Slime Mansion

This is the first in a series of watercolor background paintings that I'm working on. :> Unlike the previous environment thumbnails which include places outside the school, these paintings will be exclusively of various areas within the campus of the Alatus Institute.

I stuck Zephan in there to see how it looks, but I'm kind of indifferent about it, because the tooth texture of the watercolor paper stands out a little too much :<a. Apparently if I used a really really good scanner the tooth won't stand out so much though, but by really really good apparently they mean like $1000+ good Dx. It's an interesting effect, but I think I'll try using a hot press smooth paper some time and seeing how it'd look once a character is slapped onto it.

Incidentally, even though Zephan's standing here, this isn't actually his room. D: It's just a showcase dorm, so maybe he's just checking it out on a tour or something D:

The school semester is coming to a close in the coming weeks :D I thought I'd use this chance to post a few thumbnails of some environments I'd been working on for Directions of Destiny.

Some of these locations you might recognize from the comic, others have yet to be mentioned at all. But it's been very fun working on these concepts, and I'll be sure to put up the full finished paintings when I'm done!!

I have come to give you a report! I-it's not good news, but it's not bad news either really. It's...okay news?

After years of on-and-off hiatuses, I think I've finally come to realize that I'm probably just not built to tackle school and regularly update an on-going comic at once. D: That said, I have one year left and I'm graduating next December if everything goes as planned!! (I-if it seems like I've been in college forever, that's pretty much been the case.) BUT that doesn't necessarily mean that I won't update the comic at all until then!!

I started this comic out in a really haphazard manner, and even after so long, sometimes I would go straight into drawing after only scripting out a few pages in advance. It worked in getting me to just DRAW, and my comic-drawing skills have improved a lot from when I first began, but now I really want the story and the concept to hold up with the art!

Over the past several months I've been developing the Alatus Institute further, working out the details to the building exteriors and interiors, adding more structures to the campus, and fleshing out the surrounding landscapes and towns around the school and stuff. I've also been taking out two birds with one stone by making many of my school projects directly correlate with my plans for the comic, and lately I've been really into drawing environments, so what I hope this leads to is an Alatus Institute that is much more REAL.

Another idea I've been entertaining is turning alatusinstitute.com into an official school website, where information about the school can be posted along with other fun things, like blogs for each of the student council members, and regularly updated minicomics! Although minicomics aren't substitutes for real comic pages that progress the main story, they ARE a lot easier to draw inbetween classes and don't require any planning. I really want to go through with this idea soon so that I can at least share the fun I'm having with my characters before the real comic pages continue updating.

Finally, I've been thinking much more about storycrafting and plot structure over the past year. I've been reading a lot of books on writing, and from there I've been further solidifying my story--laying out all the scenes in the entire comic from here until the end and making sure every scene is constantly driving towards the finale and no panels are wasted on boring things that make a story drag! I've been making a lot of notes on the rest of the story that will get organized and polished into full scripted thumbnails which I plan to show my friends so that I can get some good feedback before drawing them out and publishing it online. I'm really pumped about taking writing more seriously!! :D

With all these things going on in the background, I really don't want to keep it all to myself! In two weeks winter break will come, and the first thing on my agenda is to redesign this website. It'll feature a more accessible and streamlined layout that is more blog-friendly so big-ol' written entries like this won't feel so cramped. I also want to post a lot of the concept art I've been doing, plus random sketches of the characters, and maybe occasionally story thumbnails and things like that to get reader feedback! It'll make things much more interactive around here, and by constantly updating with what's going on and getting lots of input, I hope that it'll make the comic even better!

I hope to have the new site done in January 2010, so check back often :D Until then, if you have anything you'd like to see in the new Directions of Destiny website and/or the Alatus website, or if you have any issues with or comments on the current layout, comment back and let me know!!

It's been a busy week, and it looks like it's gonna remain that way until next Wednesday at least, but I feel like lately I've finally been getting a better hang of managing my time properly. My room's actually pretty orderly and clean right now, which is to say that I'm not dying I guess.

A long, long time ago I made the emblem for the Alatus Institute using just pen and rulers and stuff, and scanned that into the computer and somehow vectorized it using some shady freeware that I managed to find that automatically converted it for me. Of course, the nature of shady freeware that automatize tasks that require the intuition of a real live human being meant that the same vector file I've been using since 2002 or whatever has been fundamentally flawed, and me being a vector dummy did nothing about it.

Usually the logo was either small enough or obscured enough that I think most people probably didn't notice how crooked and crappily-made it was (or did they??), but it's always bothered me nonetheless. SO, one of the first things I did when I actually learned how to work with Illustrator (other than the Slime Mansion logo) was re-vectorize the Alatus emblem! Properly!

Woo new emblem woo silky smooth mmm!

...E-except when I showed my friend Tina, she commented on how the old emblem looked more organic while the new one felt a bit sterile. :< Ohwell. So now I've got some hand-drawn renditions of the emblem that I'm working on instead. 8D() I'm thinking that ultimately I'll probably end up with maybe three versions of the emblem: the current new one, a simplified one, and a hand-drawn organic-looking one. And I guess I'll just alternate between the three on a case-by-case basis?

ramblerambleramble I'm going to bed good night XO

...Happy Birthday Azalea?