Each week I thought I would post my writing to see what people think. I would really like some serious feedback, but not on the prose. Let me explain what I mean: because this is going to be a comic, the quality of the prose is irrelevant, I’m looking more for feedback on the characters, scenes, dialogue and general feel of the story. I’m not writing it as a traditional comic script, so the final comic may differ quite a bit from what I’m writing now.

On Saturday nights I’ll make a new update. I’m posting to my blog across three sites (Epidigm.net, the Atheneum and the Even in Arcadia mainpage), but I will see the comments no matter where you make them. The post on the Atheneum will be open for the public, so you don’t have to worry about donating.

The working title for the story is Don’t Rush It. I may or may not change this in the future!

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Special Note: While this story is written as prose, it’s intended to become a comic in the near future. Thus there may be some unnatural attention paid to setting description, composition, camera angles and/or character descriptions.

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He never slept well after he’d been drinking. With parched mouth and head swimming, Ryan couldn’t help but toss in his sheets until his alarm sounded his need to depart for class. After a cup of coffee and a dry piece of toast (less for his hunger, and more for absorbing leftover alcohol in his stomach), he was trying to keep himself from dozing as a professor was imparting the historical importance of Adam Smith.

By all rights he shouldn’t be hungover in History of Economics, it was a completely unintentional product of his relative inexperience in refusing his pushy dormmates. When it came down to it, drinking and messing up at Settlers of Catan had more allure than any textbook ever written. Ryan closed his eyes for a moment reflecting on how truly dull Adam Smith actually was.

Just as Ryan felt the realisation of his terrible mistake, that moment of panic when you understand that you’ve not just closed your eyes, but are also potentially drooling on your shirt, he felt someone brush against him. The girl who had unobtrusively sat next to him, and of whom he hadn’t made note of before, was leaning forward and scratching something on his note paper.

Do you believe in the Invisible Hand of the Market?

Ryan paused, blinking rather rapidly at the fluid script. Was that what the professor was discussing now? Had he missed something important in his dozing? What could he really say? He glanced over at the writer briefly, trying not to be too obvious. She was awfully pretty, with straight brown hair casually pulled back from her soft face and round, dark eyes. She was especially pretty smiling at him in the way that she was, coy and almost mischeivous. If only his head didn’t feel like it was filled with cotton, making his wits slow. Not that he was particularly witty when talking with pretty strangers, as he was know more often than not to bumble at his shoes while the girls mockingly grinned and made excuses to be elsewhere. His neighbour would have none of his silence, apparently, as she nudged him gently to urge his response.

No. Not really.

What a terrible answer, he thought after his pen left the page. Really, could he have been more uninteresting? A flair of defiance welled up in Ryan as he recognized his self consciousness. No, he thought, it was a ridiculous question. What was she playing at?

Ryan’s defiance died as she smiled wider and leaned forward to scrawl again, faster and more enthusiastically this time.

Good. I would hate to be sitting next to a crazy conservative. :)

She even put a little smiley face at the end, a small mark that seemed to be in on the joke. If there was a joke. If only Ryan’s head would straighten itself out, then he might be able to decipher if this girl was flirting with him, mocking him, or just a weirdo. The girl had already turned back to her notes and left Ryan to his almost dumbfounded appearance. He rubbed his eyes hard with his fists, allowing little stars to pop behind his eyelids. The pressure felt good, like it was waking his brain from a hazy dream. At this point he had given up on anything to do with Adam Smith and made the resolute decision to add the lecture notes to his growing pile of readings.

The lineup for coffee in between classes was always snake like, as most university students subsisted on regular doses of caffeine. This particular coffee bar was located in a busy corner of the main academic building, breaking up the drab concrete architecture with polished wood and soft display lights over European inspired menus boards. You could smell the roasted coffee beans and scalded milk before you turned to corner to find the place, and it was the smell Ryan always associated with his morning classes. Round tables and straight wood backed chairs were at one point pleasantly arranged around the ares before the students came to frequent them, moving the setup in any way they deemed necessary and covering them in piles of books and paper. Chairs and tables were a strictly limited commodity in a space where everyone needs at least three regular spots to fit their study materials, and the coffee bar was no exception. Ryan had already given up the idea of sitting and gathering himself, and while his rolling stomach would embrace a comfortable chair and a moment of relaxation, his cup of caffeine would have to do.

