2024-11-16 08:00:00
2024-10-28 08:00:00
After aspiring to for the past few years, I finally succeeded in updating my site for Halloween! I have a new (spooky) homepage.
⚠ Note: I discuss the homepage’s easter egg here, so I recommend checking it out before reading this post.
Making this was a lot less of a linear process than when I was making my previous comic homepage. I started sketching stuff back in late July, but didn’t pick up on it until September. I waffled endlessly about the concept. The storyboard kept changing throughout, even as I was drawing the final art.
I had a few ideas in mind:
I didn’t know how this lights on/off mechanic would take shape until I was in the weeds of sketching. I had those various ideas, but not a clear picture of how they would work in practice.
There were two things that I figured out during the process: the ghosts, and the light mode switch.
I settled on the comic ending by leading you down a dark hallway, and I thought maybe there would be a ghost in the darkness.
And so I drew the first ghost. Then I thought should draw some variants so I could choose the Scariest Ghost. The problem with being a scaredy cat is that I was too afraid to look up horror visuals, so I had to rely on artwork I could handle and my meager imagination.
But after I drew some various ghosts, I realized they worked as animation frames—I had kept drawing them in a way where they were advancing on the viewer and it occurred to me these could be the same ghost, but getting closer… So that was the first thing I figured out.
In the beginning, the switch just toggled the lights while the ghost floated around. And then I was thinking about how to end the comic, with the ghost getting up close to the you. It then…kills you? eats you? fade to black? But then the toggle gets disabled somehow? But how? why?
But then in my sketches, I happened to put the toggle in the right corner, in reach of my character, and at some point I looked at this and thought huh. What if—
The idea fell into place. I tested this flow by animating it in Photoshop as a frame-by-frame animation. I wanted to see if flashing through the ghosts and then having my character turn on the last frame worked. Once I confirmed the concept held up, I moved onto drawing the actual artwork. And so, that was my second discovery.
Most of the comic artwork is simple: a bunch of straight on shots of my character looking the same across multiple panels. Nothing new here! I finally draw something slightly more interesting in the last panel, which involves a bit of 1-point perspective.
I intended the setting to play a larger role—for example, the picture frames on the wall were supposed to actually link to things—but after I figured out the light mode interaction, I decided that was it! That was my concept. Everything else could go in the garbage.
The final panel follows the pattern of scary eyes glinting in the dark, in an even spookier way than glasses-glinting-in-the-dark is. This was the limit of my scary artwork tolerance. Here’s a choice selection of inspiration:
During this process, I also read two volumes of Framed Ink by Marcos Mateu-Mestre, both of which are superb and inspiring.
This was built the same way my previous comic homepage was—the artwork as various images absolute positioned within panels that had a fixed aspect ratio.
For example, suppose a panel has an aspect ratio of 2:1 and I wanted the artwork to be placed in the bottom right corner:
.panel {
aspect-ratio: 2 / 1;
position: relative;
}
.panel__artwork {
bottom: 0;
right: 0;
position: absolute;
width: 50%;
}I adjusted the aspect ratio of panels based based on two arbitrary breakpoints: 800px and 500px. The clearest example of this is in the I’ve redecorated panel. It’s meant to be a large panel that fills the screen.
On ‘desktop’ it’s 1:1—it takes up a lot of space. As the viewport gets more narrow, it gets taller. At <800px, it’s 2:3; at <500px, it’s 1:4.
That 1:4 sizing is the most dramatic. You have to scroll an entire screen’s worth of height to get to the bottom of the panel, which is meant to emphasize the shadows that engulf my character.
Light mode was initially a traditional light/dark mode toggle, but I changed it to a <button> because I didn’t want to build a toggle switch.
Positioning the button required a bit more thought. In my sketches, it’s floating in empty space, but this would look awkward on the actual page. It needed to be offset from the right edge so that the hand angle would work, but just having it float there looked weird.
So I moved my navigation links out of the site footer to sit right below the comic, so that I could stick the button at the end and have it fit in better.
I also considered styling the button to look like one of my nav links, so it would be an actual surprise if you chose to click on it. However, I decided I wanted everyone to click it more than I wanted it to be a true easter egg, and I think it looks conspicuous enough that it invites a bit of curiosity.
I also spent an embarrassing amount of time trying and failing to figure out some kind of clever wordplay involving ‘hotel’. I bet if I did have a fun pun, I would have pushed the hotel setting more, but alas.
When I look back at all my ambitions and plans from the start of this, I feel like I gave up on so many things out of a lack of skill. Taking a nebulous idea through to execution is the entire point, and it feels disappointing to fall short.
