Happy New Year! If I had to pick one word to describe 2012, it would be "extreme". There were a lot of extremely awesome things that happened, as well as couple of extremely crappy things.

Anyway, Slightly Damned updates will resume as normal starting tomorrow. If you're looking for the holiday comics that used to be in the archives, check the Monster Hive website: http://www.monsterhive.net/ Personally, I hate it when people live filler and fanart in their comic's archives. It makes reading through them such a pain in the butt.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, guys! From Christmas Day until the 30th, there will be an update with a new page from Monster Hive's 6-part comic collaboration about a mysterious holiday party.

Fern & Cal from Grayling, by Arby (page 1 & 5, overall script)
Joe & Gaia Cow from The Good Life, by Glaucus
Frim, Ra'aj, & Jinjo from Within a Mile of Home, by Rx3 and Cei (page 3)
Locke, Shaela, & Kaia from Lunavis, by Pompolic (page 4)
Eldora & Akiara from Messenger, by Bugbyte (page 6)
... and of course, Crunky, Cliff, and Duster from Slightly Damned, by yours truly (page 2).

No matter what holidays you do or don't celebrate, here's hoping you're all having a wonderful time. Cheers!

2012 has been one hell of a roller coaster ride, and I'm beat. I'm taking a break from the main Slightly Damned comic until January 2, 2013.

This doesn't mean that I won't be drawing or doing other stuff. In fact, my friends and I are working on a holiday comic that will run around Christmas. I'm just feeling a little stressed out and I want some time off from worrying about the comic. See you guys in the new year! ...Assuming we all survive the apocalypse on the 21st, that is.

A reader asked me for some art advice and I typed out whatever came to mind. I decided to share it here:

1) If you want to draw better, you must love to draw. You must love to draw because you need to do it as much as you can, as often as you can, wherever you can. The only way to get better is to draw. Don't worry about making things look good all the time, just draw to get used to drawing. For example, I usually doodle when I'm waiting in restaurants, and I used to draw in the margins of my notes and homework when I was in school.

Famous animator Chuck Jones once said, "You've got a million bad drawings in you; you better get started.” in reference to new artists and animators. There really are no shortcuts. You have to draw all the time. I don't bother to upload half of the stuff I draw because it's not worth it-- I just draw to draw.

2) Practice sketching using long, unbroken strokes. Not the scritchy, precise, little lines stuff. Doodle. A lot.

3) Learn to understand what you see from real life and draw what you see, not what you think something "should" look.

4) Experiment. Make mistakes. If I spent all my time trying to fix all the things I see wrong in Slightly Damned pages, I'd never move past the first page. Just keep moving; nothing is perfect. There are things you will only learn from doing, and you'll never be able to even see the flaws in your work if you don't move on in the first place.

5) Read tutorials and real anatomy books. Not that "How to Draw Manga" or "How to Draw Furry" crap. Those are mostly useless and will teach you how to replicate someone else's "symbols"-- how they interpret real life, not how you interpret it. Disclaimer: Imitation CAN help when you're learning to draw something new and difficult, but you don't want to depend on it.

I recommend Posemaniacs.com, books on animation (even if you aren't animating, they will help you make your characters look alive), Scott McCloud's Making Comics, and any art books.

6) Break complex forms into simple shapes to give them volume. There are literally thousands of drawing books and tutorials that can explain this better than I can. It's very important.

7) Look for other people's advice. There may be someone out there who disagrees with everything I have to say, so look for inspiration everywhere. Use deviantArt, use Tumblr, or whatever. Absorb and reflect on as much as you can.

...These thought aren't very well organized. I haven't made any tutorials for anatomy or page design because I do things very inefficiently and wrong; I don't want people to copy me and learn to do things in a way that could stunt their growth. So use these nuggets as a starting point, not the end all solutions-- investigate what I said and find tutorials, books, and rants from artists who actually know what they're doing. Figuring out what's valuable and what's bullshit is all part of the neverending process of improving your artwork!

The comic is late (again), but you can watch me work on it and the next page here: http://livestream.com/slightlydamned

Featuring: Michelangelo by Playmates, Figma Link by Max Factory, and Crunky by Zoogenesis

I'm participating in this event as an artist! Please come by to donate to the Red Cross to get discount drawings!

I've got some bad news for you guys: there will be no new Slightly Damned pages this week. Maybe there could have been if I were the responsible type and had a buffer, but I'm not, so I don't. Anyway, there are two reasons why I'm not going to be making any new Slightly Damned pages this week:

1) I'm making an emergency visit to California to see my grandpa. He was recently diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. I originally planned to visit him after Anime Kaigi this weekend, but my dad urged me to see him sooner rather than later. So I'm making the trip BEFORE the convention.

2) Anime Kaigi is this weekend, and I'll be there Saturday and Sunday. It's a very teensy con, but it'll still be a time- and energy-consuming affair.

I'll still try to work on commission stuff and Soprano of Time this week, but I'm not sure how much I'd actually be able to get done. I don't want to make any promises I can't keep, so I'm being up front with you guys. I don't have time for Slightly Damned right now. I'll probably be able to get back to work next week, though! Then things can proceed normally.

Sorry guys, I was just too burnt out to make another comic this weekend. Maybe if I'm feeling up to it, I can make up this missed page! But for now, I just need rest. Expect a new page by Wednesday.

Filler graciously provided by Bugbyte. Go read her comic, Messenger!

