DXS Machina

The page for My Muse will probably be late and may show up on Thursday as work is kicking my ass. Instead here’s someone else’s work that I enjoy.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life: This comic rocks! I’ve been sort of following this guy’s art for awhile now as he’s been working his way through the comic field. I think I first noticed him either from his heavy brush stroked art in the comic “Hopeless Savages: Ground Zero” (also put out by Oni Press) or from the random pictures on the net at places like Go Gaia (now Gaia Online) and the wonderful free comics he has up on his website: http://www.radiomaru.com/. Some of his comics on his site were in blue and never finished but there was something about them that made me hope to see more.

Scott Pilgrim is the second Original graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley to be released by Oni Press. This is not counting the work he did on Hopeless Savages: Ground Zero which was also released as a graphic collecting the 4 issue comic mini series. O’Malley’s first work was a one shot graphic novel called “Lost At Sea“.

While I love manga influence, what I love even more is seeing a personal style. Something that is much more then the sum of a few years of loving anime or Bruce Tim, or super-heroes. And O’Malley has a personal style that really shines far past the footprint of his influences. While rough on the edges and stroked with a quick brush sweep there is an energy and life to the art that draws me into the characters.

The main character Scott Pilgrim is currently dating a high schooler until he meets this mysterious girl who skates through his dreams. When she turns out to be real Scott faces a real dilemma. The story is oddly a mixture of slice of life and fantasy and video game references but it works really well. The characters feel real and yet fantastical, breaking the fourth wall and even sometimes referencing the book itself. But you are pulled along into their world and their struggles. Also it’s really funny.

Heh, I’m not actually sure what else to say about this comic. But I really really like it a lot. Possibly more then any other comic book in the last 3 years. There’s not that many comics that I truly look forward to as much as I do this one.

So far there are two books out in this series and the artist is currently working on #3. The first book is: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. The second book is: Scott Pilgrim Versus The World. And the third book should be: Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness.

O’Malley’s website: http://www.radiomaru.com/
His LJ: http://www.livejournal.com/users/destroyerzooey/
Scott Pilgrim site, which explains the story better then me: http://www.scottpilgrim.com/

Tags: News, Suggested Items by Diana Sprinkle
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My Muse, Doubt Stone.
Real Live Doubt Stone.

Tags: Art, Original Art, People by Diana Sprinkle
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So back in November google image search started to love my website… a lot. And for no good reason that I can tell. So my hits went 800% higher in about 3 days and then stayed pretty high up there. When I checked my logs almost all of it was all coming from google image search… the problem is that some times it’s for like the weirdest things. Check this one out:

http://images.google.com/images?q=hot+guys&ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en

Which one of these images doesn’t belong?

LOL, if you type in “Kim Possible” you’ll get my picture of Shego in the first 4 which I find hilarious. My actual picture of Kim shows up on the next page.

Anyway, this isn’t really helping me much because I don’t think very many of these google clicks stay around to look at the art other then to grab the one or two pictures as reference or for their site design or what not. Thankfully my website has a shit ton of bandwidth or this would suck mightily. As it is it’s sort of amusing. Although it does really screw up my stats and it’s hard as hell to find other people linking to me… cause there’s just so much google noise.

And I have no idea why it loves these pictures so or why it started to favor them in the span of 3 days and has never let go. Mysteries.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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Saiko and Lavender, The webcomic
Page 45: Issue 2, Page 20

Tags: Art, Furry, Original Art by Diana Sprinkle
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Whee, I’ve been completely unmotivated to do anything at all. Therefore I have been remiss in posting to this site the comics I’ve been posting on my comic site. They go up on the comic site on time ONLY because I can update in advance. So here are the pages:

My Muse, Page 16
Pointy Screaming Balloons… Part 3

In Which there are Doubt stones everywhere. This is my head. Also this is the last page I have complete and I’ve got no idea what I’ll be posting tomorrow…

Saiko and Lavender, The webcomic
Page 43: Issue 2, Page 18

Getting on the bus to hell.

Saiko and Lavender, The webcomic
Page 44: Issue 2, Page 19

Driving the bus into a river.

Blah, I suck! Look at all of those pages I didn’t even post here or talk about. Sigh, at least most of my super advance con reservations are done. Now if I can only stop procrastinating on real life.

By the way I updated Mike Vega’s site to a blog like this. At least he’s been posting to his a lot. You can find it here: http://www.ghostcircles.com/mike/

Tags: Art, Furry, News, Original Art, People by Diana Sprinkle
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So, LJ moved everything over to subdomains and I’ve been having to fix all of my images ever since because my website has hot link protection. Every damn LJ user’s journal and friends page is now some-random-name.livejournal.com instead of www.livejournal.com. When it was all one easy domain name it was simple to allow all of LJ to get pictures from my site but now that every damn person’s page is different… I think I’ll be posting links from now on. >_<

Which means that my older pictures WILL be broken on your friends page... Thankfully I've fix it so AT LEAST my own damn LJ page shows my pictures. Gnaws on own hands. Thanks LJ. Anyway...

Went to Further Confusion last month. Made some money and talked to all of the lovely excited happy people who like my art. It was great... the cute angry mouse picture I'm using for my new LJ icon went to auction at some high price which was really cool. I post it so all of you guys can see it!

Buy this image as a print at my online store!

Heh, that’s actually my friend Dave’s laptop mouse. I just was really tired one night very very close to the con and thought it looked a little menacing… the other ratty was just added for balance but I really like him as well. Heh, this was all done in Painter 7 with no physical sketch, I just drew it directly into the computer. =D Sadly I hear that it didn’t go crazy high but still it’s good that one of my pictures went to the auction. Normally that doesn’t happen. =]

I’ve just returned to Texas and I’m slowly working my way to drawing more comic pages for My Muse. Found that maybe drawing my thumbnails directly into the computer may help me move faster on the pages since there is no scanning or clean up and the canvas can be however big I want. Also the program Painter rocks for sketching.

This makes me ponder about getting a Tablet PC… I used Fred Perry’s at San Diego for a little bit and it was pretty cool. But I figure I’ll see if I can keep up the comic making before considering the money… also my wisdom teeth need to be pulled before I can spending that much money no matter how much I also need that new computer.

Anyway Here’s the new My Muse page for today… and to catch up to what’s already been posted here’s the new Saiko and Lavender page that went up last week. @_@

My Muse, Page 15
Pointy Screaming Balloons… Part 2

Basically this page is an excuse to make a giant word balloon expressing my profound frustration with art in the form of a swear word that takes up about half the page… and it also stabs me in the head. Because damn it, frustration sucks.

This page was actually drawn before the first page of this series. It was a little doodle that I then felt the need to put in a story. At which point it became this.

There is actually another page to this romp mostly because I actually drew me falling down the stairs.

Saiko and Lavender, The webcomic
Page 42: Issue 2, Page 17

YAY. Now I run off to draw some more.

Tags: Art, Furry, Original Art, People by Diana Sprinkle
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Whaaa, I’m all late with the new My Muse. Snort, I got all busy with the con and didn’t get ahead at all so I’m just going to try and make the pages as we go. That’ll teach me. Here is the new page:

My Muse, Page 14
Pointy Screaming Balloons… Part 1

Here is the first pager to what I think will be a 3 pager. I still need to finish page 3 though. I like my really cartoony feet in the last panel.

And here’s all of the Saiko and Lavender pages I forgot to post about as well. Newest one first:

Saiko and Lavender, The webcomic
Page 40: Issue 2, Page 16

Saiko and Lavender, The webcomic
Page 40: Issue 2, Page 15

Tags: Art, Furry, Original Art, People by Diana Sprinkle
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