As Ryan was paying for his bitterly dark coffee loaded with a little too much sugar, a familiar impish grin peered out at him from over a stack of colour coded notes and haphazardly opened textbooks. His friend Lawrence was Chinese with a toothy smile, unsurprisingly straight black hair and a broad face. Much like the other anti-social university jerkwads, Lawrence had apparently determined that his book bag was worthy of it’s own chair.

“I’m assuming this is the chair you’re saving for me.” Ryan wryly smiled as he dumped the book bag unceremoniously to the floor.

“Well, you’re a two beer kind of guy who’s utterly predictable when hung over.” Lawrence replied, not looking up from his obsessive hightlighting.

“And this, ” Ryan gestured to the books and papers spread before him, “must simply be an elaborate ruse to not look like a creepy stalker.”

“Of course. First midterms are no match for a straight up genius like me.”
Ryan gave Lawrence a doubtful grunt and sipped the hot, frothy drink he so craved. Without putting much thought into the idea, he found himself also organising notes and leafing through his economics history textbook to the chapter on Adam Smith’s free market economics. From the corner of his eye he spotted a soft face framed with brown hair. He paused suddenly.

“Lawrence,” he nudged his studymate, “you see that girl over there? With the ponytail and the red sweater?”

Lawrence glanced up for half a second and returned to his highlighting, “Yeah, she’s pretty hot.”

“No, look,” Ryan pushes his class notes from that morning under Lawrence’s nose, “She’s in my econ class. She randomly wrote this to me.”

The toothy, teasing grin returned to his friend’s face as he skimmed the written exchange. He cocked an eyebrow as he looked back up at Ryan.

“You really should go and talk to her. She hates crazy right wingers, she’s clearly your soulmate.”

“Always with the joke,  Ryan mocked impertinently as his snatched the notebook back.

“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure she just recongnized you, Rye.”

“What?”

“That’s her, right?” Lawrence pointed in the direction of the line with his highlighter, “She’s coming over.”

By the time Ryan had swivelled around in his chair, the presumptuous girl from History of Economics was already standing over him. Her downward glance gave her an innocent and childlike look, wtih two saucer round eyes and almost perfectly straight teeth.

“I, uh, sit next to you in Econ 104, ” she started in a high voice, as if she were speaking an octave higher than her normal voice, “I, uh, don’t know your name.”

“Ryan!” he said almost instantly in return.

An awkward moment of silence followed. Was that really supposed to be an introduction? Ryan was used to the humiliation following his normally blundering conversations with the opposite sex, but this time he felt a tinge of pity for this girl’s hasty and unplanned greeting. If he were a more sophisticated person, perhaps Ryan could have saved her from the red embarassment creeping into her cheeks.

“I’m Lawrence, ” the broadfaced bookworm interjected, barely looking up from his work.

Ryan guessed that the exchange had put her off as her smile vanished. She quickly looked down to the travel cup in her hands. He knew that move, the feeling that if you avoid eye contact perhaps the situation will sort itself out. The problem was that usually you need someone more apt at social interactions to pick up the slack, and neither Lawrence or Ryan could claim that title.

“Oh wow,” she practically whispered, “Uh, I didn’t sound so rude in my head, sorry about that.” Her smile returned again, but couldn’t manage to reach her eyes, “I’m Vivian.”

She hesitated, not looking directly at either of them, “I, uh, have to go. See you around.”

Without so much as a quick step, she managed to get away as if running for her life. Lawrence had abandoned his study materials to watch her go.

“She’s cute.” Ryan put in, almost dreading his friend’s next quip.

“I was wrong about the joke earlier, she is actually your straight up soul mate.”

The dorms were like a social experiment gone awry. Cram as many kids between the ages of 18 and 21 together in too little space with shared facilities and archaic rules and watch what happens. Little did the experimenters know that their subjects were willing to brutally destory them and live as though it were a scene from Lord of the Flies with more alcohol and less severed pig heads. Or at least that’s how Ryan felt on a good day. On a bad day, it was more like a post apocalyptic wasteland.

With the pounding in his head and the exhaustion in his bones, Ryan knew it was getting to be a bad day.

