#TimeAndAgainbyDWF

[dashawfrostart]

This Week In "Time & Again" #27: About Why Inkscape Is My Best Friend (Aside From Krita) [VERY Techy] 🎨

Before I begin today's tale about how Lothar The Nefarious is doing, I must make a small note: I, indeed, did some work on "Time & Again", but within the last week, I was mostly busy doing a TTRPG character sheet commission for a very good friend of mine. Truth be told, I pretty much never do commissions. I don't think I can ever live off art commissions. I don't like them, usually. Most of the time I pretty much hate them. This is why I have a day job: so that I don't have to worry about commissions and deadlines, and so that I could actually enjoy doing whatever I want with my art. But there might be exceptions sometimes. That was one of them. And it actually allowed me to learn more interesting and useful tricks in Inkscape to further improve my happiness with my favourite vectorscape software 🤗. But that's beside the point right now; we'll get to that shortly.

So far, the road to completion of Chapter 6 of "Time & Again" looks this way:

The writing and the script - ✔done (long ago)!

The storyboard (drawn with a pencil on paper) - ✔done!

The Vector Stage (panels arrangement for every page according to the storyboard in Inkscape) - ✔done!

The Lineart Stage (drawing everything in black and white as it will appear in the final release) - gonna be working on it right now!

The Colouring Stage (colouring the lineart for the final release)

The Post-Production Stage (cleaning up everything, perfecting the speech bubbles, SFXs, and polishing everything squeaky clean for the actual release)

And as promised in the previous post, I'll tell you more about how the work on The Vector Stage is going for me as I work on my visual stories. With Chapter 6 of "Time & Again" now, it was pretty typical and without hiccups.

But first - an important intermission. I wanted to be extra prepared for the future and decided to add bleed directly to my Inkscape documents. I remember trying to do the same earlier sometime, but it didn't get anywhere for some reason - must be, because I ran out of my steam of persistency. Why? - I don't know. Because it actually proved to be SUPER easy.

I opened one of the older pages from Chapter 5 and expanded it manually, placing a placeholder (what else do you think placeholders are for?! for placing, of course!!!) of the bleed area underneath the layers (needless to say, I made that placeholder in Krita). But instead of having a placeholder on every page, I wanted to have a thin outline of the bleed area, if possible. And it was, indeed, possible.

Page Tool allows you to set margins and/or bleed in a matter of a few clicks:

I think those screenshots are self-explanatory. As soon as you input your desired numbers (was defaulted to millimetres for me), very thin outlines appear right on the canvas to guide you: margins are outlines in blue, and bleed in red. Interestingly, if you're a fan of pixel math - just as I am - you can easily input your numbers in pixels, just remember to exchange mm with px as you type, for example: 100px instead of 100mm. And it will work. It will convert your pixel value into mm:

It might be a small thing, but I sure am fairly impressed!!! 😍 And I love it how simple and useful it is.

I believe, I never showed how I normally work in Inkscape. So here's the introduction. I make a document for each page and save it as a separate SVG. Just a few days ago I finally got to try out the multipage SVG feature as I worked on the character sheet - but in case with "Time & Again" and its severly overgrown Chapter 6 that will have 56 pages in total, I don't think that would've been useful to me. Useful to overwhelm me - yes, but not actually useful for work. As the work on each page starts, create 3 layers: one for the panel outlines, one for the speech bubbles, and one for the text. I look at my hand drawn layout of the page and try to reproduce it in Inkscape as close to my sketch/storyboard as possible. I open Inkscape on the right hand side of the screen, while my document with all the finalized voice lines of the characters goes to the left side. It might look confusing and messy (especially if the script is written in a weird way and with a lot of visual descriptors - such is the case with Chapter 6), but to me it's actually a wonderful, very ergonomic workspace organization.

(of course, I have edited out all the stuff you don't need to see yet - and Lothar's swearing. He's always swearing. You can easily identify which voice lines belong to Lothar simply judging by the amount of cuss in them 🤣)

I manually copy-paste every single line of text into my vector document, and then I rearrange them, change the font size, text alignment within the text box (which is, in 99% of the cases, center-aligned), etc. Then, depending on the circumstances and what I'm planning on doing, I might create speech bubbles on a separate layer as well - but for Chapter 6 so far I haven't done that.

"Halt!" exclaim you. "Why do you input text lines right away? Doesn't it make more sense to put them in after all the art is done?" Well apparently not for me. Contrary to what seems to be logical, I put all the text lines on my vector page layouts right away, during The Vector Stage, very early on. Before working on lineart. Because I need points of references for my art arrangements. Later on, the text boxes might be rearranged, scrambled, and shuffled yet again, and quite possibly not once. But I need to see the full picture with the text right away to see what I must tweak or, in worst case scenario, scrap completely. The latter doesn't happen VERY often though. That said, this regular way of work organization might be a moot point for Chapter 6. Chapter 6 is going to be soooo incredibly convoluted and unique (comparing to the previous chapters) in the way what it does with words and sentences that I might need to copy-paste all the text all over again later on. But again, let's hope it's not gonna happen 😁.

... And that's is all! Once all the vector work is done, I simply export all the 3 elements into the subfolder with the page number (I'll remind you once again: Inkscape now supports batch export of layers natively, because back then I actually had to do it all manually, turning the layers off and on repeatedly... I don't miss those days one bit 😱). I just gotta make sure I export everything with the right DPI.

Previously, when all the vector work was done, I used to export all the layers in PNG format to use in Krita later. This time though I tried to experiment with the vector workspace in Krita directly. It's important to mention that Krita is a software that's designed to work with raster images, not the vector objects - although it supports vectors, too. But of course that goes without a doubt that Inkscape IS the software to go when it comes down to an extensive vector work. Krita has only limited functionality and compatibility with vector thingamajigs... I must admit, Krita dev team did a simply AMAZING job throughout the years improving the functionality of the native vector tools. However, with my requirements, it's still not enough. Normally, I have to switch from Inkscape to Krita and back numerous times as I work on my pages of the graphic narrative. The true solution is the following: I need a unified Krita + Inkscape workspace!!! 😍 Especially when it comes down to text, for I like certain features that are available in one but not in another. Generally speaking, I always go Inkscape for everything vector including text, because it's just so simple and FAST to use. But Krita has a very valuable feature to make any font/text italic, which must be based off some global offset. Any font that does not have italic style can be italicized in Krita, but not in Inkscape. Back when I didn't have an italic version of my own comic font - Frosty's Comic Font - trying to italicize separate chunks of the text where needed was A NIGHTMARE. I am so happy got to finally complete my work on Frosty' Comic Font Italic. Now I don't have to rewrite certain parts of text in Krita just because Krita can italicize anything 🤣 Phew! (more in-depth about how I make my fonts you can read in one of my previous posts here)

But alas, nothing of this kind exists in the world, just as AI-powered smart tools to automatically recognize and flood fill the characters with proper colours... yet. But I'm happy, and I'll take what I could get now - all to move forward in the development of the grandest project of my artistic life. And nevertheless, even with that in mind, I wanted to try to see how I could create "an illusion" of a Krita + Inkscape Fusion workspace through, perhaps, trying to import SVG objects right onto my Krita canvases. To see what happens. And so far my experience has been... interesting and enriching 🙃

So, as for intercompatibility between Krita and Inkscape goes, let me illustrate something.

In Krita, you can import an SVG file into your KRA file, and the vector objects are actually gonna be interactable. As you can see on the screenshot above, the panel outlines - which are simple rectangles with a stroke of a specific thickness and colour - work fine and look as intended. However, the text boxes are cut off. I have read about the possible incompatibility between Krita and Inkscape text objects. People wrote about some weird behaviours on Krita forum. Supposedly there's a plugin for Inkscape called InkSync (link from Krita forum here) that is designed to help improve text compatibility between the two programs - but alas, after playing with it so far, I, unfortunately, was not able to produce any useful result. Inkscape allows for an automatic text wrapping inside the text box (which I use all the time) - a feature that Krita does not support. I assume that might be a reason as of why the parts of text are being cut off, because if the text only occupies a single line, then it seems to be totally fine with Krita. I was able to prove that as I worked on the character sheet. And because I really need these very nice and advanced text editing tools from Inkscape for my project, then Inkscape is going to be my software of choice for now. I'll keep importing my text in PNG format to Krita for now - when it's complex.

Aside from that, Krita vector tools are very useful and quite identical to those in Inkscape. I was able to neatly group and spread the numbers on my character sheet totally hassle-free. Which I am very happy about. That was a total success. Because the numbers and writings were short 😁

Another one nifty feature in Inkscape that I found thanks to a random post on the forum is how to split an object into a few equal parts... Using interpolation. "Wait," sayeth thou, "but that kind of functionality is, like, the basic stuff!" And right you are. Surely, it's easy to split an object in two only using Align & Distribute and Division functionality, because THAT is the basics... But when you need more than 2 with extreme precision... then you're in a pickle. The solution I provided a link to above that uses the interpolation tactic is super simple, fool-proof and incredibly useful. The screenshots below illustrate that.

Within the last few days I also added proper bleed areas to the page templates that were higher quality, namely the title page and bonus materials backgrounds, and the intro/flavour text page. Surprisingly, it took me significantly less time than anticipated. I've also completed 3 out of 4 inner cover designs. The most succulent - and disturbing - one is kept for later, just as a dessert. Yeeeegh... I can feel shivers running down my spine just thinking about that artwork (at times, I wonder what happens if I get to work on a horror videogame that I would not be able to handle mentally by myself... For some reason, all of my videogame ideas have at least a few horror elements in them. And I wonder sometimes if I'd have to hire somebody else to do the scariest art for my own game, LOL). The main cover arts are pretty much ready to go, too; I only wanted to add some wee tiny detail for some extra chic 🐤, although it's not really needed.

Everything looks quite good so far :). Moving on! And see you next time! 👋

P.S. Even though it's that time of the year again, and you would think I should be playing something like that now (which I have downloaded already), or something like that (which I still have yet to buy), or perhaps simply replaying the absolutely explosively gorgeous DBK Holiday Special that I beat last year and had a blast like never before🧨 - I don't exactly feel like it just yet. Instead, Unhinged 2 extended demo is on the top of my list of Christmas inspirations. I was a bit late to the Halloween release, so I'm trying to ketchup catch up now. Well right on, then. I'm super eager to relive it all over again. I hope I finally get to water that dying hand tree. I̸͚t͌͒̈́͢ f͙ȩ̺͛͟͞e̫̫̲͆͢l̨͖̭̙̓̽ͧs̩̈́ l̺͔̎̾̂i̶̖̠̪̳͆̈́k̡͎͙̄͗e͐ͨ̏̈ͫ̕ h̭̣o̴̷͉̎͝ṃ̾̉ͭ̊ě͉͓̟̎͠.̠̀̓ͭ Oh ya! And I'm seriously planning on trying to play The Sky May Be. Like, for real. "Why?!" you ask. Because I'm curious and very open to ridiculousness. I hope I figure out how to get it running on my PC 😁

[UPD 11/14/2024]: Sssssooooo I played The Sky May Be... I was not able to beat it legitimately, but the Blessed Engine was sure amusing 😁 It was definitely remarkable for its time.

