Beyond Neverwonder

As anyone that has been following things here may have noticed, the design of the website changed yesterday. The original page layout was buggin’ me a bit, so I played around with a new design. I like this one much better. The Status Box is up at the top of the page now, so it’s easier to see when the page is loaded. It also makes things like, well, like that oversized comic, work much better. I would have had to tweak the comics page template to make that work with the old version, so coming up with a new setup was just as easy. I also opted for a 1024×768 sized layout since after looking at a lot of the stats and things, only 2% of people were using a monitor size smaller than that, so I think I’m safe leaving it this big. After all, if someone with an 800×600 sized screen comes along, the comic is still the first thing they’ll see. So that’s all good.

Ah, spring. Yes, it’s spring time brings with it all sorts of wonderful things… Like alergy season. I hate sneezing.

Beyond major sneezing fits, spring also brings with it things like the coming of Summer Semester at school. For those not in the know, when I was in college back 12 years ago, I never had the opportunity to finish my degree. I was exceptionally close. I had one class left for my Associate of Science in Graphic Design and the school then had no Bachelor degrees. (It was just a community college then.) Life just got in the way and I was never able to get that last class finished up. And then the college changed from being a community college to being a state college. The requirements for my degree changed and made it so that I’d have to take a TON of new stuff that wasn’t there before. WIth the prospect of having to pretty much start my degree over, I kept away from school.

Then in early 2006, I attempted to return to school. I was in Kansas at the time and the community college there had my degree set up so that all I’d need to do is take five general ed classes and I’d be done with my Associates degree. I started classes. I was even accepted at the University of Kansas into their BFA program for the Fall. Then, as life tends to do, things fell apart out there, and school was again put on hold.

Now it’s 2007 and I’m staring at the prospect of school again. My original college has since adjusted the degree requriements yet again, and now I only have six classes to finish my AS degree. Better still, after those 6 classes are done, I have 18 or so classes to finish my Bachelors. (Sillier still, it’s a Bachelors of Science in Art. Yeah, go figure.)

I’m hoping that life works out this time. I need to get this thing done. More for the reason that no one seems to want to hire a graphic designer today that doesn’t have the piece of paper… I’d like to have real work again. As fun as sitting around doing next to nothing is, I’d rather be doing something productive.

::achoo!:: That one’s for free.

Hey everyone! I want to welcome everyone to my next experiment. I call it Beyond Neverwonder. It all actually began as a goofy little word play joke that became something that sounded like some fun. I wondered what I could come up with if I took concepts from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and mashed them with ideas from the story Peter and Wendy. It’s Neverland meets Wonderland and there’s a big party down that hole. I found there to be a lot of places where things could cross over and there’s a lot of goofy things that I had thought of… so this will hopefully be a bit of a fun little ride here. I have a bunch of ideas that I can hopefully translate into something interesting for folks.

Ultimately though, I plan to use this little webcomic to work on my art skills. I got the idea for this from my friend Carol, who has a great little series called SPQR Blues. She calls it “a soap opera with swords and sandals” and rightly so. It’s a Roman Emipre-ish series that can be a lot of fun. But what led to that was her desire to get back into drawing again. She was working on a concept of doing a series of 10,000 drawings and the idea was that at the end, some improvement would have happened. I have to say that Carol has done an excellent job with her little experiment. I’m hoping that I can do the same.

I find that I tend to learn better with I have an actual project to do. So this is the project that I’m iimposing upon myself to help me , as Carol put it, relearn how to draw. I admit that my artwork isn’t the greatest on the planet right now. I’m ok. I tend to think of myself as a well-meaning hack. I can do some artstuffs alright, but there’s a lot of things that I’m rusty at and there’s a TON of stuff that I just downright suck at. Hands are the main one for me. I’m admittedly horrible at drawing hands. I’m working on it and I think I’m doing a bit better than I have in the past, but there’s always room for more. The other thing that I want to work on is backgrounds and clothes. It’s more the little details that I have a hard time with and that’s something that Neverwonder is going to hopefully let me do.

So with that, here’s the first page of Beyond Neverwonder. Like poor Alice, it can only do down from here. :)