He had already given up on his other classes as a waste of his potential sleep time and found himself under a mound of blankets with some Chopin keying softly through his headphones. He had started listening to music to go to sleep when he first moved into the dorms, mostly to drown out the late night conversations between neighbours. They weren’t being particularly loud, but Ryan had always been a light sleeper and great avoider of confrontations. Now, the music was comforting even when his floor was almost empty, and he had become accustomed to half listening to a melody as he slowly drifted off to sleep.

This nap was rather excellent and left a refreshed Ryan craving something with copious amounts of salt and fat. The light was fading in the evening sky when he had showered and dressed, greeting some of his dormmates as they returned from their day of classes. He found Lawrence in the common space, snapping down cards of colourful spells against a soft marshmellow looking second year resident. Perched on the edge of a worn and dirty looking sofa, he played the final move from his over powered combo deck to defeat his opponent. Lawrence sat back, clearly pleased with himself, as the marshmellow boy picked up the card for closer inspection. He was clearly not happy with what he read, as he pushed the card back across the table and began stacking up his own deck.

“Are we playing Magic tonight?” Ryan asked, sitting next to Lawrence.

The common room was old and well worn. Couches and chairs that had probably seen generations of students pass through the room lined the mental hospital white walls. Wide, unopenable windows were along one wall, facing out towards the university parkade and forest beyond. It wasn’t necessarily a cozy room, it gave Ryan the feeling that he ought to be meeting with a psychiatrist, but it was good enough for games and drinking on occassion. He was a little sick of it from the night previous, and hoped that Lawrence and the Marshmellow would be into leaving the dingy premises.

“Dinner.” Lawrence replied curtly, carefully slipping his protected cards into their little plastic case, “Then pub night.”

“Again?” Ryan rolled his eyes. Pub night happened every Thursday at the University Pub. It was terrible service and over crowded, but the beer was cheap and it was a good place for most people to meet new people.

“I need to put in my face time with the ladies.” Lawrence insisted, perhaps a little less sarcastically than he intended. He motioned to the Marshmellow and the three left the room.

All residents of the undergrad towers were required to buy food cards for the semester, so often they ended up eating in the terrible cafeterias run by some big conglomerate. While normally Ryan would cringe at the palid chicken burgers and wilting lettuce, the food service boasted a great deal of salty fried foods that he desperately wanted. The boys ate quickly, drinking down pop and discussing the different cards in the new Magic: The Gathering prerelease that they had found on the internet. Both Lawrence and the Marshmellow were fond of trying to best each other at the largest Magic nerd and largely ignored Ryan’s quips and ridiculous questions. Ryan enjoyed a game now and then, but he much preferred coming up with his own games to getting all fanboy on such and such new expansion to an already existing game. Unless it came packaged with a new and interesting game mechanic, his eyes usually started to glaze after a time.

Ryan briefly contemplated his participation in this evening’s plans, as he was already feeling a little thin from the previous night. He was awkward and difficult to talk to as it was, and in a large crowd in the pub it was almost impossible for him to socialize. He was insulated a bit from his own humiliation by the loud music and relative chance that the person he was talking to wouldn’t hear what he was saying, but only so much. Sometimes the music transitioned at just the right moment to highlight something particularly inane he was saying, much like a terrible movie trope that could only happen to a person such as himself.

One thing that significantly changed how I buy things is when I visited several factories on tour in Guangdong. If you don’t know, Guangdong is the powerhouse province for a large slice of the Chinese manufacturing pie, and it is the place where it all started. Shenzhen was the first special economic zone in the 1980s

Now I know when most Westerners hear about the factory conditions in developing nations they either try to pretend they didn’t hear, or go all activist on that biz. Actually visiting the factories gave me a different perspective – the bad working conditions are something that westerners have no control over, and no matter how “ethical” a business calls itself, at some point it has to do business with one of these factories, be it in parts, equipments, publishing, etc.

I visited 4 factories on a tour with a company that was offering free vaccinations and testing to the workers. The factory owners weren’t expecting to give tours, so I was offered a raw experience as the only foreigner in a small delegation of Chinese businessmen and women. The worst, by far, was the electronics factories. They were poorly run, dangerous and staffed with the youngest workers. This made sense, in a way, because electronics is a booming industry, so these factories pop up overnight. No time to make sure that everything is safe, standardized, etc.

