Trussed

Why Dame Danger? Why not carry on with the comics featuring Rosa and Candy? Well, they will continue (at some point) but in trying to do the second issue I'd been running into issues. I had two major sticking points that I was struggling to overcome for Issue 2 of The Continuing Capers of Candy and Co.: firstly, planning (or more accurately, a lack of) and secondly, drawing the characters. Turns out scripting, drawing and finishing comics is really hard and takes a lot of work! Who knew?!?

In the first issue of The Dating Dame, there was no planning. To take from Silicon Valley I used a sort of middle-out technique. I'd firstly written the hand-grab sequence (page 3) as an experiment to show a development of action, moving from conscious to not... from surprised to subdued. As I'm sketching these panels out, I'm debating dialogue... how do I explain how Rosa finds herself in this predicament. I come up with the idea of a misunderstood dating app but the exposition in pictures of this is ultimately quite boring, Rosa feeling lonely... scrolling through her phone... sees a misleading advert for a dating app... meets a user... then finally goes to meet the user to then lead into the sequence. This to me seems boring and long winded so I think about streamlining the exposition whilst making it more entertaining, which leads me on to the conversation between Rosa and Candy in the coffee shop (page 2).

The single panel of dialogue does a few things simply, in my opinion at least. It subtly suggests Rosa's earlier understanding of the app through Candy's naivety. At first read we're as wise as Candy but when we read on to the flashback pages we learn Rosa's responses have a double meaning. The responses suspend Candy's naivety whilst providing a little tongue-in-cheek humour for Rosa and the reader.  

But just uploading two pages didn't seem right. I had a start and a middle but no ending, so I thought I'd finished off the piece with the evening's entertainment (page 5). I was really proud with the layout on this page and I think it was this page that ignited that creative spark to do this more. The page turned out pretty much exactly as I'd envisioned it in my head... this rarely happens! Not only was I happy with the layout and flow of the piece, I felt it gave the first coffee shop conversation more purpose and understanding in continuing the double-meaning-dialogue. We as the reader get to see Rosa's truth behind her words in her flashback pages. This inspired the van sequence (page 4).

The van sequence was simply an insert page for me to put some of the other double-meaning back and fourths between Candy and Rosa. I thought of a few more than what I'd included in the coffee shop and the evening's entertainment pages so I put them down on this page. Now this van sequence impressed me because rather than thinking of the action first and using dialogue to explain that, I'd actually had all the off-panel dialogue first and required action to justify it so I was surprised at just how easily this page fell out of my brain. I think at the time of creating it I was in a good productive flow where my best work was happening. What bugged me was my panels were becoming more complex; lots of layers, gaussian blurs, gradients and text so my stone-age laptop was struggling to keep up. There were lots of overheating and crashing when trying to add the shades and highlights on this piece. Fortunately as someone who touch-types regularly on unreliable computer systems for work, it is almost muscle memory to Ctrl+S save regularly (sometimes I don't even notice I'm doing it). At the time I was sketching and producing the line work in Clip Studio and then doing the colours and text in Photoshop.

To finish up, I bookended the flashback sequences with another page of coffee shop conversation (page 6). This was intentionally the last page. But then I thought about the thumbnails, would the dialogue put people off from clicking through and seeing the larger picture? This question inspired scene in the car (page 7), a page with easily viewable action on a thumbnail scale to entice non-watchers in. I hoped the title 'Page 7' and the links would encourage readers to see the rest of the story.

So, as I was saying in the beginning... Why Dame Danger? Why not more Dating Dames?

Truth be told, I fluked Issue 1 of The Dating Dame. Any attempt at Issue 2 has been unsuccessful. I've tried writing the issue sequentially from start to finish and have barely made it to the middle without rewriting or scrapping ideas completely. I figured without a comprehensive plan, I'll never come up with anything as good as Issue 1 because it was natural, instinctive. Issue 2 would therefore be more calculated in order to tie into Issue 1, so without a good plan or preparation Issue 2 is not going to happen quickly. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not going to spend the hours (or days) developing something I'm not happy with or doesn't help develop my skills.  

Spoiler Alert:- Issue 2 was meant to be Candy's first foray into the dating app. She enters into it naively, like Rosa, but with excitement and headfirst at full speed because she's eager to experience what she believed Rosa had... only to find out it wasn't what Candy expected though it was enjoyed. However, drawing Candy from different angles is really difficult. The design of her hair makes that a challenge but it would be boring to only draw her from one or two angles that are easy for me to achieve. In order to keep creative flow, the character design need to be simpler OR my skills need to be better. I did toy with the idea of giving Candy an artist-appeasing haircut to help this but backed down, worried how the audience might react to this.

So this brings me on (finally) to 'Why Dame Danger?' I loved doing the first strip, and wanted to do more but maintaining quality would be unlikely due to the steep learning curve of developing comics.  Therefore, Dame Danger was a new idea that I could be less precious about, for the purpose of developing skills. A new character with no previous pictures, history, back-story, defining components means I can make changes more happily to the character for the purpose of speeding up the drawing process in order to maintain creative flow, rather than letting design flaws hinder that.

