Alex Heberling

This Week in Fitness

I’ve not yet lost any weight, but I’m little by little gaining muscle mass thanks to my situp and pushup routines.  I completed the third week of 200 Situps, after a very high-scoring exhaustion test at the end of week 2.  Week 3 was much more rigorous, so I think I’m going to repeat it before I move on to Week 4.  I’ve continued my portion control, and I’m doing quite well on that front.  I still haven’t gotten much cardio exercise, since it’s cold as fuck in Ohio and no one wants to go outside.

Garanos

I’m really happy that lately, I’ve been getting a lot more comments from Garanos readers, especially on individual pages, thanks to ComicPress.  The lack of such things in my life in August and September (up until the hiatus) was very discouraging.  I’m also very happy to have added a time-saving trick to my coloring technique that cuts comic time back down to 4 hours per page, which means I’m not slogging through one page for eight hours, procrastinating in Google Reader because I’d rather be doing another, better, page.  Coupled with the page stats that I’ve been getting from advertising, it seems like people are starting to notice me, which just makes me feel a lot better about this whole career choice.

I think my renewed enthusiasm is showing itself in the quality of the actual comic, too.  I’ve been going crazy with mixing up panel borders and whatnot to make things more visually interesting.  The current chapter took awhile to get going, but now the plot will be moving forward at a steady pace.

Website

I think I’m going to redesign my website again.  I enjoy the current layout, in theory, but it’s lacking some functionalities that I’d like.  I’m going to try to look into some PHP automation for it.  Possibly a widget that allows for a ‘news’ section that just aggregates my blog feed, since I post all website updates to it, anway.

Or I might just integrate it into WordPress and make that my portfolio.  We’ll see.

Webcomics

Since last summer, I’ve been trying to get through more new-to-me webcomics, and start reading the big names out there that I should’ve already read.  The result of many of these archive binges is that I just don’t enjoy the comic in question, and I shouldn’t force myself to read six or more years worth of a strip I don’t enjoy just so I can claim the title of a well-read webcomic artist.

That’s not to say I only read a few before losing interest;  with Goats, I read about the first 18 months or so before deciding it just wasn’t for me.  The new stuff may be better, and almost certainly is, but I’m a bit too obsessive-compulsive to start reading a comic (and a story comic in particular) if I haven’t read it from the beginning.

Hell, I’m just lucky I was introduced to Sluggy Freelance in 2002.  SF lost me during Oceans Unmoving, but I caught up again after seeing Paul Abrams at Connecticon.  I wanted to ask many things during his panel, such as whether Oasis was coming back or not, but since I hadn’t read his strip in three years, she very well already could’ve and I would’ve looked like a douche.  (She had.)  I actually enjoyed Oceans Unmoving quite a bit once I was able to read it all at once.  But back when it was first coming out, the pace made it utterly baffling.

But of course, the internet already knows all this.  So I’ll move on.

Connecticon was actually what made me resolve to read more of the big-name webcomics.  Meeting people like Jennie and Peter (who was actually a fan of Jigworthy) made me want to make sure I knew the material these people were putting out there in preparation for next year.  Because I will get myself to Connecticon come hell or high water, dagnabit.

I’m actually a bit nervous that, should I successfully get myself registered as a webcomicker and go there, I’ll completely implode into a fangirl stupor around all those awesome people.  That world still seems like it’s cut off to me.  I still feel like I’m just an ordinary con-goer and fan of webcomics who just happens to enjoy doing comics as well.  Yet I’ve been doing this for four years.

Whoa, tangent.  Bringing it back in, I’ve since added about ten or fifteen webcomics to my subscription list.

Photoshop

I recently upgraded my installation of Photoshop, and I’m digging the changes to the UI.  My previous copy was running very sluggishly, so much so that it was directly effecting the speed at which I was getting comics done.

As previously mentioned, I came up with another time-saving trick for my comics.  It all revolves around basically doing cel-shading for the whole comic first, then going back and erasing parts of it to feign the look of my coloring style.  Then you reduce the transparency of the layer, merge a blank layer into it to cement the transparency, and add in other touches of darkness where needed.  It’s been a huge breakthrough, since the actual shading stage of the comic now takes half as long, and the results look just as good (and in some cases, better) than when I was manually painting every shadow.

That’s all for now.  See you next week.