The best was the paper and printing factories. The staff was better trained, the materials less hazardous and the building better maintained. Printing is an older industry that requires a lot more work to make a good profit, so there are less of them, but they are better maintained.

So how did this tour effect my purchasing? For one, I will not buy cheap electronic equipment. I want my electronics to last a minimum 5 years, and am willing to write angry, vitriolic emails to company CEOs if they don’t. I also prefer second hand electronic equipment, or trying to fix broken equipment over buying new stuff.

I’m also thinking of ditching my iPhone. The factories that make them are no better or worse than other smart phones, but Apple seems to want to make software for only their best phones, making my 3GS almost useless after only two years. The hardware is still in good shape, but it can’t function with the software. I don’t want to be sending my phone to the graveyard after only 2 years just because of a software issue, especially considering iPhone factories are notorious for putting up suicide nets around their buildings to stop workers from jumping due to poor working conditions. Apple can either deal with the software issue or I get another phone. It’s as simple as that.

So, what knowledge has changed your buying habits over the years?

Happy Holidays!

I have a viral eye infection. It makes it pretty painful to look at anything, particularly a screen, for any length of time. As such, the next page is nowhere near done. I anticipate that my illness won’t last long (the kind doctors have provided me with some medical relief), but it will put a delay on the page. I would like to say I will have it up on Thursday, but it might be as late as Friday or Saturday if my eyes still hurt. Then we can get back to our regular schedule!

Thank you so much for your patience guys! I’m normally a very healthy person, so getting sick is a very trying ordeal… Plus the separation from my sweet sweet drawing addiction.

Every month there will be a new wallpaper to download for your computer and/or cellphone

When I was a young and impressionable teenage girl I had a small seed of a dream. I wanted to make webcomics like the ones that I enjoyed reading during the lazy hours of IT class while trying to avoid the mind numbingly boring information on network architecture. I would read Megatokyo and be amazed that people would come back to the site a few times a week to read the pages as they updated. Then, as I have been prone to do, I told myself it was perfectly possible for me to do that too and even be successful at it.

Thus began my long and sometimes difficult journey into the world of comics that has led me here. I love Even in Arcadia. I love drawing, writing, sketching, promoting, doing all the boring bureaucratic paperwork for this comic. To be honest, I want to do more of it, more often.

I have created The Atheneum to help me realise this dream. It’s a subscription based site dedicated to giving donators more content, and it’s now up and running. I’m really excited because I’m looking forward to making wallpapers, illustrations, tutorials, blog posts and all sort of other fun stuff to fill it with. Every month there will be a new wallpaper available for download as well as a limited edition Artist Trading Card for anyone who donates more that $7 USD. The ATCs are my particular favourite because I get to send stuff to my readers in the mail, which is such a satisfying gesture. Perhaps I’m just a weird creep, but mail makes me happy.

I would not be surprised if you’re saying to yourself, “This sounds all well and good Anise, but how does it work?” Good question, small voice in my head. If you donate (using the big, red donate

For a donation of $7, you will receive a limited edition ATC in the mail. Because I <3 you.

button), you will be brought to a page upon completion of your payment. This page will have a password on it. You may use this password to access all the content over at The Atheneum for the calendar month. Any donation is good, be it $1 or $1,000 (if you, for some crazy reason, donate $1k to me, I will feel so guilty that I will send you multiple things in the mail until my guilt is sated).

If you donate late in the month, within 7 days of the end of the month to be precise, I will also email you the password for the next month. It’s only fair that people get as much access as they can for their donation, of course. Currently, the Atheneum is a little sparse, mostly because I still have a ton of content to upload. Not to worry, if you donate in September, you will get access until December 31, 2011, 3 whole months of goodies (including all the fun holiday stuff to come).

If the donations go well, I may even be able to add another update day to the schedule. Mostly because I’ll be able to drop a teaching day (which I’m dying to do).

Now that everything is up and running, I want to hear a little more from you guys! If you were to donate, what kind of content would you like to see? I have ideas for wallpapers, icons, avatars, tutorials, videos, sketches, blog posts, reviews, and all sorts of stuff, but I’d really like to know what everyone else is interested in too!

