Anyway, back from hiatus! And finally, an end to the chapter. Hooray. It occurs to me now that people may not have seen the edit I made to the previous post last week that announced the week-long hiatus in the first place. I don’t really have a good place to make these kind of announcements, unfortunately. Maybe in the sidebar or something? I guess it’s something to consider for the future.

The current state of affairs is as follows: I still don’t have my own tablet, though I’m borrowing a wee Wacom Volito from a friend while I wait on the glorious arrival of the Intuos4 I ordered, which will probably be at least another week. Second time’s a charm, hopefully. I finally got refunded the $400 for the first botched order, and on a similar note, Paypal can go die in a ditch. I also still don’t have an internet connection at my new flat, I’m currently mooching internet off my very patient brother.

So, in short, nothing’s actually changed since last week, but I said I’d start updating again today and a promise is a promise. I also have a university deadline on Friday, so updates may or may not be affected by that.

New vote incentive, just the lineart for today’s page. Also, thank you to the people who voted despite the hiatus and complete lack of new vote incentives, you da best. I’ve been doing a lot of pencil sketching recently due to the tablet I’m currently using being a bit of a killer on my wrist, but naturally it would appear that I no longer have a power lead for my scanner, otherwise I might have been able to rustle up something a bit more interesting for the incentive.

In conclusion, August is made of fail so far.

Edit: I’ve disabled the Rampage Network footer ad in an attempt to start troubleshooting the redirection issue since the small amount of info I could find on the problem pointed towards a dodgy rotating ad. Again, if you’re still getting redirected from any part of the site please email me or leave a comment on this post.

Firstly, I got an email from a reader today saying that when he went back through the archive around page 56 he was redirected to some sort of yahoo karaoke store. I wasn’t able to replicate the issue, but has anyone else been having similar problems? My initial hunch was a dodgy Project Wonderful ad, but I have no way to be sure.

Secondly, I’m backdating this post to Wednesday but unfortunately this really is properly late now, what with it being about 3pm on Thursday where I am. Kind of sucks to break a run of consistent updates that’s lasted since the start of the comic, but I still don’t intend to miss any, even if they have to go up late. Friday’s page will probably be going up on Saturday (or possibly later, I’m running out of places to access the internet at the moment), and I may have to call a short hiatus in order to get everything sorted on my end. Turns out it’s quite hard to maintain a webcomic without internet access or a proper drawing implement, who knew?

I probably could have posted this on time if I hadn’t had to drop it yesterday in order to properly move everything out of my old flat. My old landlord decided to rip up all the carpets and start painting while we still had stuff in there, despite us still paying rent on the place until Friday. Still kind of pissed off about that… The page itself was finished about 11 hours ago, but there was no way I was going a-wandering through Dundee at 4am in order to wake up one of my friends so I could use his internet connection. I like to think I’m pretty dedicated, but I’m not that dedicated. :|

My tablet completely died just as I started on this page, and I actually had to draw the whole thing with a mouse. If anything looks funny that’s my extremely valid reason, and I’m sticking with it. Fortunately one of my flatmates showed up to loan me a cheap tablet as I was about to get started on the colouring, but I still had to strip out a few stages in order to get the whole thing finished before the sun went down because I don’t have any internet access right now, and had to jaunt over to a friend’s flat in order to even upload this, and don’t much fancy running about Dundee lugging a laptop around in the dark.

If I get mugged on my way back, I’m suing Wacom. I haven’t even had anything to eat today, this is quite sad. End whine.

Suffice it to say, Wednesday’s update may be extremely late or possibly non-existent, since I’m still moving and my flatmate’s tablet is a bit fumbly and awkward.

Edit: Amidst all my bitching, I completely forgot – Red Moon Rising was six months old yesterday! And since I got this page up just about on time (that is, before midnight in my timezone), that’s six whole months of uninterrupted updates. I don’t feel quite so bad if I end up missing an update on Wednesday, though I will try and get a page posted. Can I get a high five over here?

Edit – I completely blanked on this and forgot to mention it: Red Moon Rising has properly joined the Sage Comics collective now! That’s probably been pretty obvious due to the corner ribbon that’s been on the site for over a month, but it wasn’t quite finalised until now since I had to send a bunch of small stuff (banner graphics and things) to Alice in order to be added, but then my site got hacked… I’m sure you can imagine what took priority there. I finally got around to it though, and you should all check out the comics on Sage since they are cool, and also awesome.

I’m making a little attempt to get back to the comic’s cel-shaded roots by trying to get the cel-shading looking good on its own so I don’t have to do quite so much touching up, which invariably makes the art look a lot more painty. Also, I’m trying to be a bit more judicious with my use of the extra shadow layer, especially on the faces. I think it’s looking good combined with the newer lineart method, and the whole colouring process is only taking like an hour and a half now, which is crazy. If only I could actual draw faster…

Along those lines, the new vote incentive is just the lineart for this page since I didn’t have any time to draw up anything except the page this weekend. And we’re falling out of the top 100! Come on folks!

Also, I don’t know if anyone except me can tell the difference, but I’ve made a big change to the way I draw the pages in that I don’t ink them any more – my inking was terrible, and just took up time. Instead I’m simply cleaning up the sketches and colouring over those which, funnily enough, has resulted in a much nicer line weight overall and is saving me about an hour or so in my process. Great success! Anyone who’s interested in the difference (I expect that would be precisely no one) can compare the final linework for pages 64 and 65 here and here.

New vote incentive, another speedpainty landscape where I did a load of cheating messing about with different brushes in Photoshop.

For some reason this page was absolute murder to get done… maybe because it has real backgrounds, unlike the last few pages and also probably because I couldn’t decide on a colour scheme. I thought it’d end up more green than this, but hey… whatever, I don’t really like green anyway. Also, the rendering seems to be creeping away from cel-shading and towards being more painterly (again), which I guess I’ll need to keep an eye on, since over-complication is my sworn enemy. My computer kept crashing too. I put off formatting my hard drive to get this page done in something vaguely resembling a timely fashion, but I think it’s really asking for it now.