A New Blog!

If I don't know you, well hai, my name's Rachel, Lady of Questionably Awful Doodles, Mistress of Dying Horribly in First Person Shooters, Queen of Pointless, Incessant Rambling.

Side effects of continuing to read may include headaches, nausea, swearing, confusion, lowering of IQ, eye pain, uncontrollable rage, stomach aches, stubbed toes, the urge to troll, amnesia and toothache.  The blogger does not claim to have royal blood from any family or be in a sexual relationship with a married man, but is in fact female.

If I do know you, it's probably because you've been looking at my previous blog in which case
You Are Awesome <3.

Anyhow, enough of that.  I've decided that since I have a bit of a rubbish track record keeping my old blog updated and tended to go on rambling whingefests on it, it would be nice to start fresh and organise myself.  And be happy! Pretend to be happy *sob*! ;_;    XD  And also stop abusing the text sizes.

With all that said, onto my real rambling.  I'm going to put it under little subtitles now, too  :D

'Tessereil' Webcomic Project Incessant Ramble

It's year 3 of college; the first 2 years covered a whole slew of smaller projects during which I was assigned briefs and guided by my two kind and fantastically sarcastic teachers.  Then year 3 happened, and No One Can Hear You Scream.  I talked all about my lack of ideas and my expertise in the complex art of Headdesking in my previous blog, but with a little help from my good friend Emma (if you don't know her, go find her here --> http://emmafriel.blogspot.co.uk  <--  and make your life complete) I have an idea now!

My original ideas I batted around were 1) Continue with my previous animation, 'Feathers of the Roc' and 2) Remake my old, incomplete animation which was just nicknamed 'Nidhogg and the Eagle'.  In digital 3D!  While I'm working on Feathers of the Roc anyway, I decided against the Nidhogg animation idea for various reasons... doesn't help that I'm not very experienced with 3D... but then found out that Emma was using 'Crumbs', the webcomic she's developing, as her project.

I guess I'd never really given it much thought, but now it really does make me feel stupid.  This isn't 'Animation' we're studying, this is 'Creative Practice'.  So why the hell not!  I've dabbled in comics for years but never stuck with them - I need a solid plan to continue a project over a long period of time and I never made one for these previous comics - but the idea seemed right.  I've got my 'personal work' that's been sitting on the back burner for years and has always been separate from my 'other work'.  I'd always wanted to DO something with it, but I've always worried about what kind of icy reception it could get.  The sad truth is, it's my baby.  I've grown to be precious with this personal project - and that is BAD.  It's bad because I know that I'll keep on fussing and tweaking it until the day I die and never get to do anything with it.  So, I've decided to be a bit rough with myself and do a webcomic out of it too - I get one more chance to finalise it, and then it's out.  If it works, great!  If it doesn't, well, tough cookies.

I've given it the working name Tessereil (working because I'm not sure how easily people would be able to spell it.  If I said Tess-eh-rale, would you come to that spelling easily or no?) and I'll be blabbering more about it later.  Run, run for the hills!

Eyeboggle Treat!

Just something I've found that I think should be shared!

The fantasy webcomic 'Strays' ( find it here! -->   http://www.straysonline.com   ).  I've really been enjoying this one.  Strays is a joint project of Samantha Whitten and Stacey Pefferkorn, who both write and draw it.  It follows the experiences of a young mysterious young girl called Meela, who meets a bounty hunter called Feral and tags along with him.  The story has a healthy blend of serious drama and lighthearted comedic moments, and both are handled very well.  As the story progresses a lot of elements of mystery come into play, even with our protagonist Meela.  The story proceeds at a brisk pace (maybe a little too fast, in my opinion, but that's only because I want to see more of the loveable characters) and has very few slow or dull moments.  The characters I find are all very likeable, even those who are close to the archetypes I usually dislike.  'Spunky, cheeky young child looking for company and tagging along with the badass' is usually annoying for me, but Meela is well characterised and stays far from this; I think it's probably because the writers aren't trying too hard to make her sympathetic, and she reacts in the way a child actually would.  She isn't overplayed for gags or made to be a solid recurring hindrance, and seems to suffer logical consequences of her actions, good and bad.  

The artwork is gorgeous.  It's drawn and coloured consistently great, characters are always posed interestingly, panel layouts and text arrangements are always clear and very easy on the eyes.  The thing I love about this comic the most is the characters' expressions - the expressions!  They're just so.  Insanely.  Good.  Have a flick through some pages and see.  Strays very, very rarely if ever resorts to the typical manga expressions to convey emotion in its characters (here's an example):

Now just let me say firstly that I just whipped this up from Google; it's a little page of very well drawn (and adorable) faces, and the expressions are cute.  The problem I find is that when people use these sort of expressions, individualism of the character can easily go clean out the window.  It's kind of boiling emotions down to simple cues like these takes away the complexity of the emotion you can convey using the character's actual face.  I like to see a character's actual face showing me emotion; using these expressions kind of feels like you're sticking this familiar manga face that doesn't quite belong to any character in particular over it.  Just my opinion, of course, but Strays gets big points from me for largely staying away from this approach.

Give it a look!

Youtube Favourites

This video's a little old now, but I recently rediscovered it and had to put it up here.  Everyone loves Richard!

...unless you're someone from that village...

PS. Read Looking For Group!