Vlog 20170618 - Hiking Hourlies :D (Patreon)

Okay! Hello patrons, it is Sunday... it's Sunday morning here in Vancouver it is very rainy right now. It's been pretty rainy this week and I just wanted to record my vlog before I head into the office again!

So this work crunch is approaching the end... there is this one final push that I gotta get through before this prototype gets shipped off to production and then hopefully we'll have a little bit of a breather. But... yeah it's going be tough going for a little while longer.

Yesterday thankfully though it was sunny and Trevor was free so I kind of took the day for myself and went on a nice hike up in Squamish. And I also got the opportunity to document it for hourlies! 

So, as you know, one of the Patron rewards is a bonus hourly comic day. I sent you guys the survey and the two things that came back tied were 'nature day' and 'mission day'. So I don't--  I haven't come up yet with a good mission for an hourly comic day and it's gonna take a little bit of time to plan something like that... But Nature Day... that's something that's a little bit easier to execute.

So I went on a 7.5 km hike up in Squamish -- the Sea to Summit Trail which is one of my favourite trails -- and the hike went really well, it was a lot of fun. I took a ton of photos. So hourly comic day is usually supposed to be something where you are drawing a comic for every hour that you are awake... but I have had mixed success with that. I've been doing over the last couple years on February 1st which is the traditional hourly comic day.  But I didn't do it this year... it's a little bit tough to do in real life-- "in situ" so to speak because you have to stop what you're doing and draw the comic itself and so that's kind of bounded by the amount of time you have available to draw while still trying to go out and do something interesting to draw about.

So I made a hybrid method this time I took photos with my phone and I took notes in my cell phone and then when I got home I did a rough version. So you can kinda see here the thumbnails for what the hourly comic is gonna do.

And I also did this a little bit differently this time. So usually hourlies will be one short comic per hour and I've got this going at the start here. But the hike is like four hours long, so I did one page for every hour during the hike -- which is kinda the crux of the day that we're doing-- so 'hike-hike-hike-hike'. And then when we got back I kind of abbreviated it back down and ended because I-- y'know-- kinda came home and passed out after a 7.5km hike. 

So that's gonna be the focus of the day and I'm looking forward to really doing that in a nice... maybe... I've been thinking about how I want to do it. I think I want to do with grey marker and maybe inktense pencil. [I don't know if I can reach that from here...] Inktense pencil are... they're kind of a pencil crayon and you put them down and then if you wash them over with a little bit of water they liquefy into a... it's almost like a gouache, it's a very very vibrant colour. And I think that would lend itself well to all of the greens that are in the scene of the hike. So that's the plan and I'm going to be pulling that together over the next couple days... maybe a week or two. Not sure! But people can look forward to that :) 

I don't really have that much more to say this week I want to keep things brief and tight so the only other thing I'll mention is that Lost Omens beta reading club got to the end of chapter 1, so that's the entire first chapter that I've posted in thumbnail form.  Really interested to know what you guys think of that so far -- positive or negative -- your impression of the work at that point is really important because having a strong chapter 1 is what hooks people in for the longer journey. But thankfully, in my opinion, it gets even more interesting from that point out. You have to spend a lot of time in Chapter 1 on set up and so I will be spooling up the next bits of thumbnails for the next couple weeks and looking forward to discussing those. 

Thanks so much for all your feedback so far. I gotta get rolling to work-- I will do my best to transcribe these this time, I know I've been struggling the last couple of weeks. See you on the internet! Baiee