ROW80 Update, May 2

A Round of Words in 80 Days update:

Sunday Day 28 - 143 minutes.  Mainly did work on a tentative outline and the Intro post for the blog story.

Monday Day 29 - 130 minutes.  Probably more, actually but I forgot to keep track.  I worked on multiple things, mainly related to the blog serial.  Some planning, some artwork, and actual writing.  I had excessive help from a cat with the artwork, so I shall not show it to you yet.

Tuesday Day 30 - 132 minutes.  I had so much fun with tracking and kerning today!  (That's typography-geek speak for shoving letters around.)  You see below a concept sketch for the header art.  I plan to do a different background for each episode, and so none of them will likely get past the concept stage... and they'll all be different concepts.  (At least until I fall in love with something.)

But I love love love my type logo.  Isn't that a cool font?  It's called Noir-et-Blanc, from Austrailian font creator Paul Lloyd, who has a lot of very nice period fonts on DaFont. These are freeware and not always fully realized, but much more complete and detailed than most.

NOTE: the space at the left is partly design, but it also might be an area I use for a motif of some sort.  In this case it might be a hand rising out of the water, or maybe I'll move the sun over there.

Keep It Simple Stupid!

I've also been writing -- actually doing more writing work than artwork.  The main thing I'm working on, though, right now is learning to simplify and focus.  After so many years of learning to be more and more complicated, this is something I have to learn.  

It's like writing haiku -- except that the stuff I leave out of one episode can very often fill its own episode later.  It's a strange way to think about a story.  Kind of an untangling of it, and doing it in pure droplets.

Episode 1, however, is a two beat episode -- because it introduces the narrator and the story too.  The key there, though, is that it is two beats. Not four beats on this point and four on that.  I don't know that I have a great teaser ending for it, but I think it will do. (At least I'll have it in shape to do the job by Monday.)

See you in the funny papers.