Exit Interview

 

Red and the Wolfe on Kindle

 Red and the Wolfe is now on Amazon Kindle!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09N17DW4R

It is the whole book in its entirety. on. Kindle. An Amazon company. I did the guided view this time. I'm praying like hell that ya'll love it, and I thank you for even looking at it.

Dangle Cat

 

Pedals from Scratch

 

I’ve made a few pedals from scratch now and I was surprised to notice I’d never felt prouder of my work than when hearing my guitar going through a signal chain I made into an amp I made. Having a hand in every element that causes the sound has been really exciting. I started a couple years ago just trying to identify what was a resistor and what was a capacitor - to making pedal kits - to making boards from scratch - next maybe design my own circuit! But maybe not, there seems to be an endless supply of clever and interesting guitar effects

Recent Pedals

 

Some recent pedals: MXR Blue box - Arion MMP1 - Fuzzrite with BMP tone control - Phantom octave with DOD YJM 308 - Sonic Reducer Bitcrusher - Quantum Mystic. This has been a fun hobby and something I’ve always wanted to do, but I have to stop looking at the blogs where they post layouts because I want to make everything.

Radioactive Bikini Men From Mars!

 

I’ve had “Saturday Night Screamer” by Hollywood Burns stuck in my head since I first heard it and it inspired this. They released all their music for pay-what-you-will on bandcamp which I am very grateful for- so many French masters of new dark synthwave

Hank Hill Ascendant

 

New Headers

 

putting here so I can use them in the html... hopefully

Thought I’d change blog headers since I’ll be changing the link from comixology to kindle. I submitted Red to kindle and it has said ‘processing your file, this will take a few minutes’ for over a week now, but the last thing they said will take ‘3 to 5 days’ took a month and a half, so I guess everything is proceeding normally!

Red Heads

 

Completely forgot about this and just refound it. I didn’t know how I was going to handle the photoshop paintings in Red and the Wolfe so I was trying to figure things out, as well as get some weird Red faces out of my system. I knew working for so long on one thing my handiness would change, so I did a lot of prep work to try to keep it to a minimum. Did around a thousand* photoshop paintings before I started the photoshop work on Red, and there are somewhere around a thousand little photoshop paintings in Red. I never copied elements between panels, each panel is an individual photoshop painting.

*couple hundred

Red and the Wolfe Guided View

 

Almost done doing the guided view. It is killing my hand, and the application grinds to a halt after a few pages so I have to keep closing and reopening it. One thing I don’t like about guided view is how the aspect ratio and text size constantly change as you go panel to panel. That’s something I may plan for in the future.

Crow and Raven Original Sketch

 

Looking through old scans I found my original Sketchbook page for The Crow and The Raven. Just sat down at starbucks and wrote it, I wrote the text originally to entertain myself but decided to include it as text-to-speech. I cut this up to make the animatic, then made the full size assets in my sketchbook and made the finished video after about 18 editing iterations.

Bob Dole's Fantastic Halloween Wishes

 

My halloween costume from 1996, my friend was bill clinton. Still a handy mask to have around, featured prominently in “He Who Must Be Obeyed Sets Zealot About a Particular Tasque” and the end of “Winter’s Magical Graspe”

Compressing Red and the Wolfe

 

Using every trick I could think of I finally got Red and the Wolfe small enough to please the kindle publishing thing. I put in 300 megs of Jpgs and it poops out a 600+ meg file... what the hell is it doing with all that space? It saves a redundant dump of all the files I put into it in the save folder... So I have no idea. Now I just have to tediously outline every panel for the guided view. I thought about just using the auto-detect because it is really funny at how terrible it is, mostly just making one tiny box per page, but I guess I wont. You’d think... that the THICK BLACK BOARDERS I used would help it out, but it just seems to confuse it.

Red and the Wolfe scales

 

Looking through my Red and the Wolfe folder found a scale comparison from preproduction. Also does anyone who reads comics on smart devices use the panel-by-panel view? I think I’d prefer page-by-page but I guess on a phone that wouldn’t work.

Catgirl Body Rot

 

Made a Body Rot! My dad gave me a sheet of LM386 chips he had laying around and this is one of about a half dozen effects I’ve made with them; including the amp I’m currently using. Wanted to do a catgirl on this, make it stand out from all the gore I decorated my other pedals with.

Zealot redux

 I remembered not liking my illustrations for the last few panels of the zealot and went back to change them only to find out I already had! But I changed a few anyway because I still didn’t like them. And I’m a huge george lucas fan and love all the horrible changes he made to add terrible 90s CGI to a 70s movie to embetter it. Hopefully some day all original classic movies will be destroyed and remade with the power of tone deafness and CGI.

Kindle test

 

Trying to get 7 gigs of PDFs pared down 650 megs so I can publish Red as one book and not separate chapters. Kindle’s publishing software seems to double whatever size a thing I put in it for some reason, so I’m trying to shoot for 300.

Red and the Wolfe on Kindle

 

Red and the Wolfe is moving to Kindle as Amazon slowly consumes and digests ComiXology. I’m not sure how the merger works exactly except that I have to republish through KDP and if you already have it on ComiXology it will still be available through the app, you just won’t be able to buy it through them. It also means hopefully there will be a print version, which I am eager to see!