[dashawfrostart]

These Two-And-Something Weeks In "Time & Again" #26: PAGE LAYOUTS ARE DONE!!! And Some Ruminations of Lothar And Myself

I think it's plenty fair to start off this blog post with a happy and important announcement right away! So here it goes:

All the vector page layouts for Chapter 6 are now complete!!! 🥳🥳🥳

And it only took me about a week and a half on and off to do the vector templates for ALL 56 pages (yup... Chapter 6 is gonna be a total monster in terms of the page count; don't tell me later that you haven't been warned 😁). That happy happening certainly marks a very powerful and resolute beginning of work on Chapter 6. It scares me and makes me joyful at the same time, because, as already mentioned in the previous post, Chapter 6 has the full potential to become the absolute best chapter in the series. That is... only if I make it this way 😉 Not to mention that Chapter 6 is the largest chapter of all by far. 56 pages, I said - that's without the cover arts, title pages, bonus materials, and all the extras. In the future, it might only get outclassed by the final chapter, Chapter 8 - but we will see about that. YOU ARE HUGE!1!!111!!!!!11!.. (ok, this joke is a little on the nose, just as the rest of my Doom jokes as well as some Solaire of Astora refs. I will try to come up with more creative jokes and refs next time 😅) With such a high page count, I foresee a giant, supermassive amount of work that lies ahead of my little hands that hold the stylus pen. But that was my choice. It's not that I didn't know what I'm up to. So right on, brotato!!! 💪🥔 (sometimes I don't know where my jokes and references come from... My brain just generates the weirdest and the most obscure stuff to entertain everyone around)

After GPop Culture Fair was over (and I still have yet to write a log post about it - soon*ish, I hope*!), and the things slowed down a bit for me, I was finally be able to take a breather, to sort through my thoughts and ideas as well as real life endeavours, and to finally to set the wheel in motion for Chapter 6 of "Time & Again". I am greatly satisfied. GPop made me feel rejuvenated after weeks of being covered in dust and spiderweb unable to move properly. It made me remember that my story is pretty cool and it's worth working on! It made me remember that I still kinda like Lothar, that fixated bastard. I am extremely determined right now.

Now... I wanted to write a more volumetric techy part about creating page templates in Inkscape, for I've never delved into that in my blog posts before - but I realize that not only I'm lazy to do it right now, but it will make the post grow twice in size. As usual. Which I don't want to do right now. So I'll save that for the next post that's gonna be very techy 😁 For quite possibly, by the time the next post will be ready to be published, I will only have little progress in art for the chapter, so there's not gonna be much to show off. So I'll save my story about how wonderful Inkscape is for another day 😁.

Onto the other, thought-provoking news regarding "Time & Again".

"But what and when is the sign of enoughness?"

asks Lothar at some point of time in Chapter 6, being painfully torn apart by his inner demons and countless thoughts on purpose of his - and perhaps everybody else's? - life and struggles.

I ask myself this question, as well - and pretty frequently lately. But my reasoning behind asking this question is completely different. Perhaps, I have written about it earlier somewhere here, in my blog, or maybe not. But I've been trying to logically work my way towards the answer to this question of the utmost importance - yet, alas, the answer in front of me is approximately as vague as the narrative in the Dark Souls series. And it's as shapeless as a chunk of clay that's been warmed up in one's hands but left untouched afterwards for a week or two... Or like Zhdun. It's safe to say that Zhdun is pretty shapeless, too - like a bean bag chair (in fact, I think it's a conspiracy: Zhdun is, indeed, a bean bag chair. I have one at home, and it's grey, too).

If you look at the art style progression through all the chapters of "Time & Again" released from 2021 to 2024, you will see I went down the simplification route. While Chapter 1 was overstuffed with incredible detail (that was, unfortunately, unnecessary), Chapter 5 features a simpler, more "flat" chiseled art. Part of the reason why it got simplified is merely because I work alone, and it's not rewarding to go for full-on meticulous details absolutely everywhere, not to mention it doesn't have any significance for the story itself whatsoever. Another part of the reason is it's most likely not even needed: I truly believe that in art one has to be sufficient, but not excessive. In other words, balance is the key word. And this is exactly when our question written in large letters come into play. What exactly is "enoughness" is what I'm trying to find out for myself. This answer will be applicable only to myself, my art style, and my artistic values. The answer to this question is in no way unified, and it's different for everyone. Once again, I will refer to my all time favourite meowsterpiece, Atlantis: The Lost Empire. I want to make my art in "Time & Again" - and in all of my subsequent projects, as well - to be sufficient but not excessive. With my tendency to draw too many details when I'm especially carried away with the process of creation, this might be a challenge. But it will take practice and determination to rewrite your own thought patterns to tailor your perfect art style. The most important thing here is to keep moving. I feel like Chapter 6 will be important in this respect. My experiment should lead me to a certain - perhaps not final, but still important - conclusion on the eternal question of mine as of how much is enough. I don't even think I can explain it in words - you'll have to see the result. And I want it to be stellar in my eyes. This will take a certain amount of consideration, but it's important for me to resolve. Thank you, Lothar. That was a very good question. Now get in the effing robot and put yourself together already. Hmpf! 😤

I have a lot of plans for the future - and absolutely not enough time to complete everything, LOL. (such is a life of a responsible adult, haha) I'm planning to finally make a stunning comeback on YouTube - that's why I've been recording some of my timelapses. And I also have a giant list of "Time & Again" related topics to talk about. Gotta finally build that Q&A section for this blog that I planned to do long ago. Well, there will be time and place for everything, I guess.

For a farewell, I'll write a couple things about some videogames I played recently for an inspirational/recreational kick. While waiting patiently [no, who am I kidding? I am anything BUT patient about this!!!] IMpatiently for Soul Reaver and Tomb Raider 4-6 remasters, this crazy bird nerd played some incredibly entertaining Itch games starring bird characters. Kiwi 64 was a charming game to play that instantly made me think of the good old games by Rare, and also Yooka-Laylee (I really gotta return to the second one someday... that's gonna be my third attempt already 😖 I 100%-ed the first one, and it was a blast through and through - which is impressive for me, because I never do completionist runs, EVER). I really enjoyed Kiwi 64. And I also played Toree 3D, made by the same developer. Being utterly terrible at platformers, I only completed the very base of the game and unlocked only one of the extra characters out of two - but hey, I had a lot of fun! That game plays incredibly well, and the controls are incredibly responsive. The only sad thing is that the game lacks information in the internet, and I have a lingering feeling that it has more lore in it than appears on the surface... But I cannot really decipher anything. Well, to better! - my attempts to understand it will keep me entertained for weeks! 😁👍

That's all for today! See you soon! 😁

P.S. The only thing I don't really get is why Soul Reaver remasters are released on Doom birthday... Oh well.

[dashawfrostart]

These Three Weeks in "Time & Again" #25: More Cover Arts, More Thoughts, More Everything - But NO MORE Legacy Editions! ☝

It's been a while since I posted the last update on how things were going with "Time & Again". A lot has happened. First and foremost, prep for GPop Culture Fair. Damn, I'm looking good I'm excited. Truly. I've never done anything like that before, and I'm beyond happy to be presented a wonderful opportunity to let everyone know about my crazy kiddos 😱. I want to make them famous!!! Because prep to GPop has been one of the biggest chunks of my artistic activities lately, there's not much to report on the matter, because, well, it's self-explanatory. The booth setup, decorations, designs, etc. I might post some photos later on if possible.

Now, friendly folks, here's the biggest news for today:

The Clean Cut Editions of "Time & Again" are finally available on GlobalComix and Itch.io to read and buy! 🥳🥳🥳🥂🍻🦆

(why is there a cute duck? I dunno. Because Frosty is a bird nerd, that's why 🙃 I have 4 birding apps on my phone; how many do you have? 😁)

Just a quick reminder: Clean Cut Editions of "Time & Again" are updated, slightly expanded editions of the graphic narrative that has been proofread anew, as well. Each chapter now comes with a special section of commentary, which is optional to read, for those of you who want to go down the "completionist" route and 100% all of these tiny little easter eggs and mysterious interconnections within the chapters 😁. It also contains some insight on the chapters' development. Here's the old announcement post for the Clean Cut Edition, if anyone's interested to refresh the memory.

Also as a quick reminder: legacy editions are no longer accessible. They're gone. Forever. And that makes me incredibly happy 😁 Because the Clean Cut Editions are definitely superior.

Might be necessary only to the most dedicated fans, but to clarify what kind of metamorphoses the chapters have undergone for the Clean Cut release, here's a little improvised list:

As already mentioned above, "Notes, Commentary & Hints" for every chapter as a part of bonus materials;

Chapter 4 has been expanded and now includes 2 extra pages of purest shapeshifting idiocy craziness (more about how I worked on that addition is in this post);

Chapter 4 now has a completely different epigraph that better matches the idea of the chapter and sets the tone for the story that awaits ahead (yup, I most certainly do not miss the old ridiculous one);

Some bonus materials have been rearranged or partially swapped to ensure the reader's enjoyment (especially in Chapter 4);

Extra SFXs have been added for the better impression and consistency;

The placement (and sometimes design) of certain speech bubbles across all first 4 chapters has been corrected to improve the looks; the text arrangement within the speech bubbles has been corrected accordingly, as well;

All the dialogues have been proofread, and the shameful typos are now removed (hopefully all of them);

Minor tweaks to art (unfilled pixels filled, missing detail added/modified, artist's epic fails corrected 🤦‍♀️, etc.);

... And some other, super minor stuff that was important to me to correct even though the readers might not even notice.

As you might've guessed, YES: that was a lot of work for me this year. And it was 100% worth it. I am happy.

The next important announcement for today is that I have completed the cover art for Chapter 6.2.

I cannot show it just yet, because it contains major spoilers to the story - so you'll have to wait a bit 😁

Now, onto a somewhat sad part. With all my life endeavours, and the fair preps, not to mention THAT TIME OF THE YEAR approaching (you know, the time that most retail workers as well as the buyers themselves seriously dread, lol!), it is becoming quite clear to me that it's very unlikely I will be able to finish my work on Chapter 6 this year. I probably will be lucky to finish up the lineart alone by the end of December... But as I said before, I don't exactly have them deadlines. And timed levels are my worst nightmares. Screw timed levels. So I'll simply do whatever I can 😁

My next objective in "Time & Again" Chapter 6 development is to draw all the panels and to arrange all the text boxes and speech bubbles properly on every page.

So, basically, the main body of work on the chapter starts from now on. And that is going to be... an adventure. Yup. Because Chapter 6 will be different. Oh so different. I truly hope it's gonna be the most creative chapter of all in the series.

And before I wrap it up for today, I want to expand on some techy stuff that I touched in the previous post. I mentioned that creating a timelapse video through Krita Recorder produces an odd flicker in random moments which makes the video highly unenjoyable. When I checked out the folder containing the snapshots, I've noticed that there are some files that are solid white with no art on them. Just empty white spaces. Manually deleting the weird white snapshots forces Krita to fail the conversion of the video; it doesn't automatically skip missing frames, it simply gives an error and, well, gives up on life. While I found no clue on the genesis of the empty white frames - seems that it's just a glitch in Krita for now - I have indeed found a resolution! 🥳 Unfortunately, it's not super straightforward and, to make it even worse, it requires some extra work on the artist's part (and the artist is already busy enough, but whatever will you do?.. everybody knows that the artist's life is very hard, lol). But it works!!! And let me tell you how! I came across this post on the forum that described the exact same issue I had. The comments below have a link to a GitHub repository that contains a handy tool called Rebecca's Krita Tools. What one must do is to simply follow the instructions to install the plugin (BTW, I've never installed plugins directly from GitHub before! That's super handy!). After that, you head directly to the location of your recording snapshots, and you have to manually go through all the snapshots to remove the white empty files. After that is done, run the script called Reorder Image Sequence in Krita, select the folder that contains the snapshots - and MAGIC HAPPENS! The frames are all renamed, and you can create a timelapse now! Without flicker and epilepsy warnings!

... So I manually went through all the 11300 frames of the recording I made when working on Chapter 6.1. cover, and then I did the same for the next one.

My workspace for the manual clean up looked approximately this way:

Cool, eh?! EH???!!! I will repeat again: there were 11300 frames that I had to manually look through, with my very own set of eyes. I will brainstorm a way to automate this process somehow in the future. That's why, I think, we need help of AI - for the situations like that that require little to no real creative involvement, for techy stuff that might be difficult to do programmatically and/or manually. To help the artists deal with annoyances faster, so that they could create more art in the meantime!!!

And I was finally able to create a good video. And I will be able to optimize it to be posted on YouTube in the future. Sweet!

I should write a feature/ bug fix request on Krita forum concerning the issue. I hope that Recorder glitch gets a fix in one of the new versions of Krita. But for now, we have a perfect - although a bit time consuming - solution 😁 But that will do for now.

