Inked!

Just a short post, since I'm trying to get some work done on my NaNoWriMo project, but here are the three pages of the graphic novel that I've inked so far. My partner arranged the panels in InDesign and added the text, but I'll just show you the art for now.

The inking went a lot better than I expected it to.

Dreamlocked Rough Pages 5 and 6

Hey, everybody! Because I'm just soooo proud of them, here are the rough drafts of pages 5 and 6 of my graphic novel project.

I originally drew the pages in pencil, but as is evident from other posts on this blog, pencil doesn't show up very well once it's been scanned, so I doctored these pages up just a little bit. When I scanned the pages in, I lowered the brightness and increased the contrast of the scans just a leetle bit. Then I opened them up in a free photo editing program called PhotoFiltre (because I'm not a real artist or anything like that and I can't afford to have Photoshop just for the fun of it). I applied a filter called Comic Book, which made the lines show up darker, and then I bumped the contrast up just a little bit more. I don't like to mess with the contrast too much, because it just makes the art look awful and weird when I do. I think the filter helps a lot.

Page 5 is my favorite page of everything I've penciled so far.

I'm going to begin inking tonight so my partner can get the pages into InDesign. I'm completely terrified. Usually, if I'm going to screw up any given piece of art, it'll be when I'm inking it. I've got scans of everything, so hopefully all will not be lost if I make a major boo-boo, but there's still a ton of potential for this stage of the process to go horribly wrong. That's why I've been putting it off, but I don't have time to do that anymore.

Wish me luck! Hopefully I'll be able to show you some nice inked scans soon!

NaNoWriMo Word Count: OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND!!!!

...except it's actually over ten thousand, and I didn't think to use this joke until it was too late.

I hit ten thousand words on my NaNoWriMo project! Yaaaay!

That's well and good, but I really need to be approaching 30,000 words right now... Anybody for a writing marathon?

I've been working on the Great Graphic Novel Project of '13, too, and I've got two more pages penciled. If I can stop messing with the scanning settings, I'll try to upload them for y'all to see.

My laptop's been having Internet issues lately, which is part of the reason the blog's been quiet for a few days, but I seem to be making a little headway in that department, so hopefully the radio silence will end here.

A happy NaNoWriMo to all, and to all a good night!

Leetle Problem

I'm about to start a heavy-duty penciling session for my graphic novel project, and I was planning on doing so while listening to some good drawing music, but I ran into a leetle problem.

The cover's been popping off for months. I don't know how I didn't manage to lose it in Europe. Usually I just stick it back on, and it'll stay put for another week or two. I guess I was always too cheap or lazy to buy new headphones.

This time, however, I don't know if I'll ever find the cover. It's lost in the pigsty that is my room. Maybe I'd find it if I cleaned up... Or maybe the cover actually did fall into the trash can like I hoped it didn't. Who knows? Not me.

Yes, I could clean, but I think that instead I'll just consider this a sign that it's time to buy new headphones.

In the meantime, I found a set of headphones that one of the airlines gave me last summer in my backpack. I knew there was a reason to keep them!

A Trip Back In Time

I had a pretty neat thought just now. What if I could go back in time and visit myself when I was eight years old? I would do some major showing off to impress my younger self.

I would definitely have to show eight-year-old Rebecca my iPhone. For all intents and purposes, let's just assume that, if I have technology that can send me back in time, I also have technology that allows me to connect to the phone service and WiFi of the future.

Because how impressed would someone from 2001 be with an iPhone 4S? The first version of the iPhone didn't even come out until 2007 (thank you, Wikipedia). I think the eight-year-old version of myself would freak out over the sheer awesomeness. In 2001, the cell phone was still a relatively new gadget in my house. I think my mom was still using her Nokia brick. If not, then my parents had upgraded to the not-much-more-impressive proto-flip phones. Only half of the phone flipped; it was the part that covered the number pad, and it was also the part you talked into.

But I really do think Mom was using the Nokia phone at that point. It was a box with some number keys and a sort of black-and-white screen (we didn't get cell phones with a color display until 2006). I think it had a game or two. That was the only part I would have been interested in, anyway.

It was a while ago, but I don't really remember being too excited about Mom's Nokia. I think that was mostly because cell phones were pretty much just portable telephones back in the day, and I didn't like talking to people on the phone (I still don't). I guess it was an improvement over the pager she had for work, though.

The main technology in my life was the PC that sat on a computer desk in our family's library/living room. If memory serves me right, we had three computers then: the desktop computer in the library, the desktop computer in my parents' bedroom, and the laptop in my dad's den. It would be another year or two (or three?) until the "community" computer got moved into the bedroom I shared with my sister.