Chemicalmen

 

Tom the Tentacle

 

My Fuzz Bare

 KMA fuzzly bear, which is some modified clone of a fuzz I never heard of. Not my favorite fuzz (that is the Carcosa), it's more a classic fuzz sound I guess.

Priests of Sanctamonious Excess full resolution

 A person messaged me and said they were using this as their wallpaper but lost it, so here it is as the resolution I painted it at.

Carcosa Fuzz

 Made a Carcosa Fuzz, by far my favorite fuzz. Even with slightly different components it sounds just like my original, and sequels like crazy with everything turned up like the original. I like that, makes it feel like you are barely wielding this wild electrical current. The case has my version of The King in Yellow.

God Labs Enterance

 

I remember passing by some inspirational quote on the side of an arts building around 2nd Ave in Seattle going between buses everyday and I can’t for the life of me remember what it said. This quote is what I would say to Duke Nukem when playing Duke Nukem 3D on Christmas when he says ‘what are you waiting for, christmas?’ I wrote it down to remember it, then thought it was really funny written on the wall there. Also there is a coffee and gift shop

MXR Distortion + and DOD 250 and Spiderman

 

Put an MXR Distortion+ and a DOD 250 in the same box, mostly because the guys who make these layouts work hard to make them as small as possible and it seems a waste to just put one in a box. These are also extremely similar, but using the BAT46 diodes in the DOD is pretty quiet, so the MXR can then be set to boost it which is neat. The case depicts a samurai fighting spiderman.

Godlabs IDs

 

Some lab IDs to test out the logos. I thought it would be funny if the IDs issued were unusually long so they wouldn’t fit in any of the regular ID holding devices made since the dawn of man, but I sort of abandoned that idea because I couldn’t think of more stuff to put on them.

God Labs Logos

 

I was working on logos for signs and IDs and such and had a couple triangle/double triangle concepts going. I wanted to avoid that direction though because people seem to derive some kind of meaning and power from triangles and other basic shapes. I looked up from working and a lady had a pendant with a triangle and circle in just such a configuration, confirming my reservation. Then I started going with this top heavy design and liked it as it looks both precarious and ominous. Made me think of that pedestal the guy from Shadow of the Colossus places the girl on; looks like it was made for smashing people

First Stripboard Fuzz

 Wired and working! I ordered more 24AWG wire but in the meantime I've been scavenging every leftover scrap from the kits I've made. This is a lot more fun and customizable than the kits, but they were a great starting point. I want to make a tube amp sometime in the future now.

Case Painted

 

Case painted, again going in a different direction than I was first thinking

DooM II: Hell on Earth, case

 

Sculpted some skulls onto a case I made for a fuzz I made. I was thinking of the soul gate from DooM II: Hell on Earth, but it kind of went in a different direction. I wasn’t sure if it’d stick or just come off in a sheet, but it seems to have baked on the aluminum.

Godlabs campus looking back at the tower

 

Stripboard MXR Distortion+

 

Made an MXR Distortion+ from salvaged parts, it took every alligator clip I had to test it but it worked! The Red LEDs I’m using as clippers came from a broken blender I harvested and give a suprisingly great gnarly grit when turned up. This is the first stripboard circuit I’ve made after I started making pedal kits about a year ago, and it is even more fun and rewarding and I got 5 more circuits already lined up.

New Watermark

 

Just finished a new watermark for this era of my work. In school there was much made about hands and I never cared about drawing hands and felt like it was low hanging fruit to critique either positive or negative for when you didn’t really have anything helpful to comment on, so in part this is my retort to that. Also you ever reach out for something and retract your hand mangled? that too. Also this started when I was designing a logo for The God Labs, and real lab logos are always just like a hand with a test tube, so I was drawing a severed hand pinned to the ground with a dagger and in my head called it ‘The Black Hand of Science.’

Godlabs Campus Overlook

 

Teeth to Molars

 

A good spell to cast on your enemies would be teeth to molars. Making all of their teeth molars would open up a whole world of dental inconveniences for your opponents to suffer in.

Scientific Apparatus

 

My professor Peter said ‘why bother making up a pile of garbage when you can just go find one and draw it,’ so here is a pile of scientific junk for reference.

More work designing the God Labs campus

 

The right turn into The God Labs

 

Forest brush testing

 

Testing out a brush I made in photoshop, I called it “Mr. Chaos of Nature.” I like it for making pine trees; it’s a combination of a branch brush I made and a picture of a pine thing from some brush set I downloaded years ago. It’s nice that it doesn’t leave a repeating pattern or flatten things out, which are oft waged battles in digital painting

God Labs Aft

 God Labs Aft. Been working out some of the scale and layout of the God Labs’ campus, it is the first time it has felt good to work on the God Labs in a. long. time.

The God Labs Tower

 

Hag of Daggers

 

Halls of Grace and Love

 

Floating Meat

 

Ships

 

Bird Becoming

 

Meatquake