I know I must say this a lot (it feels like I say it a lot), but thank you very much for reading. I honestly count every new reader as a little piece of success that keeps me going. You guys are amazing to come back week after week to see my little comic. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

If you are interested in donating, you can do so here:

In my process, I don’t start with thumbnails, of course. I have a full script. Before I got really into comicking, I was a writer, and because of this I find it difficult to get the essence of a narrative without writing it out in semi-prose. I call it this because there are full sentences and dialogue and all the rest, but in terms of prose it’s really bare bones. I give the script to my husband Wei, the great storyboard artist, and he collaborates with me to draw the thumbnails. He’s super awesome :)

This is the thumbnail for the page. It is drawn by hand on regular computer paper and scanned in at a relatively low resolution. I then import it into Manga Studio and fit it to the page dimensions.

The focus for the thumbnails is panelling, composition and a bit of value.  I want to make the storytelling really clear and be able to convey emotions, mood and action with as little expositionary dialogue as possible. This page, for example, has no dialogue at all.

I like to sketch directly on top of the thumbnails in order to keep the composition and gestural movement really tight. This isn’t really a problem because I do the sketching digitally, but I imagine you could reproduce the process traditionally with some enlarging and a lightboard. Although I have seen artists do that more with the step between sketching and inking moreso than thumbnails and sketching.

Sketching is a relatively fast process, but I’m not the world’s best inker, so I like to get really tight pencils on facial expressions, eyes and other smaller details. You can see that I haven’t really sketched much of the background, and this is mostly because I paint the backgrounds in photoshop. Painting is done in value, not line, so sketching out hard lines is kind of counter productive at this stage.

During the sketching I layout the panels with Manga Studio’s fabulous panel layer tool. If I need to do any complex perspective or straight lines, I might bust out the perspective rulers. I prefer to use them sparringly because exactly correct perspective looks really odd to the eye, and it’s more natural to have several vanishing points clustered together, rather than just one.

One thing I want to point out is that I sketched Odai’s house in the background. You’ll see it disappear in the inking stage. I import the sketch into photoshop to guide my painting.

Like I said earlier, I’m no pro at inking. Out of all the techniques that go into making comics, I think it’s my weakest. I ink all my pages in Manga Studio. I feel most comfortable with the pen tools and the way they respond to how I move my hand. The next best thing for me is inking traditionally with a crow pen. I have heard some wonderful things about using brushes, but I’m just not comfortable with my skills yet. I practice with sketching, but I just don’t have that je ne sais quoi when it comes to the brush.

I focus on foreground, figures and areas of compositional balance when inking. Background and mood elements are left for painting.

At this point I import the manga studio layers into photoshop and begin painting. This has to be the trickiest part of everything so far. In order to paint my backgrounds and colour the pages, I had to practice a lot. I did almost 2 years of Anatta, where I got to make all my amateur colouring mistakes. Then I worked for almost a year practicing digital painting. Not every day, but definitely three times a week or more. Speed painting was the most important thing I practiced in terms of making comics, because it forced me to learn to choose my focus and spare the things that don’t need as much attention. If you are new to comics, I do recommend keeping the colouring simple to start, but definitely challenge yourself if you want to get better. If you want to keep the comic consistent, then practice sketches and speed paintings become crucial. Deviant Art seems to be the haven for digital painting at all levels, and I have found some really comprehensive tutorials there.

So this is the colouring process, broken down. I start by laying down a “mood gradient”. This is a gradient between two complementary, split complementary or analogous colours. By the time the page is finished, you won’t see most of this gradient, I’m just using it to blend with and keep the colours consistent. Each panel will have a separate gradient depending on it’s camera angle and lighting.

After the gradients, I grab a square textured brush and start laying down basic values in the foreground, middleground and background. When I have that to my liking, I use a hard round brush with dynamics enabled (to vary to opacity depending on pen pressure) and start to paint in the more distinct elements. I don’t use a fancy brush for this, or any layer tricks because there’s no need. Those “customizables” won’t make you a better painter, but they might encourage you to be a lazy painter. Nothing replaces some good, hard studying.

So here you can see I painted in the trees, house, ground and path. I paint all of these on one layer.

Now I lay down the flats. I use the bpelt filter to do this because it saves a boatload of time.