Since my parents had their own computers to do their parent-y things on, the one in the living room/library was designated mostly for the computer games that my sister and I played. We played all kinds of computer games, although I don't remember ever actually using the Internet on that computer. The Internet was slowly growing on me (at some point between the ages of 5 and 9, my dad taught me how to use a search engine), but I think at that point I was still mostly concerned with playing computer games.

So imagine if eight-year-old Rebecca was just hanging around the house one day, deciding whether to play with Barbies or to go outside and play in the backyard, when all of a sudden almost-twenty-one-year-old Rebecca walks in and whips out an entire computer that is roughly the size of a chocolate bar.

I would be like a character from Star Trek or something! Compared to the desktop computer I was familiar with at the time, my iPhone would definitely seem like something out of a sci-fi movie. At that point in my life, I had seen a computer with a touch screen apparatus before, although I don't know how I managed that, because touch screens were not common AT ALL. The closest thing I would have seen to an iPhone would have been my mom's Palm Pilot or my dad's Jornada (totally forgot about those until this very second), and I didn't even care about those because they were boring.

So I guess that raises the question... If I wasn't interested in cell phones or personal data assistants when I was eight, would I care at all about an iPhone 4S?

My prediction: Yes.

Why?

The games.

Because cell phones today are more than just phones. They're, like, everything. And I think my younger self would be astounded by the fun things my iPhone has to offer. I think she would also consider my iPhone way cooler than my best friend's brother's Game Boy Color, because even an eight-year-old would be able to tell there's a huge difference between the graphics on a GBC and the graphics on my iPhone 4S.

Also, I think she'd find it super awesome that I can talk to my phone and it'll talk back.

So basically, I would be the coolest person she'd ever met.

Although she would probably wonder why the heck I haven't published a book and become a millionaire yet and what the heck I'm doing with my life.

Graphic Novel Update

Hey! I thought I'd post about something other than NaNoWriMo. I haven't written about non-NaNoWriMo stuff in a while.

My other big, huge project is the graphic novel, of course, and I actually met with my partner today. We discovered that the library has a scanner that is better than mine, and she found a good way to set up panels in InDesign. We decided that I'm going to go ahead and ink the panels and scan them, and then she'll arrange them in InDesign and digitally letter them.

In the meantime, I have to draw two more rough draft pages for Thursday, and I'm not looking forward to it. At all. I need to not wait until Wednesday night to start that...

And there's your update! Yay!

Now I'm going to work on my NaNoWriMo project, because I haven't written anything yet today and I have less than an hour for my words to count for today. So... toodles!

NaNoWriMo Word Count: 5735
Graphic Novel Page Count: 4 rough

NaNoWriMo Crisis AVERTED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YOU GUYS!!!!!!!!!

YOU GUYS, YOU GUYS, GUESS WHAT!!! I GOT IT BACK!!!!

For those of you just tuning in, I posted a rant only a few minutes ago about how I lost a good chunk of my NaNoWriMo project. To read it, either go to the previous post or click this helpful link.

Before resorting to foamy-mouthed ranting on the Internet, I searched the Internet for a way to recover my lost work. As you might conclude from the blog post with all the capital letters, I did not succeed.

HOWEVER,

As soon as I published the post, I had a sudden burst of inspiration. What do you do to autosaved files you don't want? You delete them. And where do deleted files go?

TO THE RECYCLE BIN!!!!!

Ah, glorious day! I found the autosaved file in the Recycle Bin where I hoped it would be. I restored it, feeling my life return to its normal happy place.

But then I realized I had no idea where the restored file had gone.

I tried searching for it on my computer... No results. But I was not ready to give up, not when I was so close to recovering my work! So I went back to the website I had been using earlier, which you can find here:

http://www.robertyale.com/blog/2011/3/2/find-lost-files-when-autosave-fails-in-microsoft-word.html

By somewhat following these instructions and somewhat clicking buttons until something worked, I managed to save all the work I did yesterday.

I think the basic gist of it was:
1) Recover the AutoRecovery save of the document
2) Don't panic when you can't find it
3) Open up a new Word Document
4) Go to File > Open and open up the autosaved file (.asd?) from there (that's where the website helped out).

THANK GOD!

THANK YOU, INTERNET!

THANK YOU, LAPTOP!

THANK YOU, RECYCLE BIN!

:) And now I can get back to work.

NaNoWriMo Word Count: 3270, BABY!!!!!!!