Time to wave good bye. See you next time! 👋 And that will be after GPop 🎨🤪🤩

P.S. Before THAT TIME OF THE YEAR, Halloween is approaching fast. We're already prepared. Das ist gut. Alas, this time I will not produce light not produce a new Halloween artwork. I've noticed I already have plenty. I have ideas swirling in my head, but I don't think I have enough time to fiddle with that on top of everything that's been happening lately.

But I've been playing some little horror games to stay in the mood - and to discover my new sparks (well, in some cases to improve my Spanish, too, because ¿¡por qué no?!). Amongst all, Harvest Festival 64 and Feet In The Snow especially stand out. Those were very different from one another, very captivating short adventures, very well worth experiencing. I highly recommend.

P.P.S. Oddly for me... not many references to music and video games in this post. Hmm. Something is surely off... I blame Lothar. It's always Lothar's fault after all. [that urgently requires a comedy one shot]

P.P.P.S. Added a couple more references to enforce the stylish continuity of my blog posts. Yaaaay! 🥳

[dashawfrostart]

This Week In “Time & Again” #24: Well… I’m Sometimes Bad At Naming My Blog Posts 🤷‍♀️ [and a tiny wee bit techy again]

It's high time to make yet another one new blog post with the progress report - but alas, I just keep working and working on everything according to my little list pinned to my desktop, and I am not sure what to report. It's just... steadily going forward. That is all.

Within these few days, I've finished an artwork that will be used as an easter egg on several pages of Chapter 6. As per usual, that will be a reference to an old and fairly famous but somewhat forgotten*-ish* franchise. So keep your eyes open once the chapter is released next year 😉

Mostly, aside from preparing (mentally as well as organization-wise) for GPop Fair quite hyperactively, I'm also steadily working on the cover arts right now. Which is odd. I don't remember myself working on the cover arts PRIOR to working on the chapters themselves. Oh boy, things sure change. Usually before, as a general rule of thumb, I worked on the cover arts last. Chapter 5 was a very good fresh example. Although I have the most cover arts sketched in my sketchbook (usually they have multiple versions sketched, and yet everything is still WIP until I decide on something concept-wise for sure), I usually set to work on them later on as I could see the full pictures of the chapters. Suddenly, I came up with excellent ideas for the cover arts for both Chapter 6.1 and 6.2. And both of them will strongly refer to a famous franchise that bears an incredible importance in the history of development of "Time & Again". More on the matter in detail I will probably write a paragraph for either Collector's Edition of "Time & Again" or in the Behind The Scenes book.

Here's a snyak 🐍 sneak peak (the screenshot has been made during the sketching phase; that is supposed to be a fairly complex art piece, so I needed the sketch this time to make everything extra clean):

Can you recognize the reference? 😉

That cover art is what I've been working on for the last few days. And finally now I'm getting to work on the cover art for Chapter 6.2 that most likely will take me less time says I often before something unexpected happens and it takes, like, quadruple amount of time vs what I anticipated, lol.

Ah! There is something little and neat I'd like to share before I wrap it up for today 🙃 I decided to try out Krita's native video recorder for the first time. I've known about that functionality in Krita before, but, regardless, I've always used my desktop recorder instead, virtually for everything, from taking screenshots of the lulz and fails found randomly across the internet to recording clips from my gaming sessions for... well, little to no purpose, because I decided not to spam my YouTube channel with gaming videos 😅. But, since it's been learning time for me in many ways lately, I decided to give it a try. Maybe it's awesome and I will use it all the time now?! The awesomeness about Krita video recorder is that it's automated (and everybody knows by now how much I love automation, yaaaaaay!): it automatically records the progress once you open the artwork no matter how much time passes in between the drawing sessions. You can start working on a picture, drop it, return to it, say, in a month, and the recording will continue. Awesome!

Here's the screenshot of the export video dialogue:

The settings are pretty self-explanatory. For those familiar with the basics of video editing, there's nothing new. I had to install ffmpeg in order to properly execute the conversion of the video. I had to fiddle with it for a bit before it started working: apparently, the latest version of ffmpeg (7.0.2) does not work in Krita for the reason unknown to me. I tried to resolve it by myself reading the log file left after the failed conversion - but then I stumbled across a Reddit post that talked about the exact same error I was getting, and it turned out that the previous version of ffmpeg (6.1.1.) still works in Krita. And then it assembled me a very nice video.

I have recorded near the whole process of drawing that piece: from the clean lineart to full colouring, AND including trying out an alternative background that I decided to discard in the end. Eventually I will post the timelapse video on my YouTube channel to pretend it's not dead lol. I will slightly edit and speed it up even more first.

One note though: the end of the video has weird moments of flashing white frames. I was aware that things like that might happen. But still, that's a bit odd. I will have to figure out how to deal with that issue... Because I don't want to have to slap an epilepsy warning in the beginning of the video 😱😅

Ok, wait, there's one more thing I wanted to ponder on before bidding farewell for a week (or two, or a month, how it often happens to me, lol). And it's kind of a... dreamy thing, with a twist of nostalgia and an off-beat bitter-sweet Traurigkeit involved.

Last year I was very upset about one thing. Sometime in Summer, in 2023, it was an 18-year-old anniversary of my very first set of original characters - Jade, Stu, and Alan. These three people were and still are very important to me. And of course, some of you still remember the abundance of the artworks featuring those individuals that I used to post frequently on my DeviantArt gallery. And of course, those of you who have read Chapter 2 of "Time & Again" remember the tiny and short - and rather questionable 😅 - cameo of the three on the background in one scene. I wanted to draw a celebratory portrait of the trio as a little gift to them, and to myself (for personal happiness). I even had a perfect idea for a little hilarious artwork with a cake. But then something happened (most likely, Chapter 4 of "Time & Again" happened, but I don't remember for sure anymore without my devlog notes, and they're in the living room, and I'm far too lazy to reach out to get them right now 🤣), and I simply forgot about my idea. I only remembered about it long due, sometime in mid Fall or even closer to Winter. I was very upset with myself. 18 years is A LOT, let me tell you. That's for how long I've lived with these characters, polishing them, growing them, nurturing them with numerous traits; they have been undergoing an enormous amount of changes in their personalities, backgrounds, personal history, etc. In short: everything that every single one of us is going through their lifetime, in the real life. In this respect, Stu, Alan and Jade are not much different from any of us. They're even fully "legal", LOL. It might look to some that they're obsolete - but that is far from the truth. I still have grand plans for them. They will take part in my future art endeavours 😉 The story of Alan, Stu and Jade has been rewritten numerous times - but it is most certainly still not complete. Doing an incredibly simple, possibly pre-school level math, we can easily deduce that in 2025 the three are gonna reach their 20-year-old milestone. And that's a long, long time.

Since I screwed up the little celebration big time in 2023 😫, and 20-year-old is a good milestone as well, I really want to put an effort into drawing a lovely artwork of the three next Summer. That is überimportant. That must happen. Yes, as you can see, Lothar and Jeanny are significantly younger than the dorky trio. Lothar and Jeanny probably think the other three are elderly people, LOL. Well... there's surely something entertaining that has to be portrayed on the milestone artwork next year. I'm looking forward to it 😁

[dashawfrostart]

This Week In... My Art #23: "Rebuild Of DeviantArt Gallery: You Can (Not) Unsee" 🤣 And The Clean Cut Editions Are Underway!

As indicated in the previous post, I needed to finish a particular task, so, sadly or not, today's post is not really going to be dedicated to "Time & Again" completely. But that's something important that I wanted to let you know about, as well. Well, no more suspense: let's go!

I'm totally moving in the opposite direction in order to go ahead 🤣 It might sound very ironic and counterproductive at first sight, BUT! It works, and it works fast, and that's exactly what I need. I've already wrote earlier about my rocky and tedious path towards optimizing "Time & Again" for physical printing. Now, to make a proper E-release on Itch and GlobalComix as it's supposed to be (as intended, let's say), I'm doing the opposite thing: I'm cutting the full bleed area off to return it back to the proper ratio and cut off the excessive art outside the actual page! Ha-ha! Just in case if you're wondering why I do it this way: that is because all the additions and changes for the "Clean Cut Edition" have been produced on the pages already with the full bleed area included, 100% ready for printing. But for the e-editions, full bleed area is not needed, because it's not included in the final product anyway (and not intended to be there). So as simple as it is: cutting it off again. Magic. As you might've guessed, removing parts is significantly easier than adding them. In fact, with the magical "Export Layers" plugin I praised highly in the previous post, the task was a matter of merely a few clicks.

Here's the window of that absolutely wonderful plugin that everybody should have installed for their layers export procedures☝. Simple, flexible, with the option to ignore invisible layers (that is super important, to me for sure!), with no clutter and unnecessary useless settings. Buenissimo 😁

So the optimization of e-version of the Clean Cut Editions goes very quick. In fact, I have already reassembled the PDFs that are ready to be shipped on Itch ALREADY are on Itch (I started writing the post earlier, so some information was outdated)😁🥳. But the last two files still need a tiny wee bit of work, so - very soon!

As I have already mentioned (very) long ago, the legacy editions are no longer accessible. They're now history. I still have older, unedited versions on GlobalComix, but that will get fixed very soon, as well. Visit again, say, in October. I also want to express special gratitude to my awesome day job coworker Julianne who inspired me to finish what I started doing earlier on GlobalComix to improve the readers' experience! That was a brilliant idea! Thank you, my friend!!!

Now, after a HUGE preamble that is absolutely typical for my unbearable style of writing - finally, onto the main topic of today's post! 🥳 In the last post I only teased you, but now it's no longer a secret, AND the title of this post pretty much revealed it: I was working on a complete overhaul of my DeviantArt gallery. Is it a grand reopening?.. No, not really. No way, actually. Are you invited and expected to visit my gallery?.. Well, you kinda are, but I also doubt it's gonna be a lot of fun to anyone. I already stated my awkward dissatisfaction with the way things work on DeviantArt, so I took down the links to it on my social pages, and I don't provide a link to it on my landing page either. As intended by me, I still keep it for archival purpose and plan on slowly uploading newer artworks in case I want to use them/link to them elsewhere in the internet. But it urgently needed a cleanup, for in it initial state, it was nothing but trash. As in, "Be gone with you! You'll spoil my focus". (truth be told, it's not really relevant to what I was writing about; I just really wanted to make a Dark Souls reference here, lol) I remember quite a few years ago, due to changes on the servers (most likely), the quality of the uploaded art has dropped significantly on DeviantArt. So I had to reupload a lot of stuff in order to repair the files to restore their past glory for the new (and returning) visitors. Seems like something like that happened yet again. There was more though. Due to my artworks being continuously stolen and reuploaded on random websites without my permission, I used to stamp them all with my email and socials, and at times I could upload the artwork in truly god awful quality/resolution intentionally, to prevent people wanting to steal and reupload them, especially without a credit. ... so let's be honest here: if AI is stealing, then people are equally thieves as well, fair and square 😁 ... Needless to say that, within these 15 years 18 years (my math has failed me 😱😫), a lot has changed. Of course, my email has been non-existent for an eternity. Of course, I wanted to add more proper and WORKING social links on my artworks so that the honest admirers of my colourful hobby could find me again and contact me to say thanks like they usually do, if need be. And to give a proper credit, too. So pretty much my entire collection needed to be restamped with the updated social links and with my long dead email removed for good. So this is what I have done. 135 artworks have been restamped. And at this point of time, they're all reuploaded, in high quality (saved as PNGs). Now, the brand new uploads - 77 artworks that almost no one has seen up to this day - have to be uploaded sometime, too. But that will be a story for another day, for the main collection has been updated successfully. That is beside my "Time & Again" content, of course.

Take a look (at a screenshot of a random page on my "Featured" subsection of the gallery, because that will do for a show off, lol):

It is important to mention though that I made a decision to watermark all my coloured artworks. Why?.. The reasons are stated above. Crudely put: because effing people effing steal s**t 🤦‍♀️. Pardon me dirtymouthing (Lothar sure affects me rather negatively), but that's the shortest and cleanest explanation I could come up with👍😁. But from now on I will be able to happily provide links to my old hilarious artworks when I need it, especially when I make more jokes in my blog posts, LOL.

