Tonight, on a very special Saffron and Sage, Liri casts Haste, an ability that was established....four years ago?! During the pandemic?! Jesus christ, webcomics take forever. Good thing we've got haste magic! Read faster at SaffronComic.com! 

Art study of a picture by Mia Kameron I saw. I have no shame about using 3D models, but I also don't want to grow reliant on them so I'm kind of alternating. I have something absurd like 30 layers here, and I've found a new insane method of shading that I kind of like. I'm pretty happy with this, even if I cleverly chose a reference image with no hands or feet to draw.

I haven't been talking about Dumbing of Age much recently, but the current arc is cute as fuck.

Thanks! Reviews inspiring people to create is the best thing a critic can hear, and I appreciate it a lot!

Star Impact ⭐

What is it: An action series about professional boxers with anime-style superpowers

The Good: Distinct exaggerated art style with good cartooning. Fun action scenes. I’m a sucker for Punch-Out! references.

The Bad: The fights are fun but lack tension; I never felt like Aster might lose or even that she’d come up with a creative/interesting way to win. It’s still early going in the comic, though, so that might change.

You should read it if: You wanna read a cartoony comic about people punching each other in the face with superpowers.

(See all mini-reviews here)

Sometimes you just start drawing and you just keep drawing and then you kind of forget what your plan was so you flip through your art reference folder and see a tutorial on something and then you're working on and off on something with no plan for like a week and then you finish shading everything lit from the top left like normal you notice the arrow you'd drawn for yourself to remind yourself to put the light source on the bottom left because there was a magic circle at some point in the plan and then you're just kind of like "fuck it" and throw down some brushes to make a wall and carpet and you upload it to tumblr with a rambly self-depreciating explanation of whatever the hell this is.

I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on in Gunnerkrigg Court right now, but I appreciate this dude's character design. I have zero context for anything happening in this flashback, but even though this dude is in shadow, I can see just enough of his silly mustache to ground myself in roughly 1900 give or take twenty years, and that this dude is some sort of military from the coat. It's nice in a flashback that's meant (?) to be mysterious when information is being revealed to you slowly through inference.

Hey, thanks!

So, lessee. Your comic is called "Piebald Dove Plea". Bit of a weird name, for a bit of a weird comic. It's dreamlike, and to be honest I'm having a lot of trouble following it.

Some of that is that it's literally difficult to read. None of the dialogue is appropriately sized for the word balloon it's in here, and panel three has some (black) text escape the balloon into the (dark) background, so I literally can not tell what this dude is saying.

And I can see that this is something you're working on, there's a notable improvement between pages ten and page fifty-one (I like the "feathery" word balloon in the fourth panel here!), but even on the later pages there's a lot of issues and even some words escaping the balloons again. And it's pretty clear why this is happening: These word balloons don't fit the shape of the dialogue well at all. I spent some time trying to fix them, and while I'm not a letterer and I'm sure someone else could've done better, it was rough trying to get that text to fit nicely.

I think this does look a bit better, but that's mostly just because I'm using a better comics font (Anime Ace 2.0 BB from Blambot. It's free!), and maybe that I split "to sink them into cockerels" a bit from the rest of the monologue to make it hit a bit different, but I'm fighting to squeeze the square text into the round balloon. I cropped out Panel 4 because I was too scared to even try.

My own lettering is actually pretty trash, to be honest, and I'm sure all the real artists in the audience are tittering to themselves at those fucked balloons, but I think this is still enough to illustrate my point. I typed the words, then I drew the bubbles, then I drew the little rabbit doodle, and everything fits so much nicer and I can properly draw the rabbit there because I know where it fits. It's way easier because you'll see balloon/dialogue issues when it's easy to fix and not when the whole goddamn page is done being drawn and you can't change it. For the first panel in the example, simply moving Dorcas a bit to the left would've made it way easier for you to fit the dialogue in, but it's a huge pain to do that now.

For newer artists, it's usually best to focus on fixing on thing at a time, and fixing up that lettering is the think you should focus your energy into before moving on to other things. It's a small thing that's relatively easy to learn and makes such a difference.

Tonight, on a very special Saffron and Sage, bet you didn't think that sword was going to come up again. Or maybe you did. I don't get a lot of comments on my comics so I kind of assume you're all just sitting there silently basking at our greatness. Bask more at SaffronComic.com! 

Breaking: John Allison's comic starring public domain character Conan The Barbarian has been shut down by copyright trolls with an ambiguous claim to the character in the US.

Thanks!

Honestly, I don't think it's actually interesting. I said for a long time that the only place left for Tats to go was overt "The Jews are evil" racism and then he finally went there and everything else now is just different flavors of it. Nazi does nazi things isn't really news

After the success I had with the HeroForge models, I decided to grab a Clip Studio Paint model in kind of a random pose to see how that went, and then my quick 10-minute curiosity just kind of kept going. Had I known I was going to keep going with this, I probably would picked a better pose, but c'est la vie.

