Still, there has always been one big stumbling block for me: character animation.  More accurately, character modeling.  I never really grasped things like UV mapping and edge loops and box modeling using the information available back when I started (many of the tools and techniques weren’t even available then), and human anatomy is complex enough that it made the difficulty of learning it through trial-and-error exponential.

I think I’ve finally broken that block.  At the very least I’ve put a huge crater and some serious cracks in the thing.  It took acquiring a degree in art complete with many life drawing sessions, plus a LOT of reading and rereading and rererereading of my sundry anatomy and “figure drawing” art books, various bad models, and essentially flailing about and failing a lot, before the pieces started to fall into place.

In the end, a pair of video tutorials were the key to making it all go “click”. The first is a human head tutorial, and the second is a human body tutorial (NSFW due to artistic nudity). (I’m not following the tutorials blindly; I don’t even use the same app.)

In the space of a week or so, I went from “hmm, maybe there’s a model I can download or something” to bashing out seven or eight different characters with decent edge loops and proper curves.  I’m still not all that good at it, but I’m a lot better than I was. This epiphany even inspired me (or forced me) to take a poke at other features I rarely use. Best part is that I have this suspicion that it’s going to wind up feeding into my drawing skills (basically due to the amount of attention you have to direct toward proper anatomy when you tweak things).

Actually, it’s not luck, it’s related to my next point.  I was out of town for Dragon*Con at the time (not as a guest, but an attendee).  I always come back from Dragon*Con fired up to be creative (somewhat limited this time by having caught a cold on the last day, but still noticeably present), which is why I decided to reread the broken dolls story.

(While I was at the con, I’d hoped to talk to someone about a thing I want to do in the comic on down the road, but I never quite got a chance.  I think I’ll email instead while it’s still fresh.)

As I posted to twitter a month or two ago, I was also gathering reference material to start work on the comic again, but got distracted by other things.  D*C is now days in the past/a year in the future (depending on perspective).

All of this means that you may start seeing new pages in a few weeks.  I still would really prefer to go back and finish coloring (or better yet, redraw) the old pages before moving on, and I really, really need a solid buffer, but given my present respiratory difficulties, I really say with any accuracy how likely any of this is.

I may also have a scanner again soon, thanks to one of my friends.  While I like certain aspects of doing this digitally (especially consistent page format and panels, since I no longer have a drafting table), I prefer actually drawing with a physical pencil.  Returning to scanned art and trying to fuse it with the digital parts would, however, mean another upheaval in my process.

I suspect this post may come across as slightly disjointed, for which I blame the microorganisms.

I intend to go through and finish up all the older unshaded pages that I utterly failed to update while actually working on the story and pages that I need to redraw, before I start posting new pages again.  Which means I need to … actually get to working on them.

Anyway, I just thought the site had gone long enough without any updates.

I will get back to Shadsly, hopefully soon, but as of right now I have no idea when. Maybe I will just pick up and wave my wacom stylus and a few hours later a page will magically appear (yeah, right).

If you read this comic and want to help … well, some nice positive comments won’t hurt.  I’ve no idea how many people, if any, were following this regularly (as opposed to when I reminded/nagged my friends and family to look at new pages).

Update: I’ve got the site in at least a nominally readable state for now, but I’m bouncing back and forth between several themes at the moment, so that could change when I work on it more.  Note that the archive links don’t actually work when the old theme is active (one reason I’m making a new one).

Update Update: Things seem to now be more or less working as they ought to. If you see anything that isn’t, let me know. (I know the new theme doesn’t look much different … it was less about changing the appearance of the site, and more about upgrading to new Comicpress features like the transcripts and archives. The comic is about 60 pixels wider now, though.)