Nut Has A Squirrel

I started reading The Order of the Stick a few weeks back.  I just finished reading all 451 current episodes.

The series is at a really great stage right now.  Right in the middle of a nice big war and now I have to wait for the new updates like the rest of the world.  Thanks goodness for RSS.  I’m subscribed.

I read somewhere that the art work had gotten much better as the story progressed.  I didn’t even notice it while reading them one after the other.  But if you look at the first episode and the last, the drawing is definitely tighter.

The story however has stayed consistently amazing throughout.

Now I need to go find another good one to start following.  Any suggestions?

I have a few ideas for a couple medium length or longer comics. Before I start working on them, though, I want to learn how to draw some things.

One of the stories I’m poking at has a wolf for a main character and will take place in a castle; neither of which I can on my own.

So, I went to Flickr to find some examples to practice with.

Here are my practice wolves:

 

 

Here is the castle:

 

I have the printouts that has the Flickr URLs and I’ll add them tomorrow when I get back to where the notebook is.

I spent about 10 minutes on the first page, 5 minutes on the second page and another 10-15 minutes on the last page. In the end, I think there is some hope of drawing well enough to keep myself happy with the comics. I really like the basic style of that second wolf picture and the bottom two wolves in the first picture.

I guess the next step would be to plot out the story and try to design up some quick thumbnails to get a better idea of everything I will need to draw. Then I’ll spend some time practicing those elements by using a whole bunch of reference material like the Flickr pictures, trees outside the house, etc.

Pretty cool.

I’ve also decided that while I really like the concept of the digital drawing pad that I bought, I will probably be better off drawing on paper and scanning until I get more comfortable with my technique before I switch to electronic drawing.