On constant, incremental progression

I decided sometime back in 2011 that I was going to really start focusing on improving my art. So, I’ve been drawing for a few years now.

I mean, I’ve been drawing–more or less off and on–since I was a kid, but. Well. You know what I mean.

One thing that I’ve tried to do is give myself visual guideposts as I’ve been working to improve. Pieces of art that I continually return to, basically on an annual basis, as a check on my progression. One of these pieces is Link from the Legend of Zelda.

Behold.

So this is what it looks like when I draw the same character every year. What I really notice from seeing this set laid out like this is not only how my skill with a pen has increased, but also technique and style. Some time in 2014 I started adding textures to my art, but I had no idea what I was actually doing, so I just cut them randomly into the background. In 2015, I learned how to set a texture to overlay and my world became larger by immense magnitudes. I also acquired a brush pen in 2015, so you start to see variances in line width, which greatly improved the look of my linework.

Plus, man, I could NOT draw in 2012, could I? Yikes. But I still show it here because I should not be embarrassed of my history, especially once compared to my present.

Here’s another, smaller, example. Hawkeye.

There was so much wrong with my technical skill, even as recently as last year. 2014 Hawkeye’s fingers are weird, I don’t know what’s going on with his legs, his torso is SO LONG, and that HAIR?! But, honestly? I absolutely ADORE 2015 Hawkeye. Interesting line width choices, much better styling around the fingers and shoes, I felt like I made excellent choices with hair and quiver. I don’t like how I drew the arrows (I completely neglected to add the ARROW TIPS, WHAT?). But other than that, I feel like 2015 Hawkeye is such a huge improvement over 2014 Hawkeye, it’s not even a close comparison.

That’s really the long and short of it, I guess. I’ve been spending the better parts of 2013, 2014, and most of 2015 so far, just DRAWING. As often as I’m able, as close to daily as I can manage. DRAWING.

And that’s the big secret, really. You can’t really get worse at something you do every single day. You can only get better. And I’m definitely looking forward to putting together yet another retrospective of my progression as an artist in 2018, looking back at the six years that have preceded it. I’m actually excited to see how I’ve improved as an artist in the coming year.

It can only get BETTER.

Okay, so here’s the deal with 2015

I still don’t like resolutions. I never really have, but it’s only been the past couple of years where I’ve actively campaigned against the concept in general. Regardless, here’s some things (just a random collection, odd assortment, kind of things – nothing official, really) that I hope to focus on in the coming year.

My art really improved during 2014. I can definitely see it clearly, even if it may not be all that obvious to the casual observer. Much of that improvement has to do with the fact that I drew A LOT. Not daily, by any means. But quite a bit. That squares well with the old adage that you really can’t get bad at something you do all the time. You can only get BETTER, and that’s my intention with my art. To constantly improve my quality, tools, habits, and style.

I ended up falling out of love with Arcadia towards the end. I’m terrible at sticking with long-term projects, which I’m well aware is a huge failure of mine in many respects. But even more than that, Arcadia just fell apart artistically and narratively. I was telling too little story per page, and it was dragging out WAY longer than it should have. I came to the realization that I have tons of stories I want to tell, but extremely limited time in which to dedicate to the telling of those stories. So I need to focus my attention on the projects that can A) allow me to continue to improve my skills through more complicated artistic layouts and styles, and B) be told in smaller chunks that can be delivered more regularly, allowing me to tell a greater number of stories in a shorter span of time (all of which could potentially be expanded upon in the future).

Clear as mud? My goal now is to dredge up a couple of other stories I have rattling around in my head, separate some small chunks of those stories, and create them, and see where things go from there. I have ideas. They’re just awaiting my ability to deliver on them.

