luckykaa

So that's November over.

A few people I know shun NanoWriMo and instead go for NaBloPoMo. The idea of that is that you post a blog entry each day. This is why I've been posting an entry every day (Those who missed one - that was a rant about work which is friends locked).

I hate to be smug, but it's a lot easier to do than 1667 words of novel per day.

The other one was NaNoWriMo rebellion. Didn't really have a desire to spend lots of time writing. Part of it was becoming fixated with my new toy (A PS3 - only been out about 9 years so that's how ahead of the curve I am!) but I do want an excuse to improve drawing.

The reasoning behind it was this - I'm not very good at drawing.

Let me tell you about "shitty_watercolour". On reddit.com, a poster set up an account with username "shitty_watercolour", where he'd paint a watercolour and post a link to it. This is his early work. There's actually a lot of dynamism and action there but in pure technical terms it's pretty rubbish. That was 2012. This is his work in 2015. He's actually pretty good these days.

So it's all about practice. A couple of pictures a day and I get to experiment a lot with expressions, poses and props. I still haven't worked out an era. I don't have a plot either, but I do have things happening one after the other o I guess that's story. Lots of exciting things happen in it. Just for no apparent reason. I'm tempted to go for retrofuturistic sci-fi with these characters.

Day 3 of doodling a comic.

Still haven't decided what year this is set in. I prefer the fashions on the 1950's.

And then I get distracted looking at vintage footage on youTube.

Of course I could always set this in a different country. Berlin is a pretty exciting place, and very relevant in the Dieselpunk era.

I really need to work out what this damn story is.

As ever I'm winging this.

As of this morning I had no plan. Hadn't even decided on a basic plot outline, a genre or a setting. I did want to do something based on Captain Fabulous and Minty, but I haven't quite worked out what the premise is there. I really don't know enough about Warhammer to fit them into that.

I do have another character I like though - Plucky reporter Penny Pitman.

That still leaves me lacking a plot, Fortunately I'm making things easier on myself than in the past. Ace Reporters make their own plot.

Doodles so far involve seeing a car chase. And a car crash. Presumably this leads to some sort of McGuffin. And I have no idea what. This does rather depend on the era I'm going for. I quite like the idea of 1920's Dieselpunk. Okay - technically 1920's is slightly pre-Diesel. Mainly I quite like the idea of tying in an Electronic Babbage Engine and some mad scientists.

If I went for the 1930's I could throw in Nazis, which is always a good source for baddies. And 1940's has wartime stuff, and the 1950's has a cold war backdrop.

I just like the 1920's idea! I'm sure the McGuffin could be some sort of difference engine programme, but what? A virus seems too obvious. A cryptosystem might work. What I really need though is a conspiracy. This thing goes all the way to the top!

I think I need to spend some time with some sticky notes.