Yknow, while it‘s true that the new hatching methods I’ve been experimenting have the potential (when applied in an orderly fashion) to take less time than the old way, this is looking like a hatch-free week. I now have a number of comics to hatch up and finish — hopefully I can get to it after I get this (gasp!) third comic done for the week.

Fredart is still kinda borked (i’m going to move things to wordpress when changing servers, which isn’t done yet) but I wont let that stop me from posting a few sketches. Four total, and they aren’t too bad. One of them is over a year old, and comes from my ‘warmth’ development pile. Yes, there are reasons I’m digging into that pile, but I’m not gonna start talking about my personal Duke Nukem Forever project. When even your friends consider it to be a zombie project, it’s pretty sad.

Now that I’ve said that - if you live or have lived in Sendai, attend or have attended Tohaku University, or just know stuff about the area and wouldn’t mind being part of my info pool, please email me. I’m looking to refine some details about the place as well as flesh out my reference photos and make sure the mechanics of what I’m looking to do properly capture the feel of the place. I’ve been there, so I know what I’m looking for, but you can only absorb so many details in 2 days. :P

Here’s probably the best sketch I did when revisiting warmth *last* year. If you follow the fredrin twitter, you probably also caught this sketch. No commento. :P

As for Megatokyo related sketchs, I scribbled this one out last night while very tired and watching TV with Seraphim. I’m not really sure where it was going, but there’s something dynamic and angular, something subtle about the attitude I like in it. Yes, its a mess, but sketches can be when you are just trying to find lines.

I have been sketching for ideas for a Megatokyo calendar for about half a year now, and here are a few of the sketches I’ve done as possible candidates — Kimiko in a neko hoodie, and Piro sitting at a drawing table. I’ve also done a lot of digging into past comics looking for panels and other drawings that would make good calendar fodder, so I’m still not sure what the final set will be, but we should have a 2009 calendar this year. W00t.

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been experimenting with PNG format for the comics. It’s a little frustrating because it feels like Photoshop CS2 doesn’t have very robust controls for exporting web-efficient PNG files. For example, when doing a Save to Web, it actually saves the PNG as full color rather than greyscale - which is idiotic considering the original PSD is greyscale. A few of you have emailed me regarding this, and I’m still working on trying to get it right. If you’ve dealt with this issue before, please feel free to email me. ^^;;;

I’ve been tossing photos up on my Flickr site fairly regularly in recent months, but almost all of them have been pictures of Jack. ^^;; I did post some more artistic photos, which I do take from time to time, but my iphoto library is really heavy on the Jack photos. :P

Sometimes, though, I can manage an artistic photo that is really all about jack. Yes, sneaky, I know.