Work notes: A full Dossier for the Basil Hallward comic is publicly available on Patreon, with sketches, concepts, photo references and more. If you enjoy taking a look at the odd and always unpredictable process of ideas taking form, as I do, it’s now free to access.

The comic has been doing well on Tumblr and here in the web version. The Tumblr version is modified to fit better most mobile formats, although I had to split it in two parts due to native restrictions there, and also because you don’t want to put an endless scroll in followers’ dahsboard (and then expect them to reblog said scroll). It’s slightly webtoonised it order to fit that format, but that’s nothing new here. It’s been several years since I’ve had to find a middle ground between traditional page format characteristics and scrolling format for my comics, and some stories benefit even further from passing progressively in front of the reader’s eyes. I guess a full conversion for this comic could have implied separating the shots of the actress Dita Lanner passing one by one on the screen for a cool motion pictures trick, but that’s an afterthought, and sounds like a full immersion exercise in webtoon format. Which is not to say that I shouldn’t try something like that some time…

*** 

I didn’t know the work of Polish artist Zofia Stryjenska. For instance, her gorgeous series of Slavic Deities.

***

Thank you very much for all the good feedback en the Basil comic. I’ll be back in a few days with some updates on the next Secret Knots story.

J.S.

Work notes: Patreon portraits, and little else this week in art related tasks. Halloween will find me with part of this reward completed, but not all of them -as I first intended. But delays have had a lot to do with finding new tricks and learning a bit more of the tools, so in the end I think it’s ok.

What Else is There

Deconstructing Moral Character Judgments, for a quick abstract, check out the triangular taxonomy illustrated with a figure at the end of it.

The Hypnotic Spell of Grouper’s “Shade”

The Terrific Visual Novel Renaissance of Vampire: The Masquerade, a game series that’s been part of my interests for a long time.

Treats of the season: a full YouTube version of the 1967 soviet film The Viy, or “Spirit of Evil”, adapted from a story by Nicolai Gogol, a fun and visually charming movie with witches and great practical effects and sets.

Illustrations from ‘The Golem’ by Hugo Steiner-Prag

A teaser of the exhibition GOTH – Designing Darkness at the Design Museum Den Bosch

Good Night (Music)
Hamlet Gonashvili – Tsintskaro

Work notes: I’m currently illustrating Patreon portraits, and this also means a brief blog this time. The drawing above is the background for the mansion ghosts portrait, the direct reference for it was the Crimson Peak manor.

From the Secret Knots Discord

pewter recommends the works of artist Maskull Lasserre 

while LTK links to The Animators Who’ve Spent 40 Years on a Single Film

What Else is There

At Monster Brains: Kladderadatsch Magazine Illustrations (1902 – 1940)

Winners of the 2021 Close-up Photographer of the Year

This socially distanced dinner in Tokyo has a certain air of sci-fi concept

Chilean pal Nelson Dániel is doing amazing inktobers on his Instagram

Good night (music):

Vanishing Twin – Big Moonlight (Ookii Gekkou)

Work notes: TSK activities during this week consisted on promotion and setting the Patreon portraits treat. 

I was talking recently to students in the class I give, mostly young authors and editors on indie publishing projects, and I was a bit surprised to hear their reactions to the possibilities of Patreon or crowdfunding logistics. In a few words, they thought that these solutions were not for them, that they were out of their reach. All the crowdfunded or patron-supported projects they could think of, at the time of the discussion, were made by semi celebrities, really popular streamers, influencers. We discussed, later, tactics to reach or create audiences, but I was left thinking about how they envisioned these systems in 2021, the huge gap that young people perceive today between a base level of media usage, and the unreachable level of almost divine scale where social media climbers, those blessed and exponentially boosted by the algorithms of the day, set example. And, honestly, these are the people that get chosen as templates in the very patronage websites that use some variation of “creation first” as advertisement mantra. I realized, first, that no one is buying that discourse among those who are considering to start with their comic or project today. But at the same time, it’s frustrating to see how the huge popularity of the few has the effect of undermining the motivation to do new things in today’s landscape. The future web in which all tools and all kinds of audiences are finally out there, supposedly within grasp, has proven to be a dense, rigid network, solidified around fewer nodes, less chaotic and decidedly unfriendlier than it was only a few years ago. 