I have a palette for each character, in particular their hair and skin. I paint bucket them in on a separate layer from the background. With the background layer turned off (so that the gradient is visible), I lower the opacity of the flats to about 75-80% and reselect them. This give the flats a uniform feel and changes the colour composition for every scene. I decided early on that this was the technique I was going to use to visually tell the audience that the scene has changed. After I paint bucket the new colours in, I return the flats layer to 100% opacity and turn the background layer back on.

In this last step I do the shadows, highlights and extra painted details that aren’t in the background (the feathers for the guards’ helms in this page). The shadows are a desaturated brown colour on a multiply layer. The highlights are brightened versions of the flats. The added painted details are on their own layer and are painted with the same technique as the background. I start with the darker colours and a bigger brush, and as the colours get brighter I make the brush smaller and more refined.

After this I letter the comic. This page is kind of a poor example because there is no dialogue, but oh well ^^; The speech bubbles are on a layer with stroke turned on in the blending options. When the lettering is done, I flatten the whole thing, crop out the bleed, and change the image size (the original is 11×14 inches at 600 DPI) to 550 px x 794 px at 72 dpi. I export it for the web as a jpeg at 60% compression and upload it for all to read!

I hope that someone, somewhere out there will find this information useful! If you have any particular questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Even in Arcadia is a fantasy webcomics of the long and dramatic form. As such, it will be ongoing for a good amount of time and finding convenient ways for you to read along is a big part of what I want to do! The comic updates once a week on Tuesdays, usually at about 12-1 PM PST.

EiA is in all the regular spots, we have a facebook fan page where I post all updates and some extra goodies. I have a wonderful twitter account that, in addition to posting about page updates for both EiA and Days of Leviathan, I tend to post about all sorts of things related to comics, politics, observations, art and writing.

I also post to some relatively irregular spots. You can check them out under the “find us” section, including the comic list sites and voting sites. I’m not going to push voting or anything, but if you are so inclined I won’t be terribly unhappy. I’ll probably post a reminder and small incentive at the beginning of every month, but not at the expense of getting the comic done, of course.

I hope you’re enjoying the comic so far! I know I’m excited about making it. Do leave me a comment here if you have anything in particular you want to share. Critique is just as welcome as anything else here!

I’ll have copies of Lotus Root Children, Anatta, Tomato Chicken, a few prints and art cards. I’ll be happily doing commissions all weekend.

You should also check out Cloudscape Comics and Lost City Comics, our fabulous neighbours, Miriam Libicki over at table D-29 and Katie Ellis O’Brian, whose table remains a mystery to me right now.

Don’t be afraid to say hi, even if you can’t buy anything, I love chatting with people and it’s better than sitting at my table feeling like a total  loner ^^

Chloe Chan, one of my favourite indie manga artists, interviewed me about Even in Arcadia and some of the themes of the story. There are no spoilers, as far as I think, but it will give you a bit more of an idea of what the comic is about.

Updating everyday for a week straight. It’s was pretty crazy. I go some good traffic and feedback, and I’m pretty happy that I’m now off and running with Even in Arcadia. I hope I haven’t spoiled everyone too much, because EiA won’t update everyday (I know, I know), but once a week. Tuesdays to be exact. If you’re looking for some good ways to keep up to date, might I recommend liking the facebook page, following me on twitter or subscribing on the RSS?

I would also like to quickly announce that we’ve been accepted to open a store on the highly quality and currated Cargoh.com website. We’ve opened our new shiny Epidigm store with Lotus Root Children, of course, because these 3,000 books can’t be my lifesize lego block forever. I will post when we have more good stuff, including a set of sushi inspired postcards, fine art prints and other books. I have been asked by a number of people if EiA will be turned into a print book. As of now, I don’t have plans to do so in the next 6 months or so. I am, however, quite diligent and set up all the files to be easily converted to print. Thus there could be a few print books as soon as I get enough of a demand. Considering it’s full colour, it’s quite an investment.

Lastly, we have about 5 days until the end of the 21 Journeys fundraiser for the Cloudscape Comics Society. Don’t listen to much to the IndieGoGo number, we’re actually much closer to our goal with all the money that has been pledged in person. Nonetheless, if you’re looking to preorder a copy (both Wei and myself have a story in his anthology), I suggest you do so soon. After next Monday we will no longer be taking preorders.

Thanks again to everyone. See you next Tuesday!