Now, finally! About "Time & Again"!!!

As mentioned above, the "Clean Cut Edition" PDFs for Chapters 1, 2, and 3.1 have already made it to their respective pages on Itch. Chapter 3.2 needed a partial rework of the bonus materials, as I figured. At this point of time, it's all done; it only needs to be stitched together as a PDF.

As for Chapter 4 though... There's an interesting situation. At some point of time for some reason I was worried to make chapters too long. I didn't really aim to make them all absolutely uniform - although I know from the science of art that chapters that are more or less equal in size are generally more appreciated. And still, I tried to keep them within a certain limit. So I ended up cutting out some content. But with the release of psychotic Chapter 5 that, as stated in the previous post, broke all the possible boundaries of panels per page count as well as ethics (the latter is mentioned beside the point, of course), the previous requirement of a page count limitation has become... significantly less significant. So it was decided to restore the cut content for Chapter 4, also to boost the understandability of the whole story - because in the initial release, the interconnections were possibly even more vague than in the Dark Souls series 😱. I hate it when the creators take their readers for simpletons and spell out the story twists loud and clear. That is NOT my approach in storytelling. I want to make my stories into puzzles, easy or not quite, be it with an abundance of hints or with a remarkable lack of them. But they definitely shouldn't be superflat - yup, just like that mode in Minecraft that Jeanny referred to in Chapter 3.

I added 2 extra pages to Chapter 4: some artworks have been reused, some are totally new and made from scratch, and one of them has been torn apart and reassembled anew. Since the extra pages expanded the release by a little bit, I also decided to completely change the bonus materials featured in that chapter, too.

That one is still one of my favourite artworks featured in Chapter 4. ☝ It's somewhat eerie.

As for the extra artworks...

Everyone who had practiced drawing for a long time probably noticed that, over time, little by little, your style is undergoing visible transformations. A part of me doesn't like to return back to the older material to make corrections and/or additions, for the integrity of the result might suffer - since my art style has changed, and it has acquired tendencies towards peculiar elements of design that were not present in the older works. In this case, the addition was somewhat necessary, so I had to brace myself and go forward, to achieve what I wanted. I opened one of the pages from Chapter 4 to use as a reference, to see what I should - and should not - do. It is a bit of a tedious process, to try to imitate your own art style from the last year 😅... But it seems I did just fine.

At this point of time, only a petty little speech bubble is left to modify for Chapter 4, and that's it. My editor should also return the proofread file of the "Notes, Commentary & Hints" section, for there's a lot of text in it.

So, in short - it is going forward. And it's very good. After all the polishing, after all the extra work related to DeviantArt, I'm looking forward to get to work on Chapter 6 relatively soon - be warned though, that this, indubitably, will be the darkest, the crudest, and the most ethically questionable chapter of all. Here you thought that Lothar cannot fall any lower than in Chapter 5?.. Hah, well you underestimated his despicable talents. Oops, spoilers.Also, quite possibly it will be the most boring chapter. To some people.

Time to wrap it up for today. See you, hopefully sooner than later! 👋

P.S. I need extra inspirations. Usually, when in need of inspirations, I play videogames. But alas, I do not do that very well lately... It's getting awfully close to Halloween - and I've only finished 5 Doom mods at best; still never finished Abysm 2: Infernal Contract even though I started playing it last year (dear goodness! pathetic 😑). And almost all the latest Doom mods I've played don't suit my current demand/mood, so I simply drop playing. The latest and the funnest Doom mod discovery for me so far was Ante Mortem - I've never played mods with Supercharge yet, so that's the first time for me. Although a bit too exaggeratedly tomato paste saturated, I appreciated the weapon system overhaul, and the designs in general. A little self proclaimed baby modder might learn a myriad of things from that masterpiece. Very excited about Hands of Necromancy 2... for the reason unbeknownst to me, for I hardly even started playing the first one and not yet ready to return back to it. Eh. Although Psychonauts 1 really entertains me now, even though I don't have time to play if often enough - because somebody keeps working on art stuffs almost all their spare time. But I guess there's still hope for me yet 😁 However, playing Dark Souls 2 (without the SOTFS suffix) and role-playing Daniel and Lothar in the game has proven to be a giant bag of purest fun! RPing your own children always brings a weird extra layer of satisfaction to any game that starts with character creation. My Code Vein adventures prove that 120%.

... Wait a minute, I hear somebody in the crowd asking who Daniel is. You don't know?! Well... I'm sure you will start seeing that old man often enough quite soon 😉

I wonder what's gonna happen to my psyche once I seriously invest all my spare time into the development of Chapter 6... That's gonna be fun, indeed 😁😅

[dashawfrostart]

YASSSS, THIS IS HAPPENING. And that screenshot is descriptive enough.

I'm participating at a con for the first time in my life. As a vendor, on top top of that. Yaaaaaaaay.

Drop by and say hi if you happen to be around. I'll be happy to see you. Don't worry: I'll pass whatever good or bad things you've got to say about Jeanny and Lothar to the recipients themselves. I'm sure they will be delighted to hear from you. Nya-ha-ha-ha-ha! (I am not responsible for the consequences tho, if Lothar is not happy with your commentary... be warned, lol)

Here's the link to my FB post that you see above, and here's the link to GPop's original FB post. The screenshot is also clickable. (for me, the links only work in Firefox, because Facebook is not always cooperative... but what ever will you do? lol *shrugs*)

[dashawfrostart]

This Week In "Time & Again" #22: AUTOMATION 101 Because I Said So [Techy!] [And Other Ideas] 😎

I was thoughtful, so I did some simple math for the reason of mere curiosity and statistics. I counted the number of panels per chapter, just to see clearer what lies past and ahead of me, and to entertain myself. It turns out, the average number of the panels in every chapter for the chapters 1 to 4 is 92. Counting Chapters 3.1 and 3.2 as separate entities, just because they're basically two books anyway. It was a double chapter. ... Which means that for every more or less normal sized chapter I make I draw 92 separate little artworks, most of which have backgrounds and somewhat advanced, non-simplistic shading (although my latest art philosophy intends to go the opposite direction... but it only intends to do it, it does not necessarily do that very well yet, lol). Not just stick people. And here's the good part: Chapter 5 contains whooping 187 panels. The simple math tells you it's roughly double the original amount. Mostly because I needed to show the maniacal changes in Lothar's expression, the gradual changes, the agony. I hope those pretty numbers serve you well and answer the ultimate question of where the heck I disappear so frequently. And how much work it is. For one person. (and yet, I honestly think I do quite well regardless) Obviously, I disappear into "Time & Again". That is the right answer. That's how it's supposed to be for an artist working on something that is incredibly important to them 😁

But enough numbers, here are some exciting (and also facially hilarious) snippets from the storyboard! (of course, includes censorship by The Author, because Lothar never stops cursing)

With the page by page script fully storyboarded by now, I took a small detour on my road to Chapter 6.

Within the last few days, I set to work on the two important tasks, one of which is already accomplished by now.

The first task - the one that's done - was to mass process a tremendous amount of older artworks for the grand reupload (larger than the number of the panels in Chapter 5 - and that's sayin' something! 😱). I had 138 older artworks that I needed to resize and reapply a watermark on top; plus additional 77 to perform the same very task on afterwards. Why that is needed is a secret for now. But it will definitely see the light of day soon-ish (hopefully). ... As you can already guess, doing all of that manually would've been yet another nightmare - especially since my memories of going through pain and real hell of adding full bleed to "Time & Again" are still fresh in my mind, and hot like cakes straight from the oven... Also, of course, I didn't feel like dedicating a whole bloody month doing just that either, when I have Chapter 6 on the go as well as a transformation of Chapter 4 (more on the matter is just below). That's why I urgently needed automation of sorts. I'm a little surprised to discover that in my older post about how I prepared "Time & Again" for paper printing I totally skipped talking about an incredibly useful plugin for Krita that's called Krita Batch Exporter, made by GDQuest (whose videos I actually watched a few years back when I still worked on my game about the sleepy knight... but alas, as you might guess, the game never happened. oh well). Even though the plugin originally is aimed at indie game devs, it proved to be useful to me when I was working on full bleed areas for my chapters and when I needed to match them to the final print size. TL;DR: I simply opened all the pages of my graphic narrative as multiple layers, mass resized them all, and then batch exported layer by layer with the help of that very plugin. Simple and fast. Thank you so very much, GDQuest! 🌻 But alas, with the task that was ahead of me this time, with the supermassive number of random artworks that varied in size and aspect ratio GREATLY, that trick most likely wouldn't have worked. Instead, I braved learning the usage of ImageMagick command line utility. I was thinking about using it to batch edit and import "Time & Again" for printing, too, but back then I was not brave enough and didn't want to bother. This time, I urgently needed to learn. For a tech savvy person such as myself - who is a hardcore Doom nerdist who practiced modding not once but twice and thrice (and still does it 😁), a person with a lot of experience making older programs work on newer Windows, it was not very difficult. Yet, it still required some dancing with a tambourine around a table before everything started to work like a charm, and, of course, asking my Editor-In-Chef for guidance. I will even share my incredibly simple batch file code:

magick mogrify -filter Lanczos -resize "1200x1200>" *.png magick mogrify -filter Lanczos -resize "1200x1200>" *.jpg pause

to batch resize (and override!) all the PNG and JPG files to 1200 pixels wide or high depending on the original aspect ratio (unless they're already smaller), using Lanczos scaling method that proved very useful for downsizing the larger pieces to produce clean result. Afterwards, I needed to take my signature watermark and stamp it on top of all the downscaled artworks. I started working on the code for the image overlay in ImageMagick... And then, working on something totally different, I found out that IrfanView can do that for me. And unlike ImageMagick, IrfanView has UI (whatever will you do?.. I am indeed a person who has to see things in front of me, even though I'm not scared of CMD 😁). IrfanView is simply fantastic. It reads lots of different file types, it saves the watermark settings, and it works very fast. Adding my watermark to all those files was super easy and quick. And I only spent, like, one day doing all of that instead of a month of work manually 😁 Whooohoooo! I cannot verbally describe how rejoiced I am! (And I think I also used IrfanView to work on my Doom mod... that's why I installed that nice piece of software. Peanut Butter Jelly Time!.. Aaah, memories)

So that is done! Now you just gotta wait for all these 138 + 77 = 215 artworks to reappear in the internet sometime this year for everyone's happiness 😉

I am also glad that earlier this year I have discovered that Inkscape now supports batch export of layers natively - which is INCREDIBLY useful for my project (because I always start from arranging text and speech bubbles on multiple layers in Inkscape before porting everything to Krita for further work).

The second task bears a huge importance: I am polishing and slightly expanding Chapter 4 for the "Clean Cut Edition". The feedback on the chapter I have received earlier from my early access readers indicated a certain lack of hints... It was actually meant to be fairly vague to begin with. However, Chapter 4 was the only chapter for now that had a few outtakes from the script I wrote. I figured that I could fill in the gaps and make it easier to understand via the addition of a small (by my standards, lol) passage of text, aside from adding "Notes, Hints & Commentary" section. Ironically or not, all things considered, I simply decided to restore the cut content that was originally present - the content that I excluded for a truly naïve and dumb reason of keeping the page count intact (and, as we could see as of lately and thanks to my math above, Chapter 5 broke all those limitations and standards of yore anyways). Now I'm sad that I dissected my script without a weighty reason back then. But good news! I'm restoring all of that for the Clean Cut Edition! AND now with commentaries 😁 As for now, all the text and panel placement is decided on, and the only thing I have to do is to draw extra faces of Lothar and [redacted for the reason of spoilers for those who haven't yet read it] to portray a proper conversation between the two. And I think that the extra pages fit in quite nicely, too.

And aside from that, I also worked on a random artwork featuring Lothar. Here's the teaser; the full version will be uploaded soon.