In addition to creating more, I really need to read more. I only read a handful of books in 2014, and a lot of those — way, WAY too many of those — I abandoned because I couldn’t get into them. Oddly enough, while my heart has and will always will belong to the scifi genre, the books I did end up completing this past year were not genre fiction at all. Books like We Were Liars, Eleanor & Park, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson managed to utterly captivate me and hold my attention effortlessly with compelling stories. But I had a hard time getting into books that I really should enjoy (based on historical personal preference) like 2312, Caliban’s War, and Among Others. I’m not sure if it’s the fault of the stories, or…

(Actually, no complicated logic is needed there, I am the only part of this equation that requires solving. Solve for X, where X is equal to my own inability to focus on anything worthwhile for more than five freaking minutes.)

Regardless of where the problem lies, I’ve gone ahead and already stacked the deck against me for 2015 by compiling a list of books that I really, really should try to read — AND FINISH — this coming year.

Beyond that are the things that should be obvious and require no lengthy diatribes. Greater capacity for love for my family, my world, and myself. Health, wealth, and happiness. Nerd movies and comic books. Amen.

It’s NaNoWriMo time again!

Participant-2014-Web-Banner

 

Okay, so today is November 1st, and my wife probably thinks that I’m already hard at work on my NaNoWriMo novel as I sit here clicking and clacking away at the keys of my computer, but I’m really just writing a blog post for my site to let everyone know that YES, I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year, and YES, I’ll be largely unavailable around the site during this time, just due to the fact that nearly every free moment I have between now and November 30th will be devoted to either working on my NaNo project OR eating pumpkin pie.

Likely a 50/50 split there.

In any case, Arcadia, God rest its lovable little soul, is on hiatus for the month. I actually have 4 pages prepped and ready to post, but they’re all the October pages I missed posting in the first place. November will not get updated. Sorry. Try not to act surprised.

You can follow along with my NaNo progress over here: https://nathanielpayne.com/goldilocks. Details on this year’s NaNo outing can be found here.

Once more into the breach!

On the marking of milestones

On Sunday, July 13th, I posted a new Arcadia comic with very little fanfare. It was a busy weekend, we had just celebrated our daughter’s fifth birthday with a big family party the day before, and we were recovering and cleaning and just generally enjoying the quiet that comes from a week’s worth of effort gradually winding down. I posted comic #32 right from my phone because it had been ready for a couple of weeks and all I needed to do was activate it within my comic backend manager, and it was good to go. I honestly thought nothing of it.

Then the other day, as I was going through the script and thumbnails for future pages it occurred to me that I had hit a milestone. I’d had it marked in my progress sheet on Google Drive for a while, but it didn’t even occur to me that I’d managed to reach it already.

I’ve now been drawing and posting Arcadia every week for a full SIX MONTHS.

arcadia_progress

Now, that might not seem like a substantial milestone to many. In fact, even as I’m typing it here, I’m realizing that it sounded much more significant in my head. But for ME, specifically? This is a big deal. I don’t tend to stick with personal projects long (which is hilarious given that in my day job I’m an IT project manager). But I have a bit of ADD when it comes to creative projects. I like to move on to something new whenever I can, even if that means abandoning the current project in order to focus attention on something that for the time being appears more captivating.

With Arcadia, I challenged myself to not do this anymore. To keep a weekly comic running despite every ounce of my being screaming at me to toss it aside and do something else. To hit a six month weekly milestone for me is a HUGE accomplishment, and I’m honestly surprised and proud of myself for achieving it.

So now that I’ve gotten to this point, as promised, it’s time for a review! Laid out here in no particular order, are some of the things I’ve learned and observed undertaking this project over the past six months.

