Slipping Through: News

Slipping through now has it's own website:

Slipping Through

Lots of pages you haven't seen are posted up there! Any new pages will be posted THERE. I will NOT post any more pages here. Happy reading!

Slipping Through: Changelings Chapter One--Part Two

End Chapter One.
Chapter Two coming soon!

Slipping Through: Changelings Chapter One--Part One

Slipping Through: News

I am about to post the new first chapter of Slipping Through. This is definitive, this is the last reboot, this is the ONE.

Those of you familiar with the story are aware of only Maggie's storyline which I have always begun with. Finding only frustration and creative dead ends there, this time I'm starting with the Changelings storyline.

An uncertain king deals with the tragedy that befalls his mountain kingdom in a world with a purple sky. However, he may only exist in the dreams of an ambitious magician.

Read, hopefully enjoy, and comment!

Now and Then

As I was working on Slipping Through I pulled up an old piece for color reference. Struck by the changes time and practice has wrought, I thought I'd post the pieces for comparison.
Here we have Benedict, a magician, drawn just around a year ago.

His hat is so . . . squashed? It is supposed to be a top hat, but it looks more like . . . nothing humankind has ever seen before. And his face is funky. All the proportions all wrong and a year ago I couldn't tell, no matter how much I studied it. Also, he was supposed to have curly hair, but it was beyond my skills. His body lacks any sort of definition, he's just a blocky suit. What is his hair even doing?

Here his is as of a few minutes ago, a work in progress,

I notice I'm less afraid of darker coloring. Also, he's not so stiff and awkward. Necks are something I've been trying to give all my characters nowadays. As well, I've got a bit better about hands, not so much hit and miss as it was.

And a glimpse of his redesigned cane.

A lot has changed in a year. I know, in my heart, that a year from now I will be making a similar post pointing out the weakness of the pieces I made today. For the moment, his original hat will haunt my dreams.

Slipping Through 3.0

The hardest part of learning is that when you start a project, two weeks later the work you've already done is nowhere near the quality of what you're doing presently. Twice I have started Slipping Through and now I'm going for three.

The summer I am dedicating my time to the epic tale of Slipping Through, the tale of a world quite like ours. Expect, here, magic is practiced openly and one might become a Magician the same way one might become a doctor, an attorney or insurance salesman.
The story takes place after a time when the world almost ended, but was repaired in time to save it, though not without cost. The world does not remember how the sky cracked open and other worlds began to slip through into theirs. They do not remember the brave Magicians who made terrible sacrifices to save everyone. It as if none of it ever happened.
The world, however, was imperfectly repaired and there are a few people who remember what happened. Maggie, our hero, remembers. She remembers the magicians who sacrificed themselves so completely that their very existences were destroyed, making so it is as if they were never even born.
Now Maggie's worse fears are being realized: the cracks are reopening and her warnings fall on deaf ears.
*
Maggie is not our only hero, there will be at least six different story lines that converge for the final quest to save the world from cracking apart once more.

This summer I will begin the final version of Slipping Through (No more restarts!) and you will meet everyone from Ting the shape-shifter to the Gray Prince, an exile from another world.

Some Changes

Since Barbara's Artistic Achievements is taking care of my traditional mediums, I'm removing all of those posts from this blog, leaving just my webcomics, Slipping Through and Pretzel and the Princess.

All the images of my acrylic, ceramic and other traditional work are all on Artistic Achievements. Link should be on the right-hand side, tell me if you can't find it.

It has been too long since I've posted

So here are a couple pictures of a character of mine. His name is Matthew and he's been floating around in my head for about six years. It's only within the last month that I've figured out exactly what he looks like and drawn a satisfactory picture of him.
Nice shades, yes?




This is what he looked like when I drew him two years ago.

Quite a change. The only constants seem to be his earrings and wings. His personality, cheerful and snarky, has never changed, though.

His origins are quite interesting: I dreamed of him one night. A winged man with dark red skin and bright red hair. He seemed interesting and I used him as a character in a story I was working on. The story no longer exists, but within it he lived in the mountains fighting monsters all day, being extremely cheerful. I changed his hair to black and gave him silver claws that froze whatever they slashed.
Nowadays he can't do that, his claws are black, and he can shift back and forth between his human and winged forms.

He probably owes his existence to the fact I adored the show Gargoyles as a child. But by the time I dreamed him up it had been five years since I had last seen the show and had pretty much forgotten it existed. In fact, Matthew eventually reminded me of the show and I ended up watching episodes of it on youtube and getting hooked on it again. Except for the third season. There was never a third season. Never, do you hear me? NEVER.