Why is the comic uncolored? Well, it's because my main laptop's charger broke. And since my laptop has a battery life of about ~10 minutes, that means it's currently unusable. Until my new charger arrives either today or tomorrow, I have to use my old laptop, which is slow and has antiquated art programs. And because I don't have access to the color pallets I used for the other comic pages, I'm not confident I'd be able to make it look consistent if I tried to color the page. That and this computer is slow as hellll and it's driving me a little crazy.

Anyway, I didn't want to slow down the story or anything, so here's the lineart (which was difficult but possible to do on this old machine) and the dialogue, which will remain unchanged when I actually finish this page. I'll finish this page later when I can, promise.

There will be no updates this weekend because I will be attending Saboten Con and will have a booth in the Artist's Alley with my fellow MonsterHive members Arborwin and Rurik. If you see me at the con, just ask me what Rhea noticed and I'll tell you! The rest of you will just have to wait.

From the ashes a new phoenix fire bee is born. Slightly Damned's community has now been absorbed into a new consolidated community that includes of all Monster Hive comics. That means we have a new forum and a new IRC chat channel. Discover new comics and new comrades!

The new forums are located here: http://www.monsterhive.net/forums/
It's a new forum with a clean slate, so all the old topics are gone and you have to re-register. BUT we do have backup copies that my friend and fellow hive member bugbyte may be able to access to dig up old posts. If there's something you really need to see to continue your roleplaying or whatever, you have one week to request a salvage. More information is in the appropriate thread.
(Registration required to see the whole forum.)

The new chat channel can be accessed through this info page: http://www.monsterhive.net/irc.html

Note: because we have a completely clean slate, that means all bans from the past are gone. We're starting completely anew. We're also doing our best to keep the place as friendly as possible (...while keeping it PG-13, of course), so this is a great opportunity to use a second chance to make a fresh start.

The Hive is also planning to have a "Chat with Hive" event in about a week. It's like the "Chat with Chu" events in the past, except you'll get to talk to every creator of every hive comic. We still need to work out the details about when we'll meet, but I expect it could be as soon as next weekend and it will be at least 2-3 hours long. Although if you come into the chat today, you just may find some hive members!

The first Slightly Damned book is finally on sale at IndyPlanet!  I know the price is a bit steep and it takes a while, but that's what happen when you have a print-on-demand title that's as big and colorful as this book!  Believe me, the book looks great!

Here's the link to its IndyPlanet listing: http://indyplanet.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=7433 Yes, they ship internationally!
If you want to see a video of what it looks like on the inside, I have one here on Flickr (although it's a video of the flawed first book, they are practically the same thing): http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_chu/7491808324/in/photostream

I'm a complete idiot.

So here's the story: I finally got the book done, and I sent in the digital files to the printing company I'm using for a proof. Because of the way this printing company works, they do not provide free proofs-- I have to pay for each one out of pocket. So I get the first proof and I realize I can't sell it because it's missing a page (the first half of this comic: http://www.sdamned.com/2007/03/03182007/), there are some typos, and there are some minor things I felt I could rearrange. No big deal; I fixed the problems and sent away for a second proof.

Too bad I'm an idiot!

I got a message yesterday saying that the second proof was shipped to me. As I was gleefully punching in the information to sell the book on IndyPlanet like I said I was going to do WEEKS ago, I realized that I had accidentally included a duplicate page in my files. This mistake actually showed up the first time, but the printing company caught it, told me about it, and fixed it. In my negligence, I put the mistake back in. The printing company didn't ask me about it this time, so I assume they were like me and didn't catch it a second time.

So now I have another dud copy of the Slightly Damned book heading my way, and I have to delay the release of the book on IndyPlanet for another few weeks. It doesn't take me weeks to fix the errors, but it does take the printing company a while to check the files, send an invoice, receive payment, print the book, and ship it to me (at which point the book is safe to sell).

What can I say? I'm an idiot, and I should have been more careful. But there's no use crying over spilled milk. I'm just going to have to try again. I should receive the second proof by the end of the week, at which point I will check it over carefully and take note of all the mistakes I find. Hopefully it will only be the duplicate page, which is a simple fix. Then I will re-submit the correct files and start the process all over again and wait until I can finally sell a decent version of this stupid book on IndyPlanet.

In the meantime, I'm looking into selling the dud proofs. Not to make a profit, but in order to offset some of the cost of ordering them. I've already begun talking to one of my good friends (Shardith, who also happens to be working on page transcriptions) about selling her one of the crappy versions. If you're interested in buying one of the flawed proofs, drop me a line. I'll sell the book at a reduced price and sign it for you with a personal thanks. EDIT: Two crappy books, two good Samaritans willing to buy them already! I’m rescinding my offer for now, but will put it back out there if this falls through.

tl;dr I screwed up the book twice and now its sale date is being pushed back further. Maybe it'll show up on IndyPlanet in mid-August, I dunno. I'll announce it on my journals, the news box, on Twitter, etc. when it's ready so don't bother checking and re-checking IndyPlanet for it.

Commissions are open for July!
:iconcom-open:
I will only accept 10 orders this month, and orders are only considered accepted once I've told you.  It's first come, first serve!  Who knows-- I don't know if I'll actually get 10 orders, but don't hesitate if you've been wanting a commission for a while.

Also, check this puppy out:

Yup, that's right!  The new Slightly Damned book is almost ready!  You can also get a sneak peek at what it looks like inside in this video: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_chu/7491808324/
I just have to make a couple of tweaks, but it should be up for sale on IndyPlanet by this weekend.  It's about time, eh?