  • I feel like my art is improving, just not in this comic. I continue to draw almost every day, and you can see all the drawings I’m generating over on my illustrations page (the ones I feel are worthy to post, that is. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t make the cut). I feel like in every aspect of my art, my skills are improving all the time. I’m reading about and learning new software techniques and participating in challenges to force myself to draw things I might not normally draw, just to see if I can do it. It’s all making my art better in lots of different ways, but you really can’t see ANY of it reflected in Arcadia. I think the reason for that is I’m rushing the comic pages. I knock out a few pages, ink them hastily, scan and post them all within a couple of hours and then forget about it for a while. I do no detail work, no real clean-up, no backgrounds, no color, nothing. I just draw them and post them and quickly move on to another art project that might feel more interesting at the time. The comic suffers from my inattentiveness, and I think that’s something I really need to work on in the coming weeks. I love the project, and it deserves more of my focus than it’s currently getting.
  • I’m putting way too little content into each page. Each page has only between 2-3 very large panels, which is part of why the story is taking so long to develop. There’s very little on each page. My hope is that in future pages, I can start to put together more concise “comic book style” pages with multiple panels per page that make sense logically. That’s a skill I think is really valuable and will take a lot of time and trial/error to develop, but luckily I’ve been doing a lot of research. 😀
  • I have little to no audience right now and I find that I don’t mind that at all. I thought I would be disappointed to see so few hits every time I post a new page, but I’ve found that it doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve gotten to a place where I understand that this work is mainly for ME. For me to tell a story and improve my skills. And if anyone wants to follow along, awesome! But if not, I’ve found that I’m fine with it, and I just keep chugging along regardless. It’s a freedom I never thought I would enjoy, and I’m grateful for every single view I get, no matter how small the audience.
  • I’m getting out of this project exactly what I wanted. I wanted to force myself to work on a single cohesive project on a weekly basis and keep it up for an extended period of time, and I’ve proven that I can do that. The advice from so many cartoonists is that you won’t get good at cartooning unless you actually START a project, and continually improve by forcing yourself to work on it all the time. Even when you don’t want to. Arcadia is doing that for me. It’s my first project, so it’s obviously going to be rough. But I’m going to keep at it, and eventually the next project will be better, and the next one after that better still. It’s all about improving.

Now, I’m nowhere near done yet. This story has barely even started, and there’s a substantial number of pages to get through before we even start to see the end of this chapter (there’s four chapters total). Will I make it? I certainly hope so. And I’m absolutely going to keep going! But first, I’m going to take a couple of weeks off before launching into the next block of pages. I’m going to take a breath, work on some other art, regroup a bit, take some of these lessons learned, and apply them to the next few pages. You may not see all of the observations I’ve noted take shape in the next few pages, because I’ve already scripted/thumbnailed out to page 48 (the end of block 2). But hopefully starting with page 49 you will start to see some improvements in how Arcadia is drawn and blocked out on the page.

Until then, keep reading, keep sharing, and keep checking in on here and my various social networks to see all my other art. And thanks for following along with me on my crazy little journey.

Gamers should WANT more women in their games

There’s a kerfuffle on the internets, kids. There always is, of course, on every topic imaginable. Even topics you wouldn’t think are all that controversial have combatants arguing both sides as if the very act of debate gives one viewpoint validity over another.

Take the issue of representation in games.

Ubisoft unsurprisingly recently revealed yet another entry in their popular Assassin’s Creed series, one where you can play multiplayer with fellow assassins, working in a co-op fashion to assassinate high-profile targets. And people are arguing. Because, due to “a lot of extra production work” involved, Ubisoft nixed the idea of having any of those assassins be female.

And many people are reasonably annoyed by this. Both male and female. And they should be. Because making yet another strong male hero game is lazy and catering to the lowest common denominator of the gaming industry. The industry should be better than this.

And yet, as with any internet argument, people are taking the opposing side.

It’s easy to pass off the discussion of representation in games because so much of the current audience consists of men. And because of that, the industry mainly caters to those men. And so, as is the case when one holds an enviable position of power and influence over an industry, they often finds themselves failing to see the point.

The point is that women are drastically under-represented in games today. Women look at shelves packed with strong male heroes and do not see themselves. They feel alienated. They feel like the industry doesn’t care about them. That it has no place for them. That they might as well just go do something else with their time and money.

And they’re not wrong.

But this mentality needs to change. More women aren’t going to take part in the industry unless companies are brave enough to put strong women heroes into the forefront. Which is why Ubisoft’s incredibly short-sighted decision is so disappointing. They had an opportunity, and they dropped it. Because it was seemingly “too hard” to implement. A tacit lie, but a convincing one.

But gamers by and large will continue to believe the lie because they continue to hold all the cards of this predominantly male audience.

