announcements: July 2010 Archives

Actually, I was planning on not doing the Tuesday sketch this week. I have a lot of work to do on the comics for Thursday and Max is going on vacation so I have to do Saturday's Hellcat Cosmos as well. But after my daily workout today I was in ore of a mood to sketch than I was to color, so I decided to give it a shot.

As always, I'm glad I did. 

I always like to give myself different challenges for the Tuesday Sketch. The first week I did my Wonder Woman sketch entirely on computer. The second week, I decided to draw with graphite sticks. This week, the theme was "Favorite Literary Characters." I couldn't decide which one I wanted to do, so I decided to do three. And I was going to draw three different sketches, I figured I'd have to quick sketch them all. 

It's actually really good practice. When you quick sketch, you have to learn to not care as much about technical precision. I gave myself about 10-15 minutes for each sketch and was watching TV while I did them so as to not pay too much attention. It was all gesture based and just getting the idea down on paper. I used graphite sticks again because I love them so much, even though I didn't do as much blending and such as I did the first time I used them.

In any case, here are the sketches. I have a great love for mythology and folklore. As such the literary characters I chose all came from classical fiction. Let me know what you think. As always, click the any of the images to see a larger version of them.

-Mav

∑8x)

 

So here's a funny story. When I wrote the current strip, I just told Max to draw a succession of sexy and silly outfits for Sarah to be trying on and I would write jokes for whatever he picked later. That's actually pretty common for Hellcats. We sort of collaborate. I write a basic plot, and then often I'll base some of the jokes off of whatever occurs to me with Max's art.

When Max sent me inked artwork, I was surprised to find out that he'd actually drawn her in a Wonder Woman outfit. The funny thing here is that if you've been paying attention to your comic book news, DC Comics actually decided to change Wonder Woman's outfit this week. 

I actually almost made a joke in the strip about Sarah choosing the outfit because Diana Prince wasn't using it anymore, but I opted out and went the way you see in the strip above. But I kept thinking about it.

Then while perusing Twitter this morning I saw that the website Area 51 comics was running a "redesign Wonder Woman" contest. The idea being that since DC was redesigning her outfit this month, it might be fun to see what other artists might do give the chance to do so as well. I thought it might be fun to give it a whirl. And I figured, while I'm at it, why not throw in a bonus Wonder Girl as well. (Cassie is one of my favorite comic book characters.)

I wasn't really thinking about what I was getting myself into. I used to paint and draw a lot. That's even initially what I went to college for (I eventually switched my major to creative writing with an art minor). But, I've more or less gotten out of practice the last few years. I've spent way more time writing than drawing. But as I said a couple weeks ago, I had so much fun picking up the pen again (and by pen, I mean Wacom Sketch Tablet) that I resolved to do it more often. Since I drew that Hellcat Cosmos by hand in Manga Studio I figured this time I'd give it a go painting the entire thing in Photoshop. I didn't really realize that I'd gotten so out of practice that it'd take me all day. 

No matter, I was resolved to do this dammit! It's not quite as good as I wanted, my pen control has definitely suffered due to atrophy, but I am relatively pleased with it. Especially since I did it freehand on the computer rather than drawing it on paper and only coloring on the computer (the way we normally do the comics). While not as technically proficient as I want, that's something I can work on. I'm certainly happy with it stylewise. If I get more time to practice with it and get to where I want to be, both speed and qualitywise, I'd love to maybe do a special edition comic this way. 

Some day maybe.

Anyway, for now, please enjoy some rare (well rare around here) non-Hellcats artwork. Let me know what you think. Oh, and much like the comics, you can see a larget version by clicking on the image.

-Mav

∑8x)

What's going to be there? Well, we're still figuring that out. We'll probably announce new comics and blog posts automatically, since that's easy and probably useful (though maybe not. We'll see how annoying it is) and Max and I will just tweet about anything else that comes to mind that doesn't warrant a full blog posting.

In addition, we've added "tweet this" buttons to every comic and blog post. This, along with the Facebook "Like" buttons should make it easier to share your favorite Hellcat strips with your friends. 

I'm also working on making it so you can use your twitter account to comment on the strip, just like I added with facebook accounts but that's not quite ready yet (and yes, I know the facebook one is still buggy. Working on it. Really I am). In the meantime, if you have any other suggestions for things you'd like to see here (or any of these changes that we've been making recently that you don't like), please comment and let us know (or email us at feedback@cosmichellcats.com). But for now, it's back to coloring tomorrow's strip for me. It'll be featuring Sarah and Fluffy, so come back in a few hours to check it out.

-Mav

∑8x)

  

First of all, I want to thank everyone who offered support back during my hard drive crash a couple weeks ago. And thank you for bearing with us through the problems and story interruption. As you can see we're back on track now, but I hope you enjoyed the little mini-saga in the Hellcat Cosmoses we posted during the outage. I certainly did, and it gave me a chance to draw them. Something I don't get to do nearly often enough and will have to try more often.

Second, we've aded the ability to look at the previous and next blog entries. This was always possible with comics of course, but I never bothered to do it before for the blog entries. That was just a silly oversight that's now been corrected. Now if only I remember to post to the Hellcats Blog more often that might really be useful. I've still never even uploaded the photos from Pittsburgh Comicon 2010. I really need to get on that.

Third we're now using Open Graph and Facebook Connect. For the non-technical among you, this means that Hellcats is now tied in to Facebook. Basically, you'll notice that every comic and every blog post now has a Facebook "Like" button on it. If you're a facebook member and you press that, it'll mark the post as liked on your facebook wall for all your friends so they can see it as well. It's a great way to support us here at Hellcats. So if you enjoy what you read here, then by all means press the button and help us out. Oh, and if any of your facebook friends come here, they'll see your photo under the comic recommending it to them.

In addition to being able to "Like" a post here, you may also use your Facebook account to comment on posts here. Previously you had to create a local account here to comment (you still can of course, and by all means, please feel free to). Just click "Sign In" on any comment page and choose "Facebook" under "Sign in using..." If you're already logged into Facebook, you'll just need to approve Hellcats as an application (you only need to do this once) and you're good to go. There's still some bugs to work out. For some reason all comments that people have sent in as Facebook users so far have been marked as possible spam. So I'm watching for them and whitelisting anyone who is trying to use it but for now I have to do this by hand. I'll be working on this more, but not tonight. And if anyone out there has any experience hacking Movable Type (especially the Facebook Commenters plugin) and has any insight they want to share with me, let me know. Oh, and if you try to comment and I don't approve it within a couple hours, feel free to email me and let me know so I can look for it. Also, you can leave comments using Yahoo.com Accounts and AOL/AIM accounts with similar restrictions. I hope to add Livejournal and Google in the near future but I was having problems with bugs there as well.

Oh, and comments are threaded now. You can reply to them instead of just posting everything in a row. It's not perfect, it's a little weird to use, you have to either sign in (or choose comment anonymously) to show the comment window first, and then you click the "Reply to this comment" link on the appropriate comment. The comment window is always at the bottom of the screen but it will tell you right above the window what comment you're replying to. It takes a little getting used to, but go ahead and try it out and let me know what you think.

We hope to be adding some more features in the near future. Like Twitter, more Facebook features and other goodies and hopefully I'll also be adding some more photoshoots with the girls. It's been way too long. So keep watching this space and in the meantime, I hope you've been enjoying the comic and please comment or send us mail and let us know. Oh, and if you haven't already, since we're talking so much about Facebook, please go and join our Facebook Fan Page over at http://www.facebook.com/CosmicHellcats.

And as always thank you everyone for all the support.

-Mav

∑8x)