moving on

Today, my worst nightmare came true.

Over the past week, not everything was right in my life.

It all began last weekend when after trying to climb up the stairs, my dog Jack collapsed and I screamed. I screamed because I had never seen lose energy like that before. A few days prior, we had known not all was well with him. We thought he had a cold.

The week went by, we noticed there wasn't much improvement. Yesterday was the perkiest I had seen him in a long time. He was barking and waging his tail and letting us know "I'm fine. Things are OK."

How wrong he was.

I went to sleep at about quarter to 4 last night.

I was woken up at about half 2 this afternoon.

Heart murmur, kidney and liver failure.

And that was it.

It was approximately half 1 when he was put into sleep.

He would've only had gotten worse otherwise. That wouldn't have been right. Why should he have to suffer like that?

But I am utterly heartbroken. I'm numb. Shocked. I haven't stopped crying since I woke up. My eyes are constantly filled with water. My head hurts. I haven't eaten. Nothing is the same right now. Nothing feels right at this point in time, and it won't for quite some time.

This dog was perhaps one of the most special things to have ever happened to me.

I was in 2nd year in secondary school when we adopted him. I like to mark that time we got him as a time when my life would get amazing, as prior to that I had not so good times.

And it did. It only got better and better.

I am so happy to have had you, Jack, in my life. I'll treasure every moment I had with you. And the great inspiration you gave me will never fade.

I always feared this day. Of course it was going to happen, but you never want it to.

I just... don't know what else to say...

I only wish I had given him one last hug...

One last kiss...

Jack, we love you so much.

Always.

vision

One thing I've been focusing on lately is my vision. I realised how premature a lot of things were and still are, and in the meantime I've been developing things like never before. Characters I have half planned, scenarios and locations that were just a blurred image in my head are starting to become more clear and concise.

It leaves me wondering... where and when is the best time to start Triggs' story properly? 

This question both excites and scares me. But I think... I think I'll know just when. I'll know when the moment is right. For now, the further development process is becoming more enjoyable the more I've progressed. Everything is a constant journey. Where's the fun at arriving to be honest? The fun is the journey itself...

Galaxy visualisation #1

I've been getting stuck into developing a lot of things recently - landscapes of planets, technology, races, and other things. And so more concept art like this will ensue over time.

The top one is a first glance of the Venus landscape. Heavily fictional, it's the home to the all-female, botanical Venusian race - hence the planet is overgrown with all unusual flora and fauna.

The second one is rough idea of the look of the Intergalactic Police Squad HQ, developed on a bit from the following sketch:

So this October! Right. VERMILION is a year old. 20 pages, wtf is happening. I'mma try do something for that sweet date of the 24th. I'mma try...

VERMILION reschedule

what are leg physics amirite

Okay, so I've had to rethink my game plan with VERMILION, now as I'm also writing a Spirou fan comic which is very close to my heart.

So it's gonna go down like this: I'm gonna write both comics in rotation. What's that mean exactly? Well, it means every 2-3 months, I'll give my attention to one comic and work on 5 pages of that and upload them once complete. Then, I'll do the exact same with the the other comic for the next few months, and upload them in bulk.

This was the fairest way I could think up of to produce both comics. Sure, the waiting time is gonna be a lot longer, but for each upload, you get more pages! 5 pages man! Now to me, that doesn't sound too bad.

Now of course with the summer holidays, time has been more generous to me. Of course, once college starts in September, it's gonna be a bit tricky. But that'll just mean I'll hafta plan my time carefully and keep some drawing energy reserved for these two ventures.

But luckily, I just finished the first 5 pages of my fan comic (which, you can check out here, if you'd like!), which means I'll be back to resuming VERMILION very shortly! And you'll get a nice big update within a month or 2.

My apologies for not haven't updated in quite some time, but hopefully now, things will be updated more steadily. :D

Martians

Probably the species that's been bugging me for the longest time, I think I've finally envisioned what I want Martians to look like.

(the grey ones are from my hardcover sketchbook, unable to scan I'm afraid!)

Looks like we're going avian with this. And taken from that old quote, "men are from Mars, women are from Venus", this'll be an all male race too. I look forward to developing this race more.

Facebook, pomegranates and an omake arcade...

   Hey everyone! Summer's here! And I have finished my first year in college. I enjoyed it so much and it was a fantastic experience, but it went too fast. But anyways I have a summer of comicking ahead (and maybe potential employment, gotta wait and see...).


   First off, I'll like to share with you, this! The Triggs fan page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SpaceOfficerTriggs


   So if you would like to like, that would be incredibly appreciated. I need to sort out some of these networks I have, in regards to the content I release on each...
I post a lot of Triggs sketches on my personal tumblr, but I'm in the process of revamping the tumblr I made specifically for Triggs stuff.


   Perhaps I may release certain content on certain networks... perhaps things just for FB and things just for tumblr, I'll need to sort this out somewhat...


and fix up this blog a bit more. Oops.


   When I say I have a summer of comicking... I mean it. I may be going off on a tangent, but as I continue to write VERMILION, I'll be in the process of writing another comic...

Well goodness, what's this? Yep. It's-a Spirou.

   I've decided to take the leap and write a full out, unofficial fan album of Spirou et Fantasio. Non-profit of course. Just a labour of love.


   You can click on the cover above to read more about it. So I'll admit, this may slow down updates on VERMILION. But I can assure you, I'm gonna work my hardest to bring you both of these comics. I'm going to draw up the next few pages of VERMILION and build up another buffer for myself, so updates will continue over the summer.


