Blog

New computer stuff

Brock Beauchamp
April 20, 2011

First off, thanks to my girlfriend Rachel for filling in with last week’s blog entry! She’s an avid sci-fi & fantasy reader and will probably chime in from time to time with a book review or another sort of blog-type thingy on top of helping me write and edit Variables behind the scenes. A few months ago, I decided if I was going to go full-steam ahead with this comic, I was going to need a new home workspace for the digital side of things. I vacillated between waiting for a new iMac, buying a Mini as a stop-gap, or... View Article

Hospital page two

Brock Beauchamp
April 18, 2011

Here’s the next page of Variables! In this page, you begin to see Blake’s frustration with what happened in the woods and that he realizes something very strange has been happening to him. His father is just relieved to see him and naturally, wants to get the hell back home and out of the hospital. Next up, we’re jumping back to Candice and Isabel so this is the last we’ll see of Blake for a few weeks. With that said, I’m approaching the halfway point with the first issue. It seems like this has been going on forever but it’s... View Article

The Windup Girl

Avatar
April 13, 2011

Woo-hoo guest blogger here! I read a lot of books, and especially a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and then I have a lot of thoughts about them.  Which I am excited to share with the world via this exciting gig of periodic guest-blogging! I recently chose The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi for my sci-fi book club. Trying to pronounce or spell that last name would ordinarily be enough to put me off the book, but it was hailed as one of the top 20 sci-fi books of 2010 and I’ll read anything with a post-apocalyptic feel.  It was... View Article

Preview, page 7

Brock Beauchamp
March 25, 2011

It’s Friday (again) and time for the weekly upcoming page preview. I’ve been getting a bit behind this week and given that my work schedule is going to be insane next week, I need to cram as much of my free time into the comic as possible to maintain the one page a week schedule. After that, I need to focus on the home stretch and convention season so I can be prepared for the late summer and autumn convention circuit. I just picked up a Playstation 3, which I’m hoping won’t eat into my free time too much over... View Article

Adverts on Webcomics

Brock Beauchamp
March 23, 2011

I recently saw someone bring up a point about low traffic webcomics and advertising: if you only earn pennies a day from ads, why dilute your content and cause reader distraction by implementing ads when you gain very little from them? Advertising is a sticky subject in the comicking community. Some swear by them, others against. Some despise ad blockers and ask their readers not to use them while others think that is tantamount to whining and that readers should be able to browse the web however they please. There doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus on anything... View Article

San Diego Comic Con!

Brock Beauchamp
March 21, 2011

I haven’t done much work on the comic this past week (thanks be to my small buffer for the short hiatus) and it’s been a nice change of pace after over three months of non-stop work. My batteries are recharged and I’m ready to spend the next seven days working on building that buffer back up because on Friday, I found out that SelfCentEnt is going to San Diego Comic Con! To have the first issue all printed and ready, I need to be about three pages ahead of schedule by the end of the first issue. That gives me... View Article

Friday preview page 6

Brock Beauchamp
March 18, 2011

I’m glad I spent a few weeks building a small buffer because I really needed it this week. Last weekend, I couldn’t draw anything that mattered and this week, I’ve had things to do and/or I needed to do a spring cleaning on the place in preparation to getting my motorcycle up and running, the garage cleaned for the incoming floodwaters, and tonight, I need to have the snow tires removed from my car so I don’t burn off that precious soft rubber in this 50 degree weather. You have to love Minnesota sometimes… On the more fun side of... View Article

New page & Intuos4

Brock Beauchamp
March 7, 2011

On Friday, I finally spent a few bucks and upgraded my drawing tablet, an older Wacom Graphire Bluetooth. It worked well for what I needed at the time but now that I’m comicking full-time, something larger and more sophisticated was in order. Enter a large Intuos4 tablet. It’s about double the square footage of my old tablet and offers four times the sensitivity. I’ve never been comfortable with drawing digitally and now I see why it bothered me. The larger real estate and increased sensitivity gives my hand more room to work, which results in less jerkiness in line quality.... View Article

Preview: New scene

Brock Beauchamp
March 4, 2011

After a short three page intro to the Blake Monroe story, now it’s time to switch gears. Here is the first page of the second main arc of Variables: 1992. It takes place in Atlanta and involves two detectives who are looking into mysterious break-ins that are plaguing the area. I thought these scenes would bore me but it turns out that I’m enjoying drawing them more than the first three pages (I’m currently working on coloring page five right now), even though very little action is going to occur for a few pages (damn you, exposition!). For the past... View Article

Webcomicking: RGB vs CMYK

Brock Beauchamp
March 2, 2011

To preface why I’m writing this blog, one of my first post-college jobs was working as a pre-press tech in a print shop before later moving into graphic design for the better part of a decade. I’ve sent hundreds, if not thousands, of print jobs to printers all over the world. I learned much of what I know on the job and while the experience was often “do it wrong three times before getting it right”, during that time I became very comfortable with various print processes ranging from film-based offset to digital offset to pure digital to large-format printing.... View Article

Superhero webcomics

Brock Beauchamp
February 23, 2011

I've been fishing (trolling) around the Internet for weeks, trying to determine why there is a dearth of superhero webcomics online. They completely dominate the print market in America but have a very small web footprint. After asking various webcomickers and fans why this is the case, I'm still nearly as puzzled as I was when I set out to answer the question. On the plus side, I did find a few superhero books so the landscape isn't *quite* as barren as I initially believed it to be. These are the reasons people gave me: They dominate print and therefore, no one wants to read them online.

New page, Variables

Brock Beauchamp
February 21, 2011

I spent almost all of yesterday working on the book and I'm happy to say that I have nearly an entire page of buffer finished. I'll take some time to finish it today and possibly start on pencils for page four, which happens to be AN ENTIRELY NEW SCENE. So that means I have drawn my first introduction scene of Variables! Page three took me nearly 8 hours to color, which I hope does not become the standard for eight panel pages. That's just too long to color a page once a week after spending anywhere from six to ten hours penciling and inking the damned thing. I'm hoping this page was just an oddity and not the rule for some of these high count pages that are coming up in the first issue. Anyway, I'm starting to pile up comics that I need to read, including the last 4-5 issues of The Walking Dead. I've been so busy working on this book that I rarely find time to sit and READ comic books anymore.

Preview – new comic strip

Brock Beauchamp
February 18, 2011

Bill Watterson is one of the artistic icons of the past 50 years and one of the biggest influences on my art as a child. As a result, I've always wanted to do a straight-up, old-fashioned comic strip that drew from the elements of his brilliant Calvin & Hobbes work (one of the most fun, warm-hearted, and absolutely rolling-on-the-floor funny comics strips ever created), along with other great strip creators I followed such as Walt Kelly (Pogo... just fantastic) and Breathed (Bloom County, Outland... political, yet still charming). But, alas, my talent compared to these men is limited and despite thinking about ideas for a strip off-and-on for 20 years, I never found the correct mix of biting humor and cutesy charm that all of these strips possess.

Hello, Android.

Brock Beauchamp
February 16, 2011

After purchasing an original iPhone in early 2008 and upgrading to a 3G in 2009, I have deserted the iPhone camp and joined the Android crew. Overall, the two operating systems are nearly interchangeable, with iOS getting the nod in some regards while Android gets the nod in others. It's the hardware that separates these two phones and I couldn't be happier to move away from Apple's closed system and into the loving embrace of the Inspire's 4.3" screen, HSPA+ 4G data (really, more like 3.5G), and faster hardware specs. All of this for just $99, or $100 less than the lower-specced iPhone 4.