Waffle

Drawing that just popped up in my head the other day, after talking to Aggie about the economic crisis. Of course, after the drawing pops up in one's head, one has to do the hard work of drawing it - including research for things like wheelbarrows full of money.

When I googled for "Wheelbarrow full of money", I noticed something interesting. I expected to get only images of the German hyperinflation of 1923, but instead got a whole bunch of stock photos and illustrations showing succesful, wealthy, smiling people pushing wheelbarrows full of cash. I guess because the US has never experienced hyperinflation (yet), they associate wheelbarrows full of cash with wealth rather than with the collapse of a financial system resulting in poverty for large sections of the population. I have never personally experienced hyperinflation (yet) but to me as a somewhat historically educated European, the image of a wheelbarrow full of cash is not a happy one. Thinking about this has made me want to do more art relating to money, the lack or oversupply of it, and the different cultural assumptions and constructs surrounding it. There'll be more nekkid people in it, either to sugarcoat the theme, or because they've just lost their shirts.

Update: This drawing is now for sale through my Comicspace galleries. You will need to sign up with Comicspace to be able to see it (to certify that you are old enough to look at nipples) but the process is easy and does not result in you getting spammed. If you don't want to buy it that way, though, you can also e-mail me and buy from me directly. Price is set at $100 - not exactly a bucketload of money.

I have also made it available as a Print via DeviantArt, in a range of formats and at the default prices. There, too, you'll have to sign up to view and order.

Using uninked pencil art, like I've done on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan for the past three weeks and on American Gothic before that, saves me some time, but not as much as you would think. The time savings don't come from skipping the inking and colouring phases - all the effort that used to go into inking and colouring (keeping in mind that DFG has been doing the colour flats on my comics for almost two years now) now go into the final pencil line art and the grey pencil tones.

The time savings that I do get come from a) simplifying the process so there is no longer a separate Photoshop colouring stage after I get the colour flats back from DFG, and b) the elimination of wet media accidents, which I'm very prone to. The comic creation process still takes a whole afternoon even if I cut corners in drawing backgrounds - a page full of close-ups is easier for me to do than one with lots of scenery or action, so that's the sort of pages I've been drawing. I am very envious of Aggie's ability to just knock out an American Gothic page in a few hours.

Last long weekend (a local holiday), I didn't get two pages of Feral done so there's still no buffer. The buffer for Invasion is running out already. Next weekend, I may end up not having an afternoon of uninterrupted drawing time. It's gonna be a bumpy ride, and it's only three weeks into my resumption of art duties on Feral.

One of the most infuriating things about Ubuntu is the way it will tease you with a system that recognises all your devices, like, say, an Epson GT-12000 A3 scanner, running from the LiveCD, beautifully, but when you actually add, say, an Epson GT-12000 A3 scanner to an installed system, it will make you jump through hoops and tear your hair out. I've installed the sane package (much to my surprise - I'd have expected it to come with the initial OS install, especially because a front-end was automatically installed at that time. Also, sane runs from the LiveCD) and the Avasys drivers that Epson recommends, to no avail.

Oh well... I'm sure I'll get there some day, and in the mean time, it won't kill me to scan from Windows XP for a few days.

My 2003 guest series for Fight Cast or Evade, People of the Sewer, has now been added to the archives at ROCR.net. Read it one page at a time or all sixteen installments as a giant vertical scroll.
It's almost a year since Fight Cast or Evade ended, and it's time I brought this story home. It's another affectionate parody of the fantasy clichés underlying so many fantasy/RPG webcomics, so I've archived it under Unfantasy. It's different from the other comics in that section of the website though, because it's a rare foray into Furry comics for me, and because it has a lot of poop-based humour. And haikus, but mostly poop. It's a yin-yang kinda thing.

Drawing those animal characters was a lot of fun for me back in 2003. I'd like to do that again some time.

If you're reading this on the ROCR.net front page, you're seeing the new site, hosted on Lunarpages. This has been one of the smoothest server moves I've ever been involved in, but there may still be some broken links here and there. Please use the comments to tell me if you see something badly wrong.

The old server on rocr.xepher.net will probably stay on air for a while - I haven't discussed this with Xepher yet. But please always link to http://rocr.net if you're linking to the comics.