They’ll say things like “women should just stick to playing Candy Crush and Farmville”.

They’ll say things like “I don’t want women to water down my action and adventure games”.

They’ll say things like “historically speaking, men did all the fighting, so it’s more believable that I play as a man in my futuristic space pirate game”.

They’ll say things like “I don’t want to play as a girl“.

And that’s the problem, right there. “I don’t want to play as a girl“.

Maybe girls would play more games if they weren’t always forced to play as a man.

And isn’t that what we all want? Something this industry desperately needs? More gamers? An expanded audience brings in more money for companies to continue to create more games. And if there’s anything we gamers are always on the lookout for, it’s more games.

Gamers should all want more women in this industry. Because that brings the opportunity for growth which in turn gives us more games.

Don’t believe for a second that Ubisoft wasn’t able to make just one assassin female. And don’t believe for a second that it doesn’t matter.

It matters.

To all women who continue to be told “at least you have Tomb Raider, you should be happy you have that. Why do you keep asking for more?”

Because one out of a thousand isn’t enough. Not when there’s so many women searching for something they can identify with. Something that makes them feel like they’re finally allowed to be a part of the audience. And not just on the outside looking in.

Because we men get to see our faces on a thousand game covers and a thousand gameplay videos.

Because the future of the industry will rely on an expansion of the audience.

Because my daughter picks Princess Peach over Mario every single time.

Because it matters.

 

PS – Replace all references of “male/men” to white and “female/women” to black and this article remains (mostly) accurate.

So we’ve been reading a few Marvel comics lately

I’ve gradually been leading my wife into the nerd world over the past few years. It was slow to start, but once she saw Robert Downey Jr. portray a pretty amazing Iron Man/Tony Stark, and then discovered the magic of Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch, she’s been rocketing past me in fandom at a fairly brisk pace.

And really, who can blame her?

Recently, she decided that investing in the Avengers movie/television universes wasn’t nearly enough, so we’re now getting into some Marvel comics. I wasn’t about to argue with her logic.

Just a bit of background, once upon a time, I used to collect tons of Marvel comics. I was a huge Marvel fan, especially anything Wolverine, and have stacks of comics in storage (including some classic favorites, Wolverine #50, #75, and #100!). I stopped collecting around college, when money was tight (and any extra cash at the time was feeding my Magic: the Gathering habit) and never picked it back up again. In more recent years, I’ve been reading a ton of DC comics because my boss is a huge DC fan and started bringing them all in so we could read them over lunch breaks.

What we really needed more than anything were quality starting points. Luckily, Marvel has done something really smart now that they have immensely popular movies out. They’ve started a lot of series over at number 1 to give people some vantage point from which they can springboard into various storyarcs of popular characters. Another smart thing they’ve done is bring in some absolutely top-notch talent to write and draw these series’. So here’s a rundown of some of the stuff we’ve been reading lately.

Ms. Marvel – This was a no-brainer for us. A great main character who is female, ethnic, and Muslim, but also an ordinary teen who feels socially awkward and writes Avengers fanfic online. An immediately likable and translatable character with a story that is brilliantly written and drawn. We’re definitely enjoying this series.

Captain Marvel – I’ve always liked Kelly Sue Deconnick’s work, so seeing that she was taking on Captain Marvel again, and they were restarting with number 1 made this an easy choice. Powerful character and great storytelling.

Loki: Agent of Asgard – This is one we picked up because my wife can’t resist Loki (ever since he was played brilliantly by Tom Hiddleston in the movies). After a couple of issues, she’s starting to feel like it’s nothing more than fan service, and while I agree to a certain extent, I can’t help but feel there’s more to it than what we’re seeing so far. I’m willing to give it another couple of months.

Secret Avengers – On a whim, I picked up the newest reissue of this series and really enjoyed the hell out of it. Quirky, fast-paced, and definitely not taking itself too seriously, I can see it being a refreshing series among all of the Very Serious Literature™ we see these days. Hanging onto this one until it decides to let me down.