Ahem

For school I have started up a third blog. Aside from this one and The In Joke blog, I now have Barbara's Artistic Achievements which will showcase all of my work at school as well as anything I happen to paint or draw in my free time.

So, hear this! This blog will no longer have posts with any of my traditional mediums. All of that work will be going to the new blog. This one will focus on my two comics: Slipping Through and Pretzel and the Princess.

For your comic needs, come here.
If you need a dose of humor head over to The In Joke. http://theinjoke.blogspot.com/
Interested in my serious work? Go over to Artistic Achievements. http://artisticachievements.blogspot.com/

Slipping Through (new): Part 3

I have been told I draw quite the adorable penguin.

Hm. I drew these pages this summer and altered them quite a bit since then. And already my art has progressed to the point where I want to redraw all these pages from scratch. However, I would never get anything done that way since I would be starting over every month. So I'm finishing up three more pages I drew this summer before I start to bring in my more recent work.

In the next installment we shall go to Maggie's place of work and meet her fellow employees. Needless to say, they are an interesting bunch.

Slipping Through (new): Part 2

Woohoo! Part two! I think there is a definite improvement in the art. Learned a few new tricks in photoshop. Upcoming: penguins and quirky co-workers.

Musings

Just this moment I was going through my "Slipping Through" sketchbook and I realized how jumbled and out of order the pages are. I suppose this is because I tend to sketch things out as I think of them, regardless of when they take place in the story.

For example, when I rebooted this comic I started off with Maggie standing in a nightclub looking deeply annoyed. How did she get there? I wondered, Why is her hair a mess? And why is she wearing a cape? Then I realized she must have just come off work, that is, she had just had a throw down with some villain. So then I had to go and draw that bit and change that to the beginning.
Later on, in stuff you haven't seen yet, I got frustrated drawing Maggie's apartment so I skipped to drawing stuff with her at work. Now I've had to go back and fill in the gaps.

It just struck me because I've started coloring some pages that are next chronologically, but I drew them months ago. It's getting quite confusing. Especially since in some of the older pages I went back and reworked some of the panels. So in some pages there are bits that I know are ages old, but there's some stuff which I only thought of recently so it's got to be new.

Well, back to work.

It's been awhile

But I'm back! Bringing with me "Slipping Through" version 2.0! Enjoy twelve pages of my comic. At least, I hope you will enjoy it. I'll refrain from belittling myself and just let you read it.

By the way: This is a work of fiction, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. That means that Maggie is not supposed to be me and her mother is not supposed to resemble mine. I thought I should throw that out there before Mom gets any ideas. Any traumas, sufferings, or family problems Maggie has are her own and have nothing to do with me.

And I have never interrogated a rat in an alley. (Please don't ask if I've interrogated them anywhere else)

Any questions, criticism (be kind) or other input is welcomed and encouraged!

Slipping Through: New and Improved

Slipping Through: News

Just an update on my newest comic, "Slipping Through". After some consideration I have decided to redo a great deal of what I have so far. I fussed over a page in photo shop, trying to get it to look decent, until I realized the page could not be salvaged. Looking at what I've posted so far I see a lot of things I want to correct.

I regret none of my work up until this point! It has been quite educational. Now I will be redoing most of the early pages. I've decided to stick to a standard layout arrangement of three horizontal panels per page rather than my previous, unstructured approach.

And I'm off!

Lord of the Masque

The villain for "Slipping Through" is this fine gentleman. Lord of the Masque. There is meaning to that name, which will become clear in time. He is still under development, but I do know that he is arrogant and probably is tearing holes in the fabric of time and space. The jerk.

I posted this elsewhere and submitted it to be featured in an art group on this site. It was declined so I asked why, hoping for some helpful advice. They answered thusly,

"it was declined because of quality. The work is good, how you caught the movement and their facial expressions are great and but a little more work could be done with coloring. The colors are too flat and a little dull in my opinion.
if you thin out the lines a little bit and put more effort in coloring the piece would look different, the shading was okay but again, a little more detailed coloring would make it a better piece.
wish you luck next time"

A very nice reply which would be helpful except . . . most of the problems they list were deliberate choices on my part. I am deliberately cultivating a thick-lined style because it is a cartoon, the same with the semi-flat coloring. As for the colors being dull, that was intentional because I wanted the character to be understated aside from his bright red mask. In essence, for my work to be approved of I would have to adopt a completely different style.

Just my little complaint of the day.

New Project: Slipping Through

This is my new project, a comic called "Slipping Through". The main characters are Maggie the Magician and Ting the shape-shifter. Together they fight crime! Uh, Monsters. They fight monsters. They come from broken homes, too. Keep checking for updates!