This is a little project I helped my girlfriend complete a week or two ago. It’s a logo for a company, government, or organization from a dystopian future and the slogan says it all. Originally, I went with a logo made from links of chain but she thought that looked too authoritarian and oppressive so we came up with this using a hexagonal bolt head look with three S’s stemming from the middle. I enjoy projects like this and really wish I had more time to complete extra stuff on the side.

Lately, I haven’t had many opportunities to draw things that weren’t related to my ongoing comic in any way but my girlfriend needed an invitation to a house-warming party she’s throwing so I put this together last night for her. It was a fun departure from drawing the same characters and scenes and overall, I like it.

As with some other work I’ve been doing lately, I did this completely digitally. There are advantages to digital work, such as “fix that mouth” or “her hand is in the wrong position”. It’s a very fluid method of working and while I’m not ready to hang up the bristol and quills quite yet, the more I acclimate myself to a digital environment, the more it appeals to me. This took me a little over an hour to do and while that’s markedly slower than working with a pen and paper, I’m still getting used to the tablet and with practice, I think digital drawing would be slightly faster than working with traditional materials. It’s one of the reasons why the strip I’m working on is completely digital. If it goes well, Variables may move to an entirely digital platform as well. We’ll see.

Yeah. Here’s a page of people doing a whole lot of talking. At one point, Blake raises his arms excitedly while narrating past events. On the Exciteometer©, the events of this page are barely registering. Still, it’s an important part of storytelling and there are some panels that point out serious flaws in my rendering abilities… namely the foreshortening areas. I really need to work on that before attempting it again. This page ended up looking quite a bit differently than I originally anticipated because some panels just. did. not. work.

Here’s page three of the short story and I continue to blow through warm colors left and right on these pages. I’m trying to make each page lighter than the last, which has put me in quite the conundrum unless I’m planning to make the entirety of page four white with a splash of canary yellow.

I’ve been buried in work for about a month now, having worked up a short story and starting the first few pages of the upcoming book at SelfCentEnt.com. That means that I’ve been neglected the ol’ Rocketpig site for awhile. Well, here’s the latest short story page and stuff.