In the meantime, I'll leave you with a little omake arcade, based off the Stargazing prose and illustration, with dialogue written by ~FlairCube on deviantART, and doodled by myself on drawr.

prose: Stargazing

“It’s way better up here than down below.” The pale-lilac armoured robot tilted her head up towards space, as she sat - lounged out against the rough, concave wall of the crater.

“What do you mean?” The darker blue armoured robot replied, standing near the centre of the crater - looking back at his female counterpart.  

“The stars, the hovercrafts… you can just see everything from here.”  

They both looked up unto the heavens, taking in a moment of pure silence that lingered on the moon’s surface. They were outside the colony’s barriers, roaming free on the un-inhabitant parts of the Earth’s moon. To humans, the silence outside a habitable atmosphere would be too surreal for their likings. To these robots, it was nothing short of another characteristic that made up the universe.  

Except for the hovercrafts which drifted left and right across the celestial chicane, everything felt oddly lifeless. Technically speaking, the fur-coated robots were lifeless too, if all for only their batteries, with energy surging through every wire and fibre optic vein in their artificial interiors. Yet, they could still appreciate the majesty of those twinkling dots of hydrogen and helium thousands upon thousands of light years ahead of them. And the neon dots that zipped right past them at blistering speeds, just a couple of hundred miles away.

 “You’re right, Leonie. You don’t get this view on Earth, that’s for sure.”  

“Not at all. Earth’s too illuminated… I wonder has space travel also lessened their appreciation of looking at the stars?”

If there was one thing that fascinated Triggs about Leonie, it was how she questioned things. She was all the more curious than he was, and it set his mind into deep thought. Not that he himself wasn’t curious; both of them were new to this world. Leonie asked herself things, and it wouldn’t matter to her if she found out now or never at all. Triggs, on the other hand, would become so engrossed with even the tiniest, trivial riddles that he would stop at nothing until he found out their meaning. 

 

Bearing in mind, with their line of duty, that was a good trait. But for everything else, it was a burden to be weighed down with unanswered inquiries.

(So, I tried writing for once. A refreshing change of pace I must say. But I'm no *insert name of great author here*. Yeah, I really don't read novels hardly.)

Whip It

I got a hold of Imagine FX Game Art magazine and Science Fiction Art by Geoff Taylor this weekend, and it gave me a huge urge to just go fecking mental.

Here's some progress:

The title came from a track from Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded. I've been basically addicted to what I've been hearing so far.

Progress...

How's it going? Well, on this end, the spring cleaning isn't going too badly... cleared out some old entries and it gave me a chance to clear out my album in Picasa to make room for more comic pages. Not that I was running out of space or anything, but it's always nice to get back more space. Felt refreshing too.

Also, I still can't get my head around making a decent background for this blog. Ugh, resolutions n' crap.

Anyways, here's a new illustration. I've got a feeling for calligraphy pens lately and they're after becoming my preferred choice for inking my comics with. I whipped up the lines for the above illustration yesterday, 5.0 calligraphy pen on the reverse of watercolour paper, after which, I went out and bought two more pens.

It's funny how it came to be. I just found an old calligraphy pen lying around in my room one day, having no knowledge of where it came from. Later that day, I went on to experiment with it.

I'm just really fond of how I can vary the lines with these pens, just like I can vary them when I ink digitally.

So that is my new medium for producing the inks for my comic. Also, I find doing it out in landscape format works more in my favour too. I can get a lot more panels per page and combine pages together to make a nice, lengthy page. More story, more progress. Hopefully.

Triggs' 3rd!

Happy Birthday Triggs!

Yep, the little guy is 3 years old now. Hard to think it's been that long.

Anyways, celebratory picture! I made it big enough to be a wallpaper... dunno if it'll fit most. This is approx. my res, so... if you like this enough that you want it, gimme a shout and I'll upload a suitable res for you.

So, just to recap... I can't remember if I've posted the very first sketch I've ever done of him here before. Just in case...

Holy mother. Oh god. OK. So you see my point.

I mean holy crap.

So there we go.

---

Word on VERMILION for a wee second... yeah, so we had an update in the first week of January.

Unfortunately, college work has begun to kick my ass again and my arm is once again in pain.

So it's forcing me to rethink my plan for this... how I go about drawing it out.

I've come to realise that I'm more pleased with my sketch comics than anything else. I could use my left hand, but also make them neater... and they wouldn't take that long to do....

mmm, I don't know

I'm just in a very concerned frame of mind again where I need to look after myself first before all else.

I shall see... in the mean time, not sure when there'll be an update next. Sorry about this.

Happy New Year!

Things have been a bit on the quiet side, due to lack of VERMILION updates and so forth. But with the holidays and other pending work needing to be done, it's times like this updates might get irregular. But I hope not too much.

But I have a few things to share with you for the first update of 2012! Some working in progresses of an upcoming painting...

 

Please don't ask why Spongebob is there.

Please. Just, don't.

Anyways, I do have some sort of deadline for this painting. For myself, and Triggs, at least...

15th January

the little guy's gonna be 3 years old

geez, how time flies since randomly sketching concepts for a robot dog ninja.

You heard me.

Also, Triggs has a tumblr. Like, it's his own. He may be onto something regarding time travel or something? Who knows.

Check it out: space-officer-triggs.tumblr.com

Let's hope 2012 will be the year of bigger and more awesome things to come!