But I also feel proud of where this ended up. My favourite parts of this—the light mode switch, the flashing ghosts—emerged from the drawing process. I had a moment where I realized huh, that’s interesting about the artwork. Even in my tiny, unsophisticated project, it was through that meandering that something surprising came about. (I know this isn’t groundbreaking, but it was a good reminder to myself!)
I feel my artistic shortcomings very acutely when drawing comics. They require so much skill—in the most technical, artistic sense with character art and environments and composition, and then with skill in writing, and then the pacing and flow of it all. It’s very humbling, and it’s exciting to be a beginner and have so much I can improve on. I’m excited to make my next thing, whatever it may be.
2024-10-21 08:00:00
An extremely long post because I haven’t written this in a month and there is so much to catch up on. More like MONTHnotes amirite??!?!?
I updated my homepage for spooky season! I’ll hopefully write a longer post about it sometime soon (aaahhhh lol) but I’m happy I finally did something for Halloween, after aspiring to for several years now.
It’s another short comic, with a little bit of an easter egg type thing at the end. Read it here.
This month I’m trying to participate in Weird Web October, which has a daily prompt for making a weird website every day this month.
For example: #3 Colour and #6 Notifications. I’ll be adding them here throughout the month.
Notable things I enjoyed over the past few weeks:
I’m going to see The Fall (2006) next week. I first watched it probably 10+ years ago, on a shitty not-legal streaming site, so I’m excited to see it in 4K on a big screen—it’s a visually striking movie.
I finally read Framed Ink (volumes 1 and 2) by Marcos Mateu-Mestre and they were great. Sadly, I did not become a brilliant comic artist upon reading them, but I do feel an even deeper appreciation of the craft.
Here’s an example page (forgive my crappy photo quality) from volume 2, Frame Format, Energy, and Composition for Visual Storytellers, where he discusses how to adapt a frame to different aspect ratios. Hello, responsive webcomics ?!?!?
I went to Seattle for a couple of days to see Across the Spider-Verse: Live In Concert, i.e. the live performance of the movie’s soundtrack. Here are a bunch of photos from my trip.
I took the train there and back from Vancouver, which is a slow 4+ hour journey. (Imagine if we had a high-speed train!!!) Fortuantely, during the daytime the views are spectacular as you go by the water. These are from my early morning train.
My third time here. It was fun to go around and recognize items from the permanent collection that I saw five years ago.
I ended up walking around a lot. It rained when I got into the city and on the morning on the second day, but was otherwise agreeable walking weather. (It seemed like not a lot of people used umbrellas? I felt out of place with mine. Is this tourist behaviour?!?)
I love this movie, I love the music, and I loved watching it again while a live orchestra played the soundtrack.
This was my first time visiting! I watched a glass blowing demo, which was very cool.
In other news, as part of my Getting Back Into Photography thing, I bought another lens: the Fujifilm XF 35mm f/1.4. Here are a couple of birb photos I took with it last month.
2024-09-12 08:00:00
This is a remarkable piece of long-form journalism from the Washington Post about a US federal government employee who has used his position to transform the way mining operates, saving thousands of lives. The public has this idea that federal employees are just pencil-pushers who love wrapping things in red tape. But I know from personal experience that many of them are just like Chris Mark: people with a strong sense of service who want to solve problems for their country, and don’t care much about wealth, fame, or credit.
Another interesting angle to figuring out ad placements on your website are the potential for combo moves — you can earn bonus points if you can load two separate correlating advertisements for the same advertiser. These bonus points apply to your limit break meter, and if that meter fills up you get a wicked sick nasty bonus payout.
The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.
Here is a sketch of Chappell Roan, based on her look at the VMAs:
I went to see James Jean’s solo exhibition Meadowlark. It was so beautiful! Art is so cool.
2024-08-19 08:00:00
I’m getting back into photography!! I bought a new lens for my mirrorless camera, batteries for my point-and-shoot film camera, and a new half-frame film camera, lol. I really need to figure out a good way of sharing photos now.
I finally learned what film simulation recipes are. I cycled through a few here and don’t remember which I used for specific pics, but I had Pacific Blues, Kodachrome II, and Kodak Gold 200.
I watched my best friend get married, celebrated my birthday, and finally harvested some of my cherry tomatoes.
And this week I’m off to Portland with my partner for XOXO! (Say hi! Find me in the Slack! Talk to me about websites, art, comics, Destiny, or other weird internet things!)