And down below there's a bit more stuff I'd like to share today (even though I started writing it a few days ago, so idea simply accumulated in my head), in a form of expanded theses:

Since I don't want to stretch it all out as it sometimes happens with my endeavours, and there's no actually useful AI that might help me speed up the process, I think I'm going to try something peculiar this time, and it might sound... well... a bit crazy. I've been thinking about that for a while already (quite certainly, since the times I used to be an active DeviantArt user, which makes it approximately... 15 years by now?! wowza!!!), but never really had a chance to try out that approach. I was thinking about dropping the sketching phase completely. Earlier I've mentioned that, when I work on the comic pages in digital workspace once the approximate sketching and paneling on paper is all done, normally I work "in stages", outlining the panels in Inkscape first, then gradually working my way from sketches to lineart and, finally, to colouring, in segments. So I'm thinking about skipping the sketching part completely and doing the final lineart right away - simply because it will save me time. And quite possibly, a lot of time. AND time is a precious resource - so said Winston, and they were right. I understand that that might not be a good idea - but the student must learn sometime and through intense practice, right? And since I wished for that since a near immeasurable time ago, but then never ended up doing that for a reason unbeknownst even to myself - then it's probably the time to do it. Well, I'm looking forward to an adventure. I promise there will be no eyes on different height or any other fancy-schmansy stuff, and no extra fingers. With my demands to the quality it's near impossible - of course, unless intended. 😁 (I will still do simple sketches first for the complex views and angles. Otherwise everything will look crooked. Come on. I'm not that proficient yet.)

Ever since the development of Chapter 6 has been started, and its plot was in the stage of an embryo, my research lead me to a fairly solid conclusion that Lothar is a sociopath. He passes the test quite well and complies with numerous criteria wonderfully, I don't even have to doubt that. Heck, I don't even know if I like Lothar anymore... That Ar*****ch has done some very questionable stuff in Chapter 5. I just want him to put himself together and finally move on, preferably in a somewhat positive direction. This is also one of the reasons why I want to finish "Time & Again" - to help Lothar redeem himself. Come on, dude. Get in the effing robot... Eeeerrrr... Please don't take that too far though; that was just a figure of speech.

That's enough for today. See you soon 😁

[dashawfrostart]

This Week In "Time & Again" #21: The Storyboard Is Done! The Further Adventure Awaits

So far - and that is indeed final for my paper sketching - the storyboard of Chapter 6 consists of 54 pages. Of course, not counting any framing material such as the cover arts as well as any bonus materials, it's roughly 20 pages longer than Chapter 3 that's been the biggest chapter up to this day.

This is massive, let me tell you. Especially massive when remembered that it's done virtually by one person alone.

Since my plan is so grand, and, unfortunately, there are no reliably working AI tools that might've sped up the colouring and/or sketching for the final product, AND with the progress hindering factors such as life outside art 🤣, the work might sprawl out within time and space. I am ready for it. Alles ist gewiß in Ordnung. I am very well aware of the amount of work that lies ahead of me, and I will not cancel my plans because of any possible oversights (because I have none 😁). As I said before, I am very committed, and no less determined.

What I am aiming at doing however is to try and shrink it to no more than 50 pages (which will make approximately 25 pages per part, for Chapter 6, just as Chapter 3, will be also split into two parts). That will be done through trial and error and perfection of the panel placement on every page. This is gonna be a headache - but it will be very well worth it 😁. Time for me to explore the new horizons after all - that's something I was willing to do for a long time. Now even stronger than before.

I foresee Chapter 6 to be a slap in the face, a hit with a frying pan, a loud squeak of a kazoo right into one's ear. It should be - and will be if done right (and I already put A LOT of thought into how to execute it properly!) - one of the most remarkable chapters of "Time & Again". It's been like that in my mind ever since I wrote the draft for the chapter. It's a daring experiment - and of course and selbstverständlich - it's not gonna be for everyone. It will not become your average comic read for your average relaxing after-work comic reading evening 😁

I've never talked about it before, but I always sketch the storyboard prior my work on the panels arrangement page by page in Inkscape, because I want to see the full picture and how the story unfolds as a whole. One could call it a rough draft of the entire chapter. Once I'm satisfied with my approximate storyboard sketch, I start to work on transferring my sketched ideas to Inkscape page by page, to create mock-ups as well as final arrangements. Of course, as I keep working on it, the things might get altered and/or swapped.

There are currently two primary objectives on my list of artistic things to work on for "Time & Again".

The first one is, of course, just keeping up working on the chapter itself. Since the storyboard is done, I will get to the panel and text arrangement as soon as my editor-in-chef returns back to me. Right on.

The second objective is revolved around a certain real life event that I am 85% prepared for already. Unfortunately, that objective includes a series of side quests that are advised to be completed in order to get the "total completionist" medal. Earlier I was thinking about releasing the "Clean Cut Editions" of all the previous chapters by the end of summer - but alas, trying to balance out all the activities, with the amount of work on Chapter 6 as well as some real life endeavours, I simply don't have time to finish it all up until the end of August. It's in my best interest though to prepare it by mid-October. Which clashes with my primary objective to work on Chapter 6 - and that chapter is already a witch's brew by default, let me tell you!.. But I'm trying to juggle with my time and resources as best as I could, so I foresee myself coming up with certain resolutions.

Check back often: a very exciting announcement is about to happen soon 😉

In the meantime, while my editor-in-chef is still working on ridding my script of shameful typos that I might've missed due to having to re-read and meticulously refine the same parts of the text 50 times in total until my focus and brain are both a mush, I will most likely start working on the cover artworks and promo arts. And the cover arts will contain references to a certain famous franchise that the readers with highly inquisitive minds have, indubitably, already noticed the hints at earlier 😉 (dammit internet, I cannot find the screenshots from neither Bloodborne or Dark Souls games that say "inquisitiveness ahead" although we've seen them numerous times when playing)

P.S. ... suddenly, it finally hit me: Oktoberfest is nearing. Which makes me wonder why, throughout all these years that I've spent with Lothar's presence in my life, I have never ever - not a single time, not once - drawn him all dressed up and excited about that traditional German festivity. Instead, for some reason I've grown really accustomed to drawing him Halloween-style numerous times. I even had an old artwork portraying him wearing a skeleton onesie in the company of Freia and Fjolvarr... which is very odd for him to say the least (not odd though considering how much I love mocking at that individual, because he deserves that, imo). Perhaps, the answer to that question lies ahead of us in Chapter 6, for it will shed light on Lothar's past and his peculiar relationship with his motherland. But canon or non-canon - I think that still might be a fun idea to draw something Oktoberfest oriented one of these years 😁🍻

P.P.S. Here, I did it: I made a new post within a reasonable timeframe. Das ist einfach schön ^.^ Now... only gotta post more artworks before this blog turns into a "text-only" endeavour 😅

[dashawfrostart]

This... Month? In "Time & Again" #20: Die Herausforderungen des Schreibens 📚 - und mehr

Here, I thought I'm finally coming back with some truly awesome news quite shortly - but alas, it turns out it's been roughly a month. Sounds like the frequency of my overly giant posts is rigorously dropping... But I intend to let it simply flow, following its own pace, so I write whenever. I have probably already mentioned that writing doesn't always go buttery smooth for me (and I'm pretty sure I said that somewhere before; it's not just the title of this post signifies that). If the posts do not form in my head - then I simply don't write, and I don't force the process either. The spark is very, very important when creating.

But enough of digression, let's get straight to the business! First things first!!! And the news is truly fab!!!

Chapters 1, 2 and 3.1. of "Time & Again" now exist in the physical world!!! 🥳🥂

This is so cool, I cannot contain myself!!! 🤪 This is a very odd and somewhat awkward feeling, to hold your own book in your hands. Back in the day, I started working on it as an exclusively digital release - and yet, I designed it (just in case!) as a book almost right away, with the covers, inner artworks, and the proper page count that was suitable for physical printing, if need be, although without the bleed areas.

Well, turned out the "if need be" situation happened in the end. And after all, it's just very nice to have a physical copy of your own work on hand... Well, because I'm an old-school person and I love paper books. Once the entire story is done, I will definitely prepare and order a hardcover copy just for myself. And if the local (and beyond local) readers so desire, I'll print some for them, too. But that is just a potential plan for the future consideration 😁 Right now, the succulently depressing Chapter 6 is waiting for me.

Preparing it for the physical printing was a bit of a struggle - the topic I already mentioned in one of the previous posts. I have spent a month working on all of that, plus refining some little things and adding "Notes, Commentaries & Hints" section to each one of the chapters. Ordering prints, unfortunately, was also a struggle, in an odd way.

But I succeeded. And now I am very happy.

Please note that I also added a QR code that leads to the landing page with all my art links and socials for everybody to explore. That was also yet another one little thing I've worked hard on for a while last month. It even has a link to my Doomworld profile 😁 *a happy smiling and spinning cacodemon smiley should go here*

Now, I am ready for yet another one juicy announcement on today's agenda:

The script for Chapter 6 is finally done!!! Yaaaaaay!!!11!!1!1!!! 🥳🥂

Revisiting the fruits of my labour yesterday, I can say I did good. It made me happy. And that's saying something. Chapter 6 is going to be very, very wordy (thank you Lothar for thinking non-stop). 19 pages with approximately 12500 words sure will make a big impression on some readers, I'm certain... However, a large part of that whooping page number is actually commentary only. But there's still a little more reading than in any average previous chapter. Now, off it goes directly to my editor-in-chef for the proofread. Which means that incredibly soon I will finally be able to start working on the page templates for the actual release. Excited. Chapter 6 is going to be highly experimental and daring. ... and unbearably dark, too. Darker than Chapter 5.

Returning back to our aforementioned topic of the writings, as well as the ultimate torments and tortures of the process, I must share something that you might find interesting to clarify the situation - or at least entertaining to some extent. Yet again: writing does not always go smooth for me. In the previous post I have shared my fears and concerns in regard to Chapter 6 in general, particularly the writing. Well, here's the full story for a disclosure: back in the day, approximately around the time I created Lothar (and shortly Jeanny), sometime in 2015, I attempted to write a large novel about the catpeople named Freia and Fjolvarr. That story has never been finished, and the problem with it happened to be, as I ponder now, the lack of self-organization of the author. Meaning, I could write separate notes for the story in multiple notebooks, because a lot of different ideas and thoughts would swirl in my imagination, so, like fools, I would try to save them all. Which was a good tactic - and I still think it is!.. The real problem, however, emerges from the depths of creative process later on, when it's time to stitch everything together into a logical and consecutive narration. I ended up with a lot of parts that were very difficult to tie together. Usually, when I used to write my text-only stories, I went with the flow and let the logic of the characters' conversations circulate naturally - and in most cases, it yielded great result. But with the things written split in parts right from the start, finding the right chain link to link them all together into a naturally flowing conversation was... a nightmare to say the least. Perhaps I was not persistent enough, or maybe the amount of work was a little too much, for that story was supposed to be, well, at least 200 pages in total (I approximate), therefore there as a lot of unrefined material to work with. As for "Time & Again", I definitely didn't want it to die in a swamp of creation that went awry. "Time & Again" bears ENORMOUS importance to me. I could not simply let it disappear into nothingness, because that would've been easily the most disappointing thing in my life. By the time I sat down to get to finishing up and polishing the script in July, there were indeed parts of the dialogues and Lothar's delirious monologues that required connection links. I cannot really say that I dreaded working on it. But I had fear that it might end up being as unfinished as the aforementioned catpeople story. This time I was aware of the weaknesses and failings of my previous, almost 10-year-old outdated approach. So I was ready to embrace a potentially tremendous amount of works that was waiting for me.

And I did really good this time!

Have I ever told you that narratology interest me very much? Narratology classes were something I've never taken. The same with psycholinguistics and the its lesser known, more targeted subdivision called ethnopsycholinguistics. And now I feel like I have missed out on INCREDIBLY MUCH. For a language nerd such as myself, it's shameful. But nothing's impossible (am I, like, in the mood for Depeche Mode quotes today or what?..), and there are lots of books available on the above mentioned topics, so I am not sad one bit. I love sciences 🤓 And I am always up for self-education (basically almost everything I've learnt very willingly was thanks to self-education alone).

