Scenery works in progress..

Alright, it's time to sort this fiasco of a comic series out.

So far our crew have been drifting in their high-tech crate, stranded for the best part of a year, bumming around and not really achieving anything. It's time to sort that out.

I've written the plots and scripts for the next four comics, tying everything up, bringing closure to this years-and-years of general dicking about.

About time, right? Previously I've just made one comic after the next, in fact in the early days I'd just make one page after the next and decide what people would say as I put the renders together on the page in photoshop. Zero planning, just spamming it out as my brain liked. Up until Dive Into The Dark, it was just a general flow of unplanned shenanigans. When that hit, I quite liked the fact there was a more traditional sci-fi thread running through, and decided comics after that should have a bit of thought going into them.

Particularly since Bellerophon Wakes and when I came back with Pegasus' Wraith have I been working towards little plot tie-ups, a hint here and a tattoo there.

So now rather than have a general fantasising session before a comic and 'plan' it that way, I've written the lot; up to Comic 20. Rather good fun. All this plot does require some new scenery though, so I've been building CG spaces for a bit, customising free CG models and modelling a bit myself, playing with lighting and planning some mayhem.

Here's some test renders :)

There's a couple of other totally out-there scenes too, but I'm not putting them here - gotta limit the spoilers

Looking into the middle distance

Old skool

Little bit of character development. No he's not going to join the crew, but he is a badass in his own way. This guy's a goodie, for sure.

I'm doing that thing, you know when you're halfway through a thing and instead of concentrating on that thing, you do the thing where your mind wanders to three things ahead and you start to plan and build the sets/required bits for that thing? I'm doing that thing.

It's fine, seems to be part of how I work, a nice little brain-relaxation technique I guess, stops me getting bogged-down in the current scenario and lets it run free in the hills of a possible future.

So here we are, an old bloke in a white Dr No suit and no doubt some comfortable slippers. Nothing to prove, this guy. How he fits in with our plot will become clear in the fulness, but suffice to say (and as always..) don't hold your breath. These things take time, and unlike the weekly comic artists whose job it is to produce comics, I am more like a couple-of-comics-a-year kinda person, they come in flurries and then go very quiet. Sorry about that.

Work, eh? Can't live with it, can't live without it. Well you can, you just have to get used to exclusively eating pulses and that's not a commitment I'm willing to make right now. Much happier being able to afford unusual beers and ironically needing to plough through them to relax at the end of an insane workload of a day.

It'll chill out though, always does. Seasons of woe and stress do tend to tail off and that makes living in between all the sweeter. So I'm holding out, knuckling under, and letting the little brain do some wandering through the forests for a bit.

Also on the cards: bamboo forests. It'll make sense in the next-but-one comic, I think. Little bit of Zen required for our crew I believe. Time for some closure and some taking stock. It'll happen. Probably not in the upcoming immediate comic, but it'll happen.

That's the best bit really, slipping into some comfortable trousers and flipflops, and padding through the woods, letting the stress leak out of you like water from a porous vase. So I've been creating bamboo forests and wise old men, hoping that one day when my workload calms down, art and reality will meet and I can slip into the bath of contented rest.

AAArgh work explosion!

Don't you just hate it when things are trundling along nicely at work, and then they triple? Like "Hey, oh you, you enjoy your job? Here's three of it!"

Man alive I could do with a rest and a cold brain enema or something. It's like stress piled on a headache rhumba these days, where does it all come from?

Well. Time to chill out. Time to shower the stupid working-late grime off my exhausted, rigid body and try and bend it into a sleeping, relaxed sort of pose and hope all the spreadsheets and general work crap whimsy leaks out of my face while I'm asleep.

Thought I'd put some clothes on Ix for once...