Hosting, a new style, and comics, oh my!

Over the last three years, the amount of pay work vs. personal works has definitely tilted heavily in the direction of the former. With less time being spent on exploring new styles, furthering my fundamental skills, and, really, full creative freedom, I’d been feeling a little boxed in.

In an effort to combat that feeling, I started Stylus. It’s an art forum by and for illustrators, designers, and other creatives. I’ve even introduced a little bit of writing into the mix over there, but more on that later.

The forum took off prety well. We’ve got a close-knit, if relatively small, group of people sharing techniques and getting better because of it. That success came with a bit of a price, on two fronts. Stylus and this site have been getting a ton of traffic. With the video blog having been published, my host got hit sort of hard. I hadn’t planned on it, so there are some bandwidth overages to deal with as a result. No big deal, but it did dull my excitement towards rapidly publishing a second video blog. I have over six hours of video to edit and share, but I need to migrate the site to a new host first.

Luckily, I won a contest at The Little Chimp Society that offered a free year of hosting at Gimur (Unlimted bandwidth and disk usage for around $50 a year, not too shabby). I haven’t migrated my existing sites (namely Stylus and this one) over, but I did start the wheels turning on a creative writing/podcast sorta deal that I should have more info on soon.

In addition to Stylus being an outlet for more creativity and less commercial work, I am starting a comic collective endearingly titled Slime Racket. Several friends have come on board and comics should be getting published there weekly. Yay.

Last, but not least, I’ve been experimenting with a rougher spot coloring system. I really wanted to come up with something that would allow my inked lines to stand out a bit more, not being overpowered by the volumetric lines as halftones I typically employed in the colored bits. This style of coloring is pretty established, so it’s not as if I discovered some great new thing, but I did manage to find a way to easily replicate it in Manga Studio, which is typically my weapon of choice. Double yay. There isn’t much that makes me happier than slamming Manga Studio against the wall and forcing it to do things it was not intended to accomplish, heh.

Here’re some images created using this new technique:

Whew. See now, it may have been a little while between updates, but I’ve been busy! I don’t intend to entirely ditch my old style of coloring, but rather to try and explore as many of these individual techniques for providing a unique texture as possible, all the while retaining the old ways of doing things. I just want to incorporate the rough edges in a smart manner in the future. Like, for instance, on shrubs, brick, concrete… You get the idea!