I thought I wanted to mention some other fun topic, but I no longer remember what it was. That's alright; chances are by the time I decide to return to make another post, it will shape itself a tad better anyway. So I'll save my currently improperly shaped thought for later.

See you soon! 👋 I really gotta pick up the slack and start posting more frequently 😅

[dashawfrostart]

This Month In "Time & Again" #19: The Prints Have Been Shipped!.. (possibly an insubstantial post)

Hallöchen!.. All of a sudden, almost a month has passed. And I didn't even notice... Wait, I'm having a rather strong feeling of déjà vu here. Oh ya. The previous post starts the same (well, almost). Some (namely myshelf) might want to go ahead with the joke and say every day is exactly the same (oddly, even as of 2024, I still manage to mix up the title of the song with the title of that short indie game called Every Day The Same Dream). ... But that's probably enough of Nine Inch Nails references for now.

So! The awesome news!

The print-friendly versions of "Time & Again" for the Chapters 1, 2, and 3.1 have been completed, and the prints have been ordered, and now they're already on their way to me! Yaaaaay!

I had troubles with the printer's website, unfortunately, which prevented me from finishing up this giant, outstretched-in-space-and-time project as fast as I [thought I] could. But now it's all done, and all that adding full bleed hassle is over, and I'm not going to bother doing that for chapters 3.2, 4, and 5 for now, because they're not gonna get printed yet. Next time I'm gonna be working on print-friendly iterations of "Time & Again", it's most like going to be once the complete edition is on its way. And I still have ways to go. ... without simple and fast ways of automation, and without assistance of smart AI algorithms that might help speed up the process of flat colouring based on the creator's predefined palettes - I definitely got long ways to go. 😑 *sigh* (yes, yes! I still hope that somebody makes a plugin for Krita that will be able to do exactly that, because that would've been wonderful and SUUUUPER helpful for me! For now though, there's only but nobody came).

And aside from that... I actually don't even think I've done much. Most of my latest accomplishments - including the creative ones - were not "Time & Again" related, to better or worse. Or not quite, let's say.

However, I've started working on an alternative cover art for "Time & Again" - the one that I had in mind for quite a while; the one that's been lurking around somewhere in the perils of my pencil sketch dump for long, that has appeared perhaps around the time of development of Chapter 2. Currently, it's missing proper shading and a background.

Also, following a suggestion of my friend, I made a cute comedic artwork that will eventually end up as an art print for an artistic event I'm planning on participating in later this year. Yaaaay!

For now, I refrain from showing any progress because of some certain reasons, so I'll share the final versions later on.

That's very funny and weird how it turns out sometimes!.. Thanks to one of the minor characters in my story (and spoiler: they will appear in Chapter 6! 😉🥳) I've made a discovery that I quite enjoyed! To get a better understanding of the aforementioned character, I started listening to vaporwave. And I must admit, I'm enjoying the genre through and through. Not exactly your elevator music type thing, but at times not too dissimilar. Or at least it feels soothing and meditative to me, in an odd and crooked way. And hey, lots of distorted samples from my favourite gems of ye olde good 80's. A music nerd such as myself simply cannot cringe at that, for sure. Good job, my character. You must be proud of yourself, you sleek and fixated, yet somehow adorable genius. Now get in the f***ing robot (I wish I didn't say that; it gives me an incredibly unsettling wrong association now... 😅). That very same character is also the reason why I'm intermittently playing Broken Reality now - and also enjoying it through and through. Very inspirational and quite relaxing. Really looking forward to play the anticipated sequel, too!

Alas, there's a little confession to make.

The problem is that, right now I'm not yet certain how to approach Chapter 6. And no, I am not talking about the form of it (however, the visual representation of that giant pile of Lothar's self-hatred should be taken into GREAT consideration as well, indubitably - but that is a rather impressionistic question, methinks).

What I cannot deny right now is that I don't feel like I'm in the mood. "Why is it so important, and why is it such a big deal?" you ask me. Well, first of all, as a content creator, I truly believe that you have to be in the mood in order to create quality content. Second, because of a specific nature of Chapter 6, it's incredibly important to get myself into a certain mood prior to working on the final writing (for even the script is not yet complete, although the substantial majority of it is certainly done, and it's even overflowing in specific spots 🤣😅 dammit, Lothar, you think too much). I could possibly say I'm a little scared to delve into it, because it might turn into a descent into an endlessly black pit with no light anywhere around, even from above. I need a certain mood that is best described as Traurigkeit und Weltschmerz (and virtually anything along the line).

And this is the feeling I'm lacking right now. Perhaps, too much stuff is going on in real life right now, or maybe I simply allow myself to distract from being "Time & Again" productive a little more than I should've... Or maybe the simple answer is that I'm a happy and cheerful person by nature, but to write a proper Lothar I need to become a very dark and grim dude, dammit! 🤣

I also realize that I'm behind on my creative schedule, too. Which is probably not helpful. But, as I said earlier, I'm not exactly scrunching myself into strict timeframes either.

But at the end of the day, albeit slowly and with a certain degree of uncertainty - I'm getting there. Medicated Lothar and his personal problems are definitely not forgotten by me. I'm letting it flow freely, to ensure the greatest result to be achieved.

That's all for today. No illustrations, but that's how it has to be for now! See y'all later! 👋🎨

[dashawfrostart]

These Two Weeks In "Time & Again" #18: Everything Is 99% Ready For Printing! (Through Blood And Tears... Almost 🤣)

Hallöchen!.. All of a sudden, two weeks have passed. And I didn't even notice. To be completely frank, I haven't been feeling very comfortable over the course of those 2 weeks. Difficult life endeavours are sure not helping the situation, and I keep feeling antisocial - even more so than before (meaning: a bit less social than my normal introverted self). Intermitting work, home stuff, pushing it with "Time & Again" (still the top priority in my life), and simply being a human being has been a tad tense and somewhat distressing for me... So the emotional background is not exactly a candy right now. That said though, it doesn't mean that I'm not trying to persevere. Because oh booooiiiii, I sure doooooo!!! 😎 (keeping it up as the cracks are growing is something that Lothar is struggling with in his day-by-day life, that handsome bastard. His situation is a little different though)

Although it might seem that the amount of work on "Time & Again" that had been done was nowhere near tremendous, some things were subjected to substantial and quite important transformations. Plus, as per usual, considering writing short posts is most certainly NOT my forte, this post is most likely gonna be very wordy - but it will also contain a bunch of WIP screenshots. So brace yourselves - and more screenshots pop up as you go further ahead into the post. (Also, brace yourselves for a little bit of beeped soft cuss, because it had to happen)

... But before I begin today's oversized tale, I have to ask a curious question (because changing the topic randomly is what I excel at 😎):

How do y'all feel about cover artworks that have little, to nothing, to do with the story itself?

That's quite a daring question, isn't it? And I know that some might be frustrated with such a choice, shall the artist resort to such a rebellious decision. But lately, I've discovered that, to me this is not an issue. It's a difficult question, really, and it's a matter of a personal preference, for sure. I like puzzles and mind-bending stories. I like questions, and I like hints - and yet, I do not necessarily ask for any answers at all. As I read stories, I love co-creating/co-writing them in my imagination rather than reading about unnecessary [in my humble opinion] and meticulously explained points of the story that would've been better off kept in the dark, for the sake of the reader's joy. I also like stories that start somewhere from the middle and provide no introduction/exposition whatsoever. I'll figure it all out as I go ahead, all by myself. I don't see a problem at all. Perhaps, you can already see a certain correlation with "Time & Again" and the way it's written. But back to our question! I don't mind it when the cover art is a bit... off. I think it really depends on the story, on the author/artist, and the idea it is trying to convey. I don't take things like that as something offensive or disrespectful; I treasure creativity, and I deeply rejoice at the signs of mystery, and I love the excitement that a cover art like that could reward me with. But I would like to know your humble opinion on the matter, as well.

They reason I asked is because the cover art for Chapter 6 is still the only one that does not have a clear design in my pile of sketches. I think I will come up with the idea for it on the go, during the development, but currently 've got absolutely nada de nada (except for a meme sketch. Frosty loves old-skool dank memes. The meme sketch is not exactly suitable for the cover art tho, so I'll stash all my precious thoughts of longcat deep in the corner of my heart so that it doesn't accidentally pop up on the cover design).

But back to the topic now!!! Finally!

In the previous post I promised to head further and farther into the mysterious forest of the techy depths of 2D art creation.

So, I've been working on the "Clean Cut Edition". One of the most important objectives in this respect for me was the conversion of Chapter 1 into a Letter page format. The original release had a different width/height ratio - it was based off the European/Worldwide page standard that is A4 that is narrower from the sides (more in-depth info about the differences between Letter and A4 page sizes is here). I know, I know, Imma dummy: I should've done it right from the start. But I didn't, because back then in 2020 I couldn't even imagine that I might want to print my story someday. But wait, there's more! 🖐 My second objective after changing the page format/ratio was to add full bleed to all the pages for the proper printing - plus add a little more cushion to the speech bubbles to make sure nothing gets cut off when printed. I know, I know, Imma dummy: I should've done it right from the start (deja vu feeling here, anyone?).

So this is exactly what I've been doing during those 2 weeks of online absence 😁. AND I DON'T EVER WANNA DO THAT EVER AGAIN, NEVER EVER IN MY LIFE. Full bleed areas forever now, for all my projects, regardless if they go to the printers later on OR NOT. That's all. 🙅‍♀️

As you might've already guessed, I did not feel particularly happy about having to redo everything manually. That would've been a nightmare!.. 😱💀 And a supermassive amount of work...

However, I knew that I needed to fix some stuff manually anyway. Moreover, not everything was actually as hopeless as it seemed to begin with: on some files, the backgrounds already extended enough beyond the canvas boundaries, so I only needed quick fixes to make them look good. So I started off with the simple stuff first, such as the cover arts (oh boi, talking about cover arts a lot today!).

☝ Here you can see how much the full bleed area extends, thanks to the areas that are not filled with white colour. Cover art for Chapter 2 was super easy to add full bleed to. Actually, none of the cover arts needed any desperate measures. Somebody was half-smart a few years ago 😁😅

And yet again, I'm eager to dream about the [sadly] non-existent AI algorithms that could've been INCREDIBLY helpful in my situation! From the older post you already know that I'm not opposed to AI when it comes down to help with already existing stuff and with the prospects of automation, which in the end results in saving precious time. And to me time is of the essence right now, because I would rather invest my time and effort into the new chapter of the story rather than trying to recreate neater full bleed areas on already existing pages to make everything, well, printable. More content, new content, please!!! So my obvious thought was to utilize the help of the modern technologies and to use AI generators to automatically expand my pages to create bleed areas! Nice, fast, and simple, innit?!

So after a short search, Brian stumbled across a plugin for Krita called Krita AI Diffusion. And it sounded awesome!!! The manual said it can outpaint - meaning, it can extend the artwork beyond the canvas boundaries. And that was EXACTLY what I needed for my work! For that, I even updated Krita to version 5.2.2, for earlier I've been always using 5.0 😅 After setting everything up, installing the server and the packages as the manual suggests, after learning about it and playing with the settings for a while, I came to conclusion that...

The Sc***ße doesn't effing work for my bloody task 🤣

The plugin seems to work very well for what it is, but sadly, not for extending the canvas to create full bleed areas suitable for printing - which was THE task I specifically installed it for. It fills up the empty areas just fine, but... it doesn't really guess what I want or doesn't guess the pre-existing patterns.

For a test, I took the title page of Chapter 1 and requested to extend the canvas based on the artwork. I wanted the AI to simply extend the hexagonal cells pattern 40 pixels in each direction. After 5 minutes of thinking, it got me... a wooden pattern (as represented on the close-up screenshot to the right). That was a good guess, no doubt... But alas, far from what I needed ideally.

But I had a hack: since the high-res version of this background has been already created earlier as I'd been working on Chapter 5, I decided to swap the backgrounds and just scale the new one to the size suitable for printing. Didn't have to generate the pattern all over from scratch. Yay!

