Whew!

The invaders seem to have been destroyed, and the Secret Underground Headquarters is back in contact with the outside world. Productivity remains at a standstill, however, as a lot of software and drivers need to be reinstalled. Back at it soon...

Friends, Romans, Countrymen-

I come to bury Ceasar, or at least a nasty virus that someone has unleashed on my unsuspecting system. Despite having it clearly identified by my firewall, finding info on it on the net, and trying several removal programs, it still insists on trying to access the internet. This madness must stop, so a complete scrub down and re-install is about to occur. In other words, I'm nuking the bastard. So what if my cities will become radioactive wastelands? I cannot allow a foreign invader to corrupt the purity of my file system. This will not stand! Anyway, this little bug-hunt has been consuming my time and energy, and more will be required to rebuild on the ashes I am about to create. Therefore, a slight pause in productivity will now ensue. Wish me luck. See you on the other side.

Wreck-Lass

This is Wreck-Lass, about as close as I can get to the Super Hero genre. Originally she was going to have her own book, and may yet, but in talking with Lou 'loopy' Pirro, who collaborating with me on the original Eaton Pye, He-Man Artist story, we decided to fold her in as a supporting character, and I'm pretty happy with that. Who hasn't wished he had a girl with a big hammer to back him up from time to time?

I'm still trying to find the right place to put serial art- all I know so far is this is quite it. Who knew that this would be so complicated? Or that I would be so friggin tired all the time? It may be time for a nap.

Weary...

I spent a lot of time yesterday and again today, in between emergencies and various forms of drudgery, trying to suss out the intracacies of the blogosphere. Really, how tedious. I did check out a couple of hosts for comics, but I didn't much care for the way things were laid out, other than the fact that it was easy to start at the beginning and read to the end. A nice feature, of course, but not enough. I saw that some practitioners of the web-comic art have modified their little desmenes (I hesitate to say domains, as that now means something rather specific)in attractive ways, but I don't think I have the time figure all that out on top of everything else just now. Anyway, all this has left little time for actually drawing, painting, etc- not that there was any to begin with. But the night is young...

Headaches

First of all, I've got a crushing headache of the kind that the gentle spring breezes tend to bring to Megatuberopolis at about 80 mph every spring. Pollen, pesticides, fetilizer, herbicides, radioactive waste and fist-sized grains of 'dust' make for a heady brew. Of course, I tell myself, at least it is spring, so the temperatures are soaring above 30 degrees. Farenheit. We don't believe in the metric system here in Megatuberopolis.
On top of this I have the headache known as the Information Superhighway in polite circles, or the f@$)!kE^%* internet in others. Having been in a cryogenic coma under the Arctic ice for several decades, I have a lot of catching up to do, and it's making my head throb. This blogging bidniz, for instance, seems straightforward enough, until you start trying to actually get someone to read the damn thing. Then, all of a sudden, you have to deal with backlinks and RSS feeds and webcrawlers and so on and so on. I'm sensitive artist, fer crying out loud! I shouldn't have to know this stuff.
Also, I realize that in addition to this little jewel of on-going virtual blather, I need an actual web-site of some kind where I can post sequential art in- get this- sequence. This blog stuff is all very well for the kinds of random slop I've been posting so far, but it's a hard way to read a comic.
So, I'm forced to conclude, the House of Pye needs it's own in-house IT expert, webmaster and all around interwob widgeteer. Volounteers? Anyone. That's what I thought...

Going Technoratti

Just trying to get the ball rolling here....



Technorati Profile

Hot Slice

Every so often I try to put together a Pye Girl pic. This one isn't particularly polished, I still have a fair amount of rust in the joints. And I have yet to remember much of what I've forgotten about photoshop. If only Plato had been right...

Today has been a day mostly of scurrying, waiting for things, and scurrying some more. In between I've managed to do a little sketching and paste this together, just to keep my hand in. Perhaps tomorrow will be more productive, artwise.

Hot Dice

Another painting for the game. I didn't just paint it- all of a sudden it's freezing again, so no ventilation in the Secret Underground Headquarters. I just finally got around to processing the picture of it, so I thought I'd put it up here.

That's about it for the moment, I may have some House Of Pye graphics postable later today.