For each page of Dame Danger, I plan to do one of these 'Developer Diaries' to document what I've learned from the page, what changes I've made to the characters or plot and the reasons why. I hope this is educational and interesting to those that want to know more about my creative process. For those that aren't, you can probably skip all of these upcoming Developer Diaries. Like this, they will be wordy!

Feel free to let me know your thoughts about what I've discussed here in the comments. 

Some of you will have noticed uploads haven't been quite as frequent from myself recently. Don't worry, just had some house-art (decorating) to do, which had been occupying my time. Got a couple new works underway already.

My core membership ran out (wah!) but I'm a little closer to getting the next batch through donations thanks to the most recent 120 coin donation (leaving the user anonymous in this post as I didn't know if you'd like the mention but it is much appreciated). Check my DA page to leave a donation of your own to help towards another three months of core membership. 

Before the core membership ran out, I did have a flurry of polls. To update those that were interested, in reference to posting your own Candy & Friends fan art, I've made a favourites folder on my own DA page (probably going to avoid making a Candy & Friends group for now). If you'd like to drop me a note including a link to your fan art I'll have a look and if I like it, will add it to my faves and will most likely post it up in a future journal. Like the rest of my works of Candy & Friends, I'd prefer it to be relatively clean, promiscuous but fun (not really up for anything violent, and please keep within DA's rulings).

I noticed I'd reached 15,000+ page views, so massive thanks for this. I did debate drawing a celebratory piece for this milestone but the first landmark I'd celebrated for this 10,000 views, so I expect I'll wait until 20,000. 

A lot of you would've seen I got Core Membership over the Christmas period for a few months and have been trying to make the most of it whilst I've got it for the next 6 weeks or so to see if it is worth continuing with in the future. I've been running polls, experimented with a forum, organised the different volumes of Candy & Friends into multiple folders, etc.

The first couple of polls related to whether you'd want commissions and/or see a Patreon account of my works. The results for these were, to be quite honest, a bit disappointing for myself personally. The large consensus mostly agreed they'd like me to continue with free works. Although I've been happy to do this recently, these arts do take up a good portion of my time and it would've been nice to be earning during these times to make ends meet (especially as I've missed a lot of time from work recently due to health complications). Tools to do these work cost money too, and for me to improve the works, I'm not sure I can give it a good boost with new tools on my current budget. But hey ho, I'll continue for free for now, but if you'd like to donate any amount of points to help me get future Core Membership subscriptions I'll be more inclined to reward fans, viewers and watchers with continued free works.

The next couple of polls saw far greater responses. I'd posted a couple regarding which Candy vs Cosplay and Rosa vs Roleplay characters you'd like to see the OC's take on in future works. Batgirl and Catwoman were clear winners for Candy and Rosa, respectively. I like that you'd picked the same universe of DC characters for these two. I might do a combined piece as well as two singles, because why not, eh? It seems these are certainly more of my popular pieces and they really help increase the viewership.

I trialled a forum through the medium of chatting to fans (or fan) about a fan-inspired OC. Although only one person responded to this (thanks for that, though, appreciated nonetheless), I noticed a couple of pitfalls I might come across doing this. I very much use a freestyle method of drawing; slapping down lines and shapes till it forms an idea in my head. Therefore, trying to do something more constrained by specification might be more difficult for me to do at this stage of learning curve. As a result, producing this character will most likely take me much longer to complete. Sorry to disappoint, that's just how it is right now (but still an idea I want to implement and have a crack at completing every now and then). Interesting though, how not many more people got involved in this. I've had a few requests to draw, which I've not done/agreed to so far. I'm surprised more people didn't take this as the chance to have me design their own character, but kudos to those that did. Very astute. 

Finally, I'm debating setting up a Candy & Friends group, to showcase completed works and expand exposure of the OC's to the DA universe. As I might expand into other series here, utilising different drawing styles, I'll need more folders to organise the works ('cause I'm stubborn about things like that)... And with the recent changes DA have made to the galleries (boo!), I figured this might be a free solution to organising my works into 'volumed' folders without having to pay for Core Membership, should I lose it (I assume it works like that). I also thought this would be a good location for artists and writers, fans of Candy & Friends to upload their own fan-arts and fan-fictions relating to the OC's. This is something I'm really intrigued in seeing. The idea from my end is if I operate the group, I'd be able to review the pieces to add to the group's galleries so pieces that keep in light with my original ideas, themes and characters of the OC's can be hosted and shown. I'm aware some artists and writers may want to submit works that are much more extreme than what I would want or do and I'd rather have first refusal at associating that with the group than not. Though, mixed reviews come back about this; many of you see the group surplus to requirements (though you're not obliged to join the group to see future works of Candy & Friends, just a better organisation of it). However, a lot of you are happy to support this and a few would upload fan-works. I think this is something I might go ahead with. Feel free to leave comments about this below if you wish.

That's all for now, quite wordy I know, but it had been a while since I'd posted a journal... so here it is. 

Sorry, had a few weeks out in hospital with a health scare related to breathing.  I'm back now though, after a bit of key hole surgery so moving forward might be a bit sluggish over the next month or two, considering these stitches, but move forward I will.

Basically, I was watching the view counter creep up to 10,000 then at 9,999... BOOM! What can I say, your support had left me so breathless I had to call an ambulance out! Anyhow, thanks for all the views, favourites, comments and otherwise to get me to these stats. Your support is highly motivating.