But the real test was to make the AI extend the actual comic page with a complex artwork on it. I took one of the first pages of Chapter 2 and tried the Extend function on it. Again, after, like, 5 to 7 minutes of it thinking, it gave me... some intricately designed fairytale-stylized forest pattern - with a heart on top nonetheless. Mind you, it also smudged Jeanny's pretty face to make her look as if she's a horror vision of sorts. (another kind of Abomination, maybe?..)

Yikes forever! 😬🤢 After that I pretty much understood that AI will have no use for me right now.

I will write a more in-depth review of Krita AI Diffusion plugin for the sake of contribution to its development, and to provide precious user feedback in one of my future posts.

In cases like that, one always wonders to themselves: what will be more time efficient right now?.. Trying to fight with the new unknown tech, learn it and make it work to automate the future work? Or is it more time efficient to simply do everything manually instead of potentially spending hours and hours on something that might not even work out in the end?.. I took a less risky path this time, obviously.

Well, since the help of the modern tech was out of question... I buckled my pants, mentally embraced the amount of work ahead of me and... pressed on. Because what else a starving artist will do in this case?..

To my surprise, it actually didn't take too much time. Some pages did tho. I DON'T EVEN WANNA TALK ABOUT SOME PAGES. Goodness gracious, I'm so happy the work is done now!!! Below there are some examples of what my pages look like now after adding full bleed to them ("safe zones" are included on the templates, too. I made my templates all by myself, based on the professional printers' templates I already had downloaded):

Surprisingly or not, extending Chapter 3 was as easy-peasy task - perhaps, because the chapter features relatively simplistic artworks, at least of the foreground.

And finally, "Clean Cut Edition" includes some little visual and textual improvements, not because that would've been better for printing, but because I said so. For example, as shown below, I rewrote the scary background font on the angry Jeanny panels to make it more readable, and I almost completely rearranged and redrew the speech bubbles on the bottom of the second page of Chapter 2. Now they look much more lively and playful, and fun. And no random tree patterns and hearts, for crying out loud. *cough cough*

I s'ppose, that is quite enough of reading for today. You guys must be very tired of my giant tale that stretched out across time and space.

So I bid farewell for now. The next step will be quite exciting 😁

[dashawfrostart]

Last Month in "Time & Again" #17: I Did A Lot Of Sketching This May!

Hallöchen, I'm finally back! 🥳😎

It's been a while. A little over a month of somewhat forced social netwrok (here, I did it again) abstinence made my head very fuzzy for the reason unbeknownst to me. It's a little difficult for me to gather my thoughts regarding what to do next and which direction to move on... ... However, is it really possible to say that, am I simply confused? Because, to be fair to myself and the rest of you, I perceive that I've completed a decent amount of work lately. I was trying to be steady and consistent, yet gradual and not too hasty. Because as we all know, Frosty hates timed levels. For a reason. (I would like to provide a link to that post where I wrote about that - but alas, I cannot find it, or maybe my search is kaputt. So no link. Oh well! 😁) And I think I did very well on not being hasty. I just enjoyed my time drawing old-school way (one might say outdated, but deal with it 😎), with a pencil in a sketchbook, listening to my favourite music and discovering new and interesting genres and bands as well, not worrying about the time constraints or anything else. That was good.

I have finally finalized the design of a peculiar character I've been trying to complete since the last year, I believe. And that was a great leap forward for me, for the character actually appears in Chapter 6, and it was sure a high time to finish up the design. Good timing, señora. I also made a lot of fashion sketches for the main characters. Especially Lothar. He will need a lot of clothes for Chapter 6. And no, not because he's gonna go tour around The North Pole, or Siberia, or anything alike. *wink-wink* Lothar is not Lara Croft. Yet. (anyone who gets the hidden reference above receives a virtual hi-five from me 😁) Finally, I sketched a lot of promo arts, all of which will have to become complete artworks someday - or at least I would love to draw them for realsies. Many of them are somewhat unnerving, for the circumstances of the story require that. Haven't you noticed that inclination in my recent artworks already? 😉 Alas, the majority of the sketches I've made in May I cannot show to you: they contain far too many spoilers.

As far as the design works go, that's all for the updates. But as for the writing part - there's more to the story. I took a few more notes to possibly utilize in Chapter 6 that - spoilers and lo! a disappointment! XD - will be incredibly wordy, even by my own standards. And quite possibly a very depressing reading. This is THE reason why I'm transforming this abomination into a piece of a graphic narrative (previously known as "a graphic novel" - although some might argue and state that the difference is rather vague). And the story requires that, so objections are categorically denied. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, any complaints are denied, too 😁

With all the blunt honesty I always possess, I must admit that I've been working on Chapter 6, and occasionally even Chapter 7, somehow in parallel with Chapter 5... That was indeed a distraction and perhaps it didn't help the development of Chapter 5 either - although it's hard to say seeing the truly remarkable result (and I sure think it's remarkable). I cannot really hold back and I simply write down the thoughts I have for the future chapters because they happen naturally. And perhaps, it's even productive. I sincerely believe that, with a project such as "Time & Again", a good result might be achievable only under the condition of the creator being submerged (and possibly diluted) into the world they have created fully and completely, with as little distractions as possible. It's difficult to achieve sometimes, given we're all married adults with jobs, and life, and tendencies to go birding because yaaaay ducks!!! and obligations far outside our art endeavours alone. But I think one should really try their best, for this is what truly matters 😉 (and haters can hate all they want)

Since the quality is superior to quantity in my understanding, and considering everything I said in the previous paragraph, I am not gonna set any timeframes, expectations, and deadlines for the development of Chapter 6. I will just keep working on it (and everything surrounding it) in a steady yet spontaneous, unforced pace. My goal - approximately - will be to complete Chapter 6 by the end of 2024. And considering what I want it to be, it's gonna be a truly unique type of work - a work I never did before, another one genre experiment. Possibly a mind-bending one (for me. most likely not for the readers this time).

Back to achievements in May, I even made new friends - humanoids and others 😁🥳

And now, back at home, being accompanied by a quiet non-stop white noise of the AC as well as numerous chirps, squeaks, and fascinating songs of the local feathery inhabitants (also pretty much non-stop), I finished up my action plan for the foreseeable future and set to work on the "Clean Cut Edition". This is the top priority task right now. Starting gradually as usual; hopefully I will accumulate more magical power inside me to start a proper artistic spark and to let the steam off as I go. And the more - the better 😁 More techy stuff will probably be covered in the next post.

So far, I've made additions to the "Notes, Commentary & Hints" section for the previous chapters that will make it into their "Clean Cut" iterations later on this summer. It is sure weird and hurts one's brain to write commentaries to the events throughout the entirety of the story - and in my case it's especially convoluted and twisted - including the past chapters AS WELL AS the chapters that are yet to be released. As we all remember from the intro to Chapter 1, "everything in the world is interconnected". I must reflect those interconnections - and there are tons of them, it's dizzying! - in the Notes/Hints section in the end of each chapter - for those who are interested. I'm almost done with that part, but it needs to be 100% complete and polished. And the future events and references need to be remembered by me ahead of time so that I could make a proper commentary in the preceding chapters that have something to do with the certain future events directly. And this is bloody challenging, let me tell you! Being an omniscient god is sure tiring and difficult.

Goodness gracious, I truly missed home. I truly missed the beautiful green trees and yellow speckles of dandelions scattered all around, and the charming smell of the lilac. I truly missed the squawking sparrows, and sad songs of the chickadees, and hilarious blue jay screams, and the endearing honking of Canada geese. Really looking forward to see northern flickers again this year. They make the most adorable sounds. I also truly missed Dragon Ball and my other art-style obsessions. I truly missed my Doom mods (even though I've been progressively doing very bad this year and hardly touched - never mind finished - any decent mod; I still never finished Abysm 2: Dawn of Innocence that I started playing in the beginning of this year, for crying out loud; those are some pretty bad gaming stats for me 😫). I missed playing Sonic Frontiers (that game is mind-blowing!!!). I missed my nice day job. And I sure missed not drawing anything via my graphic monitor. I guess I'll have to reacquire the skill quickly, LOL!

There are also a few future plans that are still not clear enough and therefore don't deserve a special mentionation... yet. I just wanted to note that there's way more for me to do than I usually cover in my blog posts in regard to my creative works. There's always a lot going on on the background - I'm just like that 🧐

That's probably enough of babbling for now. Who am I, you think?! Edgar?! 😉😁

No screenshots of the artworks for today - but I'll share a little discovery about Simple Sticky Notes that I use all the time to create neat to-do lists to stick to my desktop (oops! exciting spoilers!):

Until a couple days ago, I didn't know that you can create links to the files on your HDD through Simple Sticky Notes; I presumed you could only link to a URL. But I was wrong. And now I'm happy. Because I have a few documents scattered around my "Time & Again" folder that contain long lists of important items. Now I created the links on my sticky notes that link directly to those documents ^_^ This may be a simple and silly thing, but it makes me incredibly happy 🥰

Until next week, folks! 👋

[dashawfrostart]

"Time & Again" Chapter 5 Has Been Finally Released!!! 🥳

Yes, yes, yeeeeees!!!! It’s finally here! Chapter 5 of my graphic narrative “Time & Again” is released today!!! Only after a few months of development, through ups and downs, through problems and solutions, and with various personal things happening on the background – I’m ready to announce it’s here! Time to celebrate! :D

Read it on GlobalComix: https://globalcomix.com/c/time-again/chapters/en/6/1

Get a high-quality PDF copy from my Itch page: https://dashawfrost.itch.io/time-and-again-chapter-5

That was quite a journey for me! This chapter is significantly darker than the previous ones released so far! Let me make a fair note: a totally different, quite grim arc of the story begins from now on. Only 3 more chapters left.

Thank you everybody who read, liked, supported, and reviewed “Time & Again”! This means truly a lot to me! I really want to know what you guys think!

Your opinions matter! Remember to use tags #TimeAndAgainbyDWF and #LotharAndJeanny when posting stuff about “Time & Again” anywhere in social.

I made the discounted bundles that contain “legacy editions” of Chapters 1-4 of “Time & Again” on both GlobalComix and Itch.

Why? Now, that is indeed a good question! I've already explained my intentions on the release of the upgraded "Clean Cut Edition" in this post, therefore I'd like to encourage people to get the legacy editions in case if they want comparisons or if they are archivists. 😁👍 TL;DR (because Frosty cannot for the love of it write short posts): Because the upgraded edition of the previous chapters is underway. The upgraded version is called “Clean Cut Edition” (and freshly released Chapter 5 is already a part of that quality upgrade), and the major difference between the two editions will be the newly added “Notes, Commentary & Hints” section. Also, the shameful typos that slipped my attention will be all cleaned up, and some visual improvements will be made, as well. Therefore the currently available Chapters 1-4 will be soon outdated and therefore will be replaced by the “Clean Cut” versions everywhere.

So if you’re curious to see the “less clean and typo-ridden” legacy editions – the bundles are for you! They also allow you to easily show some appreciation and support to the artist, and that is very valuable, too! That will keep me motivated to work on the future chapters AND it will support the development of “Clean Cut Editions”.

Get ‘em here: https://itch.io/s/122573/time-again-chapters-1-4-legacy-editions-bundle

And here: https://globalcomix.com/a/dasha-w-frost/bundles/d1688c7c-b48a-4edf-957d-98fa658b3b81

The bundles are available until the end of May 2024.

