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Here’s a good thing I worked up yesterday as a gift for a good friend. Probably took about nine hours, including an hour and a half spent trying to find good animal references. There are a few things I would change, but you know how it is with the incessant passing of time and so on.

The Laser Panther is, of course, a nod to Brütal Legend.

It might be a bit too big.

My current PC is beginning to feel a bit old, but there are no appealing options to replace it with. Actually, my PC isn't performing any worse than it used to, but I've tried some of the new ones, and they sure are snappy. If computing power had plateaued around the time I built this PC I'm writing this on, I'd have nothing to complain about. But that's not the case. It's like if people didn't necessarily get more stooped-over and wrinkly as they aged, but new 25-year-olds were getting comparatively much more attractive with each year that new 25-year-olds came off the line. But they're all either too tall or too short.

I'm getting tired of Windows XP, too. For some reason, Photoshop CS4 was unable to fully take advantage of my graphic card, so those GPU-dependant features didn't work. Turns out CS5 can't figure it out, either. I updated the graphic drivers, and you know what? I am getting really tired of updating graphic drivers.

Additionally, last year I tried using some Mac-only writing software to not only participate in National Novel Writing Month, but to write four graphic-novel story treatments, and I must say that using a Mac for day-to-day productivity was a great experience -- much improved over Windows XP. I resolved myself that as soon as the Macbook Pros were refreshed (Apple gives them a spec bump every so often), I'd pick one up. Except now that they're here, it's hard to get too excited.

The Macbook Pros seem appealing - they take up little room, are attractive, and almost as powerful as I'd like. I have no real need for the portability, though, so I'd rather not pay a premium for that.

The Mac Pros - well, they're just too expensive, and I would very rarely tax the machine's capabilities.

Looking at the specs, the 27" i7 iMac would be the perfect machine. I'd love one. Except it's enormous and I do not need another monitor. For about eight hundred dollars less, I could build an identical Windows machine. For $900 less, Dell will build me one, with a useful 12GB of RAM. Apple, why can't you offer me a headless iMac? It seems like a shame that I should be spending two- to three-thousand dollars and not getting something just right.

(I have another gripe against Apple that makes me wary to buy into their club - they seem to be adopting the great Evil Software Corporation reputation that Microsoft used to have. It's like I've fallen through the nerdy rabbit hole. I'd expound on this topic, but there are tech pundits doing a better job of that right now, somewhere, I'm sure.)

MEANWHILE, IN LOS ANGELES...

I never thought I'd say this, but I've been having many fond thoughts of L.A. lately. There seem to be a lot of great comedy things and a lot of great art things going on down there these days. I know for a fact that there are some cool people down there. I get the impression that the general populace is nicer than here in Vancouver, too.
Also? It's a real, actual, major city. Vancouver thinks it's a major city -- certainly the real estate is priced that way -- but has none of the actual cultural amenities that a real major city has.
And I love Vancouver - it's very, very pretty, there are sidewalks, the air is relatively clean and sushi restaurants and bike paths are both plentiful.
You know what? The truth is I just really want to see this show, and I want to live somewhere where a show like that happens.

Whoops – I’m late in posting this. But there it is – the clean line art that will appear in the finished book. A few small changes were made between the rough sketch and here. It looks a bit cluttered right now, and Selim (right in the middle there) gets lost, but the colour will put the focus back on him.

Some of the line weights are a bit inappropriate, so I might fudge those in Photoshop later.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to help me out with my multiple-choice difficulties! It started out with Option 4 taking a pretty strong lead. Option 1 was sort of like a tag-along - it seems like people who liked 1 also liked 4, and 4 gained the most weight. But then Option 3 started to pick up steam late in the day!

Unfortunately for 3, if you put it in context (the same context I so cruelly refused to provide), it doesn't work as well as 1 or 4. So I've tightened up 4 a bit (you can see that above) and printed it off (you can see that below). This page comes between 19 and 20 in Chapter 4, so I'll be pencilling it in about two weeks. I'll share the line art when it's done!

(FWIW, I shove a "Gradient Map" adjustment layer at the top of the layer stack, with one end representing 15% Cyan. Print it out, and when you scan it in again, and you can just pull out the blue, leaving the lovely line art.)

For a page that I need to add to my book. Without any context, which
of the four images do you prefer?

When my girlfriend pointed this out to me last night, I assumed that a
spider had sexed up my houseplant, and that I wouldn't wake up in the
morning due to being overrun by baby spider-spores. In the light of
day, though, it just looks like maybe some flowers or something. I've
had Ferdinand for at least six years now, and he's never done anything
this crazy. I was scared. Maybe he's going through plant puberty.
We'll never know, because I never took the time to teach him English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_deremensis (yawn!)

100% zoom of a tiny chunk of the line-art pages I’ve been scanning in at 600DPI.

You’d think the Bristol Smooth paper would show less tooth than the Vellum, but only by a small degree (this is vellum, by the way).

This is what the scanned pages look like before I Photoshop them into high-contrast submission.

This little image reminds me of the girls in high school that would just doodle pretty eyes in the margins of their workbooks. They always had long, long lashes and little glinty reflections. Much more ornate than this.

Speaking of high-school and margin-drawings, my Grade 11 math teacher would get mad at me for doodling in the margins of my notebook. His disapproval messed me up. Now I write equations in the margins of my drawings.