completing work on two book covers and a website design for Logical-Lust Publications, I put this together to post on the LL site with my bio. Done in Poser, with a background sky from Bryce, and the clothing textures and transparency maps done in Corel Photopaint and Corel Draw. It was probably something I struggled to complete at the time, but now I could knock this out in a couple days. Amazing what a few years of practice will do for an artist.

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Personal Art – Dryads

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Dryads, 2004

This was a personal project, created using ZBrush. I love the results I can get out of ZBrush, but the learning curve is steep. Setting up the dryad characters involved learning how to sculpt them in ZBrush’s “intuitive” interface, then paint them, and then pose them. I found the program to be not so intuitive, and so I haven’t done much with it on a regular basis. I know it well enough to know what I should be able to do with it, but then when I use it, I spend the next few weeks beating out my brains on my desk as I try to figure out how to get the program to do what I want it to do.

By the way, this is one of the few 3D images I’ve done using just one program. I’ll say this for ZBrush. You don’t have to go to an outside program for post-work. You can pretty much do it all right there. Which may be why I find it so damned complicated. There’s too much packed into one program for me.