Iron Man – I just picked up the soft trade of the “Believe” story arc and the wife has devoured it greedily. I haven’t started yet, but it sounds like it’s another great series that we’ll be following for a while. We’re way behind in this series, and I’m really looking forward to getting to the “Iron Metropolis” story arc because that looks killer.

Hawkeye – I will read anything written by Matt Fraction, up to and including a Denny’s menu. Luckily Hawkeye is much more entertaining than that. A great look into the rough life of a superhero with no powers making his way in the big leagues. Hawkeye’s greatest enemy is oftentimes himself, and this series weaves a really interesting story on that concept.

Saga – Okay, one non-Marvel series on the list. If you aren’t reading Saga you absolutely need to pick up the trades. This is seriously fantastic craftsmanship in both art and storytelling, and I have a feeling that it’s something that will be a classic once it’s all said and done, and will be talked about for decades following its eventual completion. Such an amazing series, definitely don’t miss out on this one.

So, yeah, COMICS! We may be adding more to our collections in the coming months. I may have to do a review later in the year of what we may have added, and what we may have dropped in favor of higher-quality series’. In the meantime, please excuse me, I have some Iron Man to catch up on…

Introducing Arcadia!

Last month I hinted at a project that will allow me to push my art and continuously iterate and improve my skills. Well, after several weeks of planning, drawing, building, and nervously biting my nails, I’m finally ready to unveil that project.

Allow me to introduce my mistress these past few weeks, ARCADIA.

Arcadia is my new weekly webcomic. It’s the story of a young boy who finally gets to journey off of the only world he knows, only to be swept up into an adventure to (of course) save the entire universe. The plan right now is to create and release at least one new page every week (two if I can manage it) and if I keep that schedule, the full story should be completely told by, oh, let’s say, 2027 (give or take a decade).

Arcadia is dear to me because it was originally intended to be a novel written together with my son Caleb. We collaborated on it for several months, until I (as is often the case) became bored with the project and shelved it. But eventually, I took the idea back down, dusted off all the notes, and reconfigured it as a weekly webcomic project. And Caleb is, of course, still on staff assisting me with fleshing out the remaining story.

The goals I have in mind while working on Arcadia are many, and easily represented through handy bullet points:

  • Storytelling: of course, that’s the main goal. Caleb and I have an interesting story we want told. This is our way of doing it.
  • Improving my artwork: another big one, part of my desire to do this project is to force myself to draw things all the time. And not just things I like, and things that are easy, but sometimes things I may NOT like, and characters I actually hate, and facial expressions and positions that are difficult to visualize, and scenery, and all the remaining unsightly trappings of a webcomic. In this exercise, I hope to continually improve my ability to draw.
  • Maintaining a schedule: can I do something weekly? I’d like to think so. And post updates on time? Perhaps. We will see….
  • Just plain seeing if I can even do this: yeah.

So, in short, bookmark the site, add it to your favorite RSS feed reader, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, and I’ll try to keep you up-to-date on the webcomic as we progress through this experiment together. Share it with your friends, because if I don’t have an audience of at least some magnitude, it’s going to be even harder to force myself to commit to this project.

But most of all, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I hope I enjoy creating it for you.

These are not the 2014 resolutions you’re looking for

This coming year, there won’t be any new year’s resolutions for me. Oh, I’ll probably start trying to eat better, and maybe try to lose a few pounds, because let’s face it, I need to do that regardless. Be a better husband and father? I like to think any man (myself especially) would strive to do that every single day, resolution or no. But resolutions make me nervous, and I’m not going for any of it.

Working on a novel this past November taught me something very important: I don’t really like writing. At least not long form. But I absolutely adore stories, and more than any other creative pursuit, I truly want to devote myself more fully to my illustrations and art.

That’s why in 2014, the biggest thing I want to accomplish is being able to focus on more of these kinds of creative projects, and work to improve my craft of drawing and story writing. Daily, if at all possible. One of the ways in which I plan to do that will be by working on an awesome weekly project that I hope to unveil sometime in early January. It will be a fun and (potentially) interesting project that I hope will push my art and writing skills to their maximum, and allow me to improve both throughout the year. Then, I can eventually move on to even more interesting projects I have nestled inside the stubborn folds of my brain, and each one will end up looking better than the one that preceded it.