Yup... Time (and again) to celebrate!!! 🥳🍺🥂

[dashawfrostart]

Time for the fourth and the last teaser for the upcoming Chapter 5 of “Time & Again”! The fans of good old memes will surely recognize this one without further commentary 😉 And for the rest of you, I will provide a quick explanation - and also a bit of a backstory for the curious minds. This meme-like teaser is based off "Ancient Aliens" meme (NOT to be confused with the Doom mod of the same name). However, I have learnt about that particular meme thanks to the Dark Souls variation made by UsagiLovex from DeviantArt; gladly, that artwork is still available here. Needless to say... That Lautrec of Carim version of the meme made a great impact on my crazy imagination. I believe, those of you who are familiar with Lautrec and Dark Souls will have more fun and perhaps a clearer understanding of the meaning of the teaser I made. That said though, I believe you will understand it best once Chapter 5 is finally released 😉... Just wait up a bit. It's almost here, I promise 😁 See you very soon!

~~~ The previous teasers can be found here: TEASER 1, TEASER 2, and TEASER 3.

[dashawfrostart]

This *Past* Week In "Time & Again" #16: Preps For Something Big (And Unknown)

In regard to "Time & Again", the last week was... rather odd. One might possibly say it was somewhat uneventful, but that's not really true. In fact, it was SO EVENTFUL that I'm a little agitated right now. Or maybe "agitated" is not the right word. The writer/editor in me, sadly and to my shame, is failing to put it properly into words now to make it descriptive enough.

The most important thing is that little stuff here and there in Chapter 5 has been improved, altered (where needed) and fixed. So now it looks even better. For example, I recoloured a whole set of speech bubbles in Inkscape to make certain that the readers understand it easier to whom the certain lines belong to. As I worked on that particular improvement, I learnt a new trick yet again. I really like it how the newer interface in the latest versions of Inkscape works comparing to, say, that from the version 0.92 that I used when I only started to learn vector software. It makes everything much easier and allows to swap certain things in a matter of a few clicks (but also including a few minutes of swearing because I didn't realize that I was hitting the wrong buttons to begin with - that's how it sometimes goes for me 😅… but dis ok, everybody is learning, right?!). That goes for swapping gradients on the go, as well. I learnt that one can just import another SVG file that had extra gradients into another one to make extra pre-made gradients available in the list for an easy colour swap - and I needed that because I had to use the exact same colours for certain speech bubbles. I could've used a colour picker, of course, to take the colours from an already complete page... but I'd say swapping the gradient colours from a dropdown list is easier and hassle-free. I like that.

(those two pictures above are the examples of what I did, taken from one page: those are the straight exports of the speech bubbles from Inkscape. To the left, that's an old version, and to the right that's an updated new version as it is going to appear in the final release)

I also checked all the text again to make sure that I never missed anything that needed to be italicized (further reading on how I improved my font and created an italic version of it is in my previous post). Fonts are important in my story. Whenever something is highlighted in the text, be it through the formatting or via additional decorative effects - that MEANS certain something. The change of the font itself is also significant. Little details like that make me happy, and I love to see how meticulous the other artists can be when it comes to the little details like that. In my opinion, in art every little detail has a certain meaning, has an impact on the story and/or how it's perceived by the readers. So, in short, everything is important. It might be a hint of sorts, after all.

I even mused ahead, and not only I took extra notes on important monologues/dialogues for Chapter 6 that I'll start working on later this year (approximately in summer), but I also brainstormed the whole idea of "Time & Again" all over and came up with the certain concepts for the very distant story elements, even in regard to Chapter 8. I got ways to go, but it's never wrong to fantasize and refine what you've already had in your mind for the future 😉.

I am patiently waiting, enjoying my nice cup of Earl Grey tea in my apartment on this snowstormy day (yep, we are suddenly snow buried), as my editor gives the chapter a second read for further refinement. I'm very content about how it's going.

And I'm slowly setting up a page for Chapter 5 on my Itch.io - I'm gradually, resolutely getting there.

That's practically all I've done for the story itself within the last 7 days or so.

Majority of my incredible effort lately has been put into something else though.

And here's some important news: I've been trying to prepare for the two grand adventures that potentially await me in May. But - funny how it often happens this way in life, innit? - realistically speaking, only one of these adventures is going to take place in my life, for they are mutually exclusive. There is simply no way to combine them. It's either/or - no options in between. Therefore, knowing in advance that I put double the effort, only half of which will potentially pay off, it makes my life right now pretty fun, no doubt about it. But this is something that absolutely has to be done.

One of those endeavours is artistic - and another one has a great life importance to me. The artistic one though requires A LOT of preparation and a certain financial investment, too. Unfortunately, where it all stands right now, due to the time limitations, I am terribly restricted in my options. This is why I'm virtually trying to do a tribal dance with a tambourine in my right hand, twirling around the dining table, singing incomprehensible impromptu songs in all the languages I remotely speak in (hopefully not futile) attempts to draw a certain positive outcome closer to me. And trust me on that: this is not an easy task. I foresee myself looking like a sun-dried prune once the hassle is over.

You know, in videogames, I view RNG as some kind of a nuisance. It might be nice at times, but, being a fan of games where I have full control over everything I do, I cannot appreciate RNG very much. I like to be responsible about my own actions, and I want to know when I screw up or succeed, so that I could make adjustments to my actions accordingly. All this "RNG a.k.a. gambling, bro!" makes me cringe. In cases like that, I always feel like AI just hates me, LOL. Never have I been very lucky in small life events either... well, except for that one time, or maybe two at best. Well, if interpreting having blue jays at my balcony feeder as "a lucky event", then I'd say three. Yup.

Closer to May, aside from Chapter 5 release, hopefully! - I will make an announcement about if I rolled 20 for realsies and what The Real Life RNG is gonna present me - because the choice between the two possible routes does not depend on me. So we'll have to go from that. It's also fair to mention one of these routes potentially leads to me going radio silent (blog silent?.. internet silent?..) for a month. Which means no updates on the state of "Time & Again" for a while.

But enough of babbling for now, otherwise I turn into Edgar - who babbles all the time (according to Lothar anyway). That was another one not-really-to-the-point post. I had plenty of those many years ago 😁

See you soon! 👋

[dashawfrostart]

These Two Weeks In “Time & Again” #15: IT'S FINALLY DONE 😱 And The Logo, And The Font

I almost kinda can't believe this, but just a couple days ago, it finally happened:

I FINISHED CHAPTER 5 and shipped it to my editor-in-chef.

Wooooo-Whoooooooooo!!!!!! 🥳🥳🥳 I am so happy! It's really hard to emotionally understand that the work is finally done. That was quite an undertaking.

... Overdue by approximately 3 months. But that was just a silly time limit I set to myself before I even started working on it. Different life situations got in the way of me finishing it up faster, but, all in all, since I am fairly satisfied with the result, I don't think any complaints are justified. I am indeed happy. Now I am in the state of mental emptiness. Joking. Not really. I suppose, until my editor gets back to me with a handful of suggestions, I will simply keep drawing and I will try to finish up all the last preparations before I could justify the public release. Gotta make everything look nice and sparkly clean after all 😁

I also slowly, little by little, write materials for a bonus book that currently has a vague title "Time & Again: Collector's Edition". I believe I never revealed that plan just yet, but that's been something I've been working on on and off since the last year, I think. Or maybe even since 2022. Hopefully it's gonna be interesting to all the "Time & Again" obsessed fans in the future someday, because it will contain more WIPs and sketches. As for myself, it's just fun to use it as a sophisticated diary for how the work went.

Speaking of different editions... Earlier in this post I've mentioned my plan to release the updated versions of the previously released Chapters 1 to 4. So, the prospects of that updated release are also getting brighter and brighter; from ghostly, ephemeral concept it is actually gradually fleshing into something real, almost day by day now. And this is very good. And here's the grand reveal for you: this is what the refreshed logo for of the updated edition gonna look like:

In fact, Chapter 5 will already have this very logo, for it's gonna be the first Chapter to be ever released that came with "Notes & Commentary" section right away. And the presence/necessity of that very section is the main reason why I am updating everything in the first place.

So, when will "Time & Again: Clean Cut Edition" of the previous chapters be released?

- unfortunately, that I have yet to decide on. Cannot tell right now, but one thing that stands for certain is that it will be released only after Chapter 5 goes public. My current priority right now is the release of Chapter 5, proper and nice.

Since today's blog post already contains a fairly big and happy announcement, this might be enough of the news for now. What could possibly be as important as the fact that I finally finished up the supermassive amount of work, literally a new chapter in Lothar's story?! Probably not much!.. Well, almost.

For the last topic to cover today, I wanted to tell something else important and interesting that most people will probably not understand due to excess amount of specific terms 😅 But it matters a lot to me, so here goes.

Not long before all the work on Chapter 5 was 100% done, I finally got to look at the main font that I use in my graphic novel (Frosty's Comic Font), for it needed some perfection: I remembered that it was not displaying correctly in some cases, or rather, selected set of the symbols didn't look right, depending. ... I must admit, I am a huge fan of typefaces. I used to collect fonts for personal use back in the day, for I loved to experiment with different designs, and usually I needed them for my custom "one of a kind" greeting cards I used to make for my friends' birthdays. Good memories.

A few years back I started to learn how to make my own True Type fonts - and I bet you have already seen at least a couple of those fonts on my artworks, logos, signatures and, of course, in "Time & Again". Some of those fonts are still partially incomplete and/or unpolished and, thus, currently unused by me - until the moment in the future when I will finally have more time to fiddle with 'em, for working on fonts is not too difficult, but not particularly easy either. In this case, I mean "it's time consuming", for the process of actually drawing a font, designing letters and symbols to me is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. But vectorizing, perfecting the kerning in between certain pairs of letters, making sure that nothing is sticking out too much comparing to the rest... That is a bit tedious. In the end of the day however, it pays off tenfold, for you have a pretty, absolutely nice font that can be used virtually anywhere, in any software, for any purpose. I've never designed any monospace font yet... But aye, I'm being a little too nerdy again. Back on track, Frosty.

I never post my fonts anywhere to download, paid of free; I use my font solely by myself for now. And "Time & Again" was the reason why I urgently needed a new nice font with a fair touch of "me" in it... I wanted to make "Time & Again" my own as much as possible. So it was only obvious that I needed to design my own typeface for this crazy project. In 2021, I made the first relatively complete version of Frosty's Comic Font to use in "Time & Again" as the main font for the characters' speech. It contained all the basic English language glyphs and extra symbols for German language. Alas, not everything was smooth, and in Inkscape, when I used to copy-paste the lines of text on the speech bubbles, the formatting of little symbols such as apostrophe and quotation marks went down the drain, and was exchanged with the default system font (or whatever Inkscape uses when a glyph is missing). Unfortunately, that error stretched out in time (and space) up until a few days ago. I only was able to figure it out last week. By the time I managed to figure it out, the version of the font reached 1.3, and the last update also contained glyphs for Spanish language. It turned out, I did not include glyphs for all the possible variations of apostrophes and quotation marks. So I got that fixed. And now everything works like a charm. I am very proud 🙃 But the actual reason why I needed to return to designing fonts was different: I was tired of not being able to force italicize my font in Inkscape. While Krita allows for a default italic offset for a font that does not come with a premade italic version of itself, Inkscape does not do that. My manner of work is such, that I work with fonts on the pages of my graphic novel in Inkscape, for it's easier to me. But I like to sometimes accentuate certain words in the speech of the characters with italics, usually to make the readers pay extra attention to those particular words. I did not want to fiddle with workarounds (and in fact I know of no such things for my particular issue) in Inkscape, trying to combine multiple text boxes with different manual skew on the same line or whatnot, so I finally decided to make Frosty's Comic Font Italic. I generate all my fonts in FontForge. Here's what the window looks like:

I couldn't even imagine that generating an italic version out of a regular font could be done in just a couple of clicks in FontForge! 😱 So simple!

Once it was skewed, I tried to input an example text just to test it out and see what it looks like. When I'm test driving my fonts, I like to write something that uses extra symbols, such as something in German or in Spanish, because all those extra fancy letters make me happy. And once I was satisfied with it, I saved the final version (v1.4) and started using it! Here's the clear side by side comparison of what the regular version looked like versus the new italicized one:

I think it turned out rather nicely.

And now in Inkscape I can finally use different formatting of my own very font within one text box, as illustrated through a quotation from a song by U2 (these guys are my current obsession - just as in ol' good times when I was 11 🤣) on the screenshot below:

Magic!!!!!)))))

That's probably all for now.

... Okay, okay! You probably want more teasers/spoilers from the finished product, right? Here's a little funny snippet for you:

Because any urban landscape always requires fat rock pigeons staring at stuff. Some of them might even watch something while munching on popmeat popcorn.

That's all for today's great news! See you soon! 👋😎 There's more to come.