Inkydinkydoo

Same heads from the other day, but inked. I'm using sharpies because A) I'm lazy, B) I'm in a hurry, and C) I don't have a decent double-ought sable round. So, there's definitely a dearth of interesting line quality. There's only so much you can do with a sharpie. Well, okay, you can go over the lines and vary their weights, but besides A) and B) above, I'm working on sketch pads from the dollar store, and it doesn't take much ink to start them behaving like blotters. Next I'm going to try ordinary old printer/copy paper and see if that's any cleaner, but I'm still leaning toward messy pencil drawings.

Headwork

Here are some pencils of Nilla. I'm still messing with some style/technical issues. On the one hand, I hate to ink, so I'm tempted to just skip that and stick with the pencils. Photoshop cleans them up to some degree, and what the heck, how clean do they need to be? I like some of the liveliness of straight pencil, but I admit my pencils are pretty sloppy.

The other issue is that it means drawing everything straight, because the pencils are harder to manipulate in photoshop. At least with my primitive PS skills, it's not worth the work to collage things together working from pencils. The inked versions are easier to cut and paste with. So, we'll see which variety of lazy-assedness prevails in the long run. Right now, I kinda like the pencils, though I plan to go a little cleaner than what you see here.

You can see that I haven't entirely honed Nilla's look down, either. While consistency is the hobgobblin of little minds, it's generally considered de rigueur for comix. Pretty soon I'm going to have to decide just how square Nilla's jaw is and stuff like that. However, with that hair and that dress, I figure she's already pretty easy to pick out of a crowd. What's messing me up here is that while I'm working on Li'l Nilla and Li'l Nilla, Zombie Killa, I'm also working with more grown up manifestations of her for Eaton Pye, He-Man Artist and various little side projects.

Bit O' Nilla

I'm not really a big fan of chibi, so I made some. It's a little bit like watching a car wreck, or eating chicharones- you don't want to, but once you start, you can't really help it. The thing that's weird with chibi is that you can't really tell how old they are. They have all these child/infant characteristics, but not really. You can make adult chibi, and child chibi. And little fuzzy animal chibi. They're kind of like children, and kind of like demon-possessed ventriloquist's dummies.

You can probably tell from this that I find them scary and repulsive, yet strangely attractive. I am hoping to exorcise this fascination by indulging in it.

The question is- how? Li'l Nilla is a kid, but not a chibi. Her older manifestations don't seem to have much room for chibiness either. So I suppose Chibi-Nilla will be relegated to random promotional graphics and similar forms of cheerleading.

Hoodoo Pye

Today I thought I'd upload a couple of images from a series I was working on before the recent coma. They're for a card game- only fifty or so more to go! If I can get some ventilation in the Secret Underground Headquarters and do a little brushwork, I'll start posting them as I go. Meantime, here is what I have.


Apparently I'm going to have to relearn HTML to reliably format these things, so for now I'm just going to throw them against the wall and see where they stick.



Where they stick seems to be amusingly unpredictable...
but I suppose this will have to do.
There's little enough news from the House of Pye right now. No time for anything but sketchwork, and, as hinted at above, no proper facilities for anything else either.
So, pencils, a few inks, and some old stuff is what you'll be getting for a while here.

Construction Work

I've just put up a snazzy new banner, but I'm going to include it here also because it's the kind of thing I change a lot, so it will be here in the archive.

I've been working on sketches for Li'l Nilla, Zombie Killa, and with luck this blog will allow me to post one here:

Okay, that was a bit unexpected, layout wise, but it will do for now. On the right is Li'l Nilla herself, and on the left her friend Harmony.

In putting this banner and sketch together, I have discovered that during the recent haitus I've forgotten pretty much everything I ever knew about photoshop. Coming hard on the heels of the discovery that I've forgotten everything I ever knew about Frontpage and HTML, this is a bitter blow indeed. Obviously much study will be required before I can actually present the ongoing adventures of Nilla here, but in the meantime I will scatter this blog with sketches and whatnot.

Alright, gotta start somewhere, so this is as good a place as any, right? We shall see. I’m hoping this is a convenient spot to post some works-in-progress bits and pieces from Eaton Pye : Origins, Li’l Nilla, Zombie Killa, and other House of Pye productions. As well as some random raving and suchlike.