At least, that’s the idea.

Okay, fine. Maybe just ONE resolution. “I resolve to play more Skyrim.” There. That one’s already in the bag.

The sounds of typing fills the air

As you probably no doubt remember, we’re participating in NaNoWriMo this year. As I sit here, we’re a full one-third of the way into the NaNo season, and things are very interesting. As you can see by my stats, I’m actually doing very well this year – far and away better than the last time I participated in this hellish nightmare of words, words, WORDS, back in 2007. I’m much more engaged, much more excited, and much more productive than I ever was previously, and that’s amazing, because if there’s one thing that is incredibly difficult to do in NaNoWriMo it’s, well, everything I just mentioned.

Most of that has to do with my incredibly lovely and talented wife, who, you can see by HER stats, is COMPLETELY BLOWING THIS THING OUT OF THE WATER. She’s hitting the keyboard hard, and she’s digging in, and setting personal reward goals, and is being all determined and everything. And it’s adorable and motivating and I haven’t seen her this happy in a long time. Even when she’s frustrated by her characters misbehaving in her story (happens more frequently than writers care to admit), she finds a way to smile and just dwell in the sheer ridiculousness of pouring out creativity and thought and inspiration onto a page and letting it somehow melt into a story while it air dries.

But we’re still in the honeymoon phase. The first third is the easiest third. I’m just shy of hitting the halfway point in the word count (though I’m already near the end of the second act of the story, so who knows where the final count will end up, honestly). The wife is already well into the thirty-thousands. We’re going to make it, I know we are, but we’re going to be drained and broken by the end, and December will be spent trying to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and trying to sort out the mess by Christmas.

(That was obviously an extreme exaggeration, but you get the idea.)

In any case, we took a break to go see  Thor 2 and have a nice dinner, just the two of us, so we can keep ourselves grounded during this madness. We’re making our daily word counts, and in the end, I think we’ll end up with either something we’re proud of, or something we’ll toss in the drawer, never to be seen again. And then, we’ll probably do it all over again.

Because we’re insane, you see.

Nan Oh Rhyme Oh

It’s that time of year, again. The fall leaves changing, the air is getting colder (I think I covered most of this in my last post). But most of all, we’re quickly approaching November. And that means: NaNoWriMo.

For those unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The time of year where thousands of people around the world simultaneously attempt to write a 50,000 word novel between November 1st and November 30th. It’s a truly tough row to hoe, requiring at minimum 1,667 words produced to page per day in order to manage the feat. I haven’t done it myself since 2007, when I wrote a truly hideous novel that I immediately tucked away in a drawer and promptly forgot.

But, the point is, I WROTE A NOVEL. I can say that even now, six years later, as I wind up the various strings and intricate mechanisms of thought in an attempt to try, try again to accomplish such a task.

This time, however, I won’t be alone. This NaNo effort was actually sparked by my wonderful wife, who realized they had a NaNoWriMo Young Writer’s program, where you can sign up as educators and watch over your classroom. We have setup just such a thing, where our two boys shall attempt their own novels (with appropriately smaller word count goals). It should be interesting to watch them progress through a month of daily writing. I’m placing bets on when each of them decides to give up on the effort (will they even make it to Thanksgiving? One can only hope….)

You can watch my own progress through the month over here (I’ll probably also be posting quite frequently on my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts).

As an added bonus, my wife – being a goddess of Pinterest – has created an inspirational NaNoWriMo board, which I’ll be (occasionally) contributing to. It’s already got a load of great writing tips and advice in handy inforgraphic format. I’m already feeling sufficiently INSPIRED.

So, over the next few days, we’ll be starting to assemble outlines, conceptualize ideas, plot out scenarios, sketch some characters, and dress a few settings. All in preparation for the start of putting words to page first thing November 1st.

It’s time to drag something out of nothing. It’s time for NaNoWriMo 2013.