Carson Fire’s benighted homepage
Status report
I don’t want to linger too long on what happened, but a quick summary:
- Looking for paying work
- Windows went wacky
- Offline for more than a month
- Went nuts trying to fix it
- Now on Ubuntu
- Learning a million new things all at once
- PROGRESS!
Look at the set of drawings over there, the Carson Fire cartoon, one pencilled, and the other two inked. This is something I’ve never really done successfully before: this stuff is 100% digital. Even the pencils.
Yes, yes, I know, everybody does Flash cartoons these days. What’s entirely new for me is to be able to draw a pencil drawing on the computer that matches and even surpasses what I can do on paper. I couldn’t quite do that with any other graphic program before, even with a Wacom tablet.
Before I even talk about the inks, I want to point out how important this is for me. I have one wild eye that often doesn’t point in the direction it’s supposed to, and I often have a hard time focusing on the paper. I can never get the right distance from it; I can’t keep track of proportion from one end of the paper to the other; I can never quite fit things right. If I sit down while drawing, a nerve in my back gets pinched, which puts me into a kind of catatonic state.
And don’t get me started on the paper and supplies. I’ve got tons of old stuff on old paper I can’t manage, and I seem to always be short on supplies for doing the new stuff. Say I need $50 per month for art supplies and there are $300 in bills (hahaha! well, this is just a for instance); we’re always short the $300, and even if we make it by the skin of the teeth, so much for art supplies.
For a while now, it seemed that it would be ideal if I could somehow move to all-digital comics production.
Moving to Ubuntu forced me to abandon a lot of old tools and find new ones.