In my case, I guess it’s really fortunate to have been able to start in a different context and keep going through the creation or preservation of the niches where I can share my stories and interests with others. The Discord server is great, the audience in my Patreon is really supportive, and whenever I’m allowed to pierce the net of some of the more exposed outlets or social media systems, the response is good. But promotion, as I mentioned in the beginning of the post, takes considerable time now, and that’s just one of the characteristics of the work now. This is something to explore further in future posts.

On Patreon.

The post with the open call for October portraits is live and public, and these are the “character classes” I designed to inspire which type of ghosts the patrons will ask for their portrait:

If you’d like to join my Patreon and get your portrait as ghosts, the timing is perfect.

From the Secret Knots Discord.

Recommendations of aesthetically interesting, comic-inspired games: Koldun mentions Sable (though it seems it may have performance issues), LTK shares Zineth

professionalbanjoist recommends the webcomic Barbarous

What Else is There

From the National Library of Sweden Flickr: “Celestographs or coelestographs are photographs of the sky taken without camera or lens.” Beautiful, and also, If you make digitally layered art, these make for some really cool textures.

Into The Odd remastered, a tabletop rpg on Kickstarter. Possibly TSK-ish as we say on the Discord server, I really like the way it looks.

More in the spirit of the season: Tales of Mystery & Horror by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Christopher Lee. A bit over 2 hours, YouTube link.

Good Night. (Music)
Vangelis ft. Stina Nordestam: Ask the Mountains.

Work notes: promo comic about ghosts finished, for now I shared it on Instagram and Reddit, and I’ll see where else can it fit. I’ll add it to the Patreon post with the portraits call as well.

I’m not sure if it works that well as a joke or parody, but I had fun working with the YouTuber expressions, and trying different things with the ghosts and their backgrounds was also satisfying. In the last months, I’ve grown more comfortable with paint tools in Clip Studio, specially oils and watercolors. Even the basic, preset tools are intuitive and respond well to the drawing tablet. I’m using a Huion Kanvas 13 and overall I think it was a good choice for my first pen display tablet.

On Patreon

The rules and character classes for the traditional October portrait game will be sent out in a Patreon post this week. The sketches for this post are part of it.

From the Secret Knots Discord

professionalbanjoist shares the twitter link for this 24 hour comic called The Night Mother, by Melanie Gill Man

A short film from 1999, from Makoto Shinkai, director of Your Name. Signaled by Gyrgir, subs in English and Spanish

gwenlin (Gwen Montealto) shares with us her short story Ascension, published in the speculative fiction magazine All Worlds Wayfarer

Whate Else is There

The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost

At NeoText: The Spine-Tingling Comics of Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie

Oh, Disney, You Never Should Have Fired Kay Nielsen

Good Night (Music):
Piano Magic ft. John Grant – Your Ghost

Work notes: promo comic about ghosts almost done, with a small preview in the ghostly little lady caught in the camera, up here.

 I’m resuming posting on Reddit after a long time. I had to adapt a comic in terms of format, and test a different font. This led to some interesting discussion and tests on the Discord server. In the end, I see the problems with the fonts I’ve been using for Secret Knots comics, specially with readability in the wide range of screens, devices, and the inevitable resizing to comply with social media limitations, and at the same time, I’m not too fond of the standard fonts for comics, even though they tend to a stronger body and higher clarity. So it’s research in progress.

On Patreon

No post this last week, but the traditional October portrait game this way comes.

From the Secret Knots Discord

The life and death of Otzi the Iceman, as told by analysis of his 5200 years mummy. Link shared by Gyrgir.

The short-lived Giger Bar that became a yakuza haunt. (Twitter link). More at the Giger official website.

“The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization” shared by Rain.

What Else is There

The drawings of Clark Ashton Smith

“Some of the winning and honored images from the 2021 Small World Photomicrography Competition”

Good Night (Music)

Oneohtrix Point Never & Elizabeth Fraser – Tales From The Trash Stratum