63% of you said that tracing a HeroForge model counted as drawing, I think this would probably get a higher score on that poll since it's an artist model designed explicitly for this purpose and because I'm drawing all the clothes etc. I'm also realizing that the model is most useful when you use it more as a guide and that if I tried tracing all the individual fingers in the hands it'd look way worse. Anyway, things I learned

Anyway, I think I'm going to keep using CSP Models and alternating between them and model-less studies. I don't want to become reliant on a crutch but also it helps me make a good picture and making good pictures makes me happy and being happy from drawing motivates me to draw more.

I got to say, the resolution to the decade-long "Robot cult worshipping Kat" plotline being Shadow telling Robot to stop making a Robot Cult and Robot being like "Okay" feels a little underwhelming.

Happy 4/13 to you as well!

And, as I think everyone was predicting, there's new Homestuck Content today. I'm hoping this is going to be the big update where they get to the point and have the long-teased [S] page, but we're not looking good if we're opening with Dirk, whose primary character trade is long rambling speeches. This is the first we've seen of Dirk since the new team took over, though.

The idea that Dirk's CANON plan is ironically consisting of him sitting around idly discussing The Lore is a decent meta joke, but it got old after a page or two. Please do literally anything, Dirk.

I do like this page, though, with the art busting out of the frame. And, given what I literally just said (I write these liveblogs as I read them), Dirk's opening by repeatedly insisting things are happening in his story is meant to be ironic. He's also claiming he became a god in order to do this HS2 stuff, which is flatly untrue. Presumably he means be became Ultimate to do narrative stuff, which is an interesting order of events if that's the case, and it's not that becoming Ultimate made him evil. Also, let me put some appropriate background music on.

It does feel weird for the new team to be directly commenting on the quality of the writing of the old team like this, but to be fair, it is classic Rose shit.

New Guardian Mode artstyle, which we were starting to see in Candy as well, since these characters aren't kids any more. But in Candy, everyone keeps their faces, whereas Dirk is just his hair and glasses, like Bro.

Oh good, I turned quirks back on. There's a lot of meta complaining about the writing this update.

I do like that the humans are looking more like Guardians and the Trolls are looking more like Ancestors. It's odd to have them standing next to each in different art styles like that, but it kind of works.

Dirk's use of the term "Virtue Signalling" is probably worth making a note of here. HS2 has sort of flirted with the idea of Dirk as right-wing, and that appears to be continuing here.

There's a lot of speculation that the Candy kids are going to end up in the game as well, and that this is even something that the original cast over there is working towards. This would require, as Terezi points out here, literal genocide. And I think that is where the Candy story is going, with Rose/Jade/Jane all being in on it and Kanaya/Karkat being cut out, so it's nice of Terezi to remind us that Sburb is evil and that sacrificing an entire planet to help your kids become immortal is kind of a dick move.

This is the kind of thing HS2 really need more of, stuff to speculate on. Terezi, Rose, and Dirk are literally the only three people on the entire fucking planet. What "other agents" could Dirk possibly have?

Also, it's nice to have a little fucking narrative tension on this planet for once. Dirk and Rose are each creating an entire sentient race for the purpose of sacrificing them. Terezi is in a position to save the world, but doing so means giving up her chance to save John. Wow! Stakes! It's nice when stories have those, instead of just idly fucking around doing nothing for the sake of a meta-joke! Also it means the bad guy is being evil instead of merely boring, which is also a nice thing to do now and again.

There's not much to analyze in this art, but it's stylin'. The guardian mode look is great. Is Rose wearing lipstick on her robot face?

There's been a very subtle incest-y vibe with Dirk/Rose in Meat, and apparently we're keeping that too. Being sexually depraved is becoming like Rose's defining trait.

Oh, that's kind of a cool ability, but also what can't an Ultimate do?

Rose's team is going to win, and it's going to be the 48-player Squiddle session that creates the troll universe, making all of Homestuck canon an inescapable time loop through which no new ideas can emerge, except for the influence of Candy.

Rose he is your dad.

Hm. No big [S] page and we still haven't gotten to the point, but we've made the Dirk half this story significantly less fucking boring, so I guess that's a win. This is an update the story desperately needed, giving Dirk some characterization and leaning in to how fucked everything here is.

Also, spending the entire update teasing a timeskip to the start of the game and then ending without doing it is a good meta joke, provided we don't keep doing it for ten more updates.

I've been reading a new comic called Kattabolt, which is too new for me to review yet. It's a'ight so far, though. The art is very cute, the story is moving quickly, and it tags all the characters who appear on a page for easier searching, which is surprisingly rare in webcomics, so it's one of those comics I'm keeping an optimistic eye on. (wouldn't mind some keyboard navigation, though).

But I can't decide how I feel about "Your advantage over me is null" from firey teenage street thug Ray in panel 4 there. On the one hand, it seems kind of an odd phrasing, both in general and for the character of a street thug (though if we learn Ray is some kind of nerdy street thug than this is great foreshadowing).

On the other hand, it's fairly elegant exposition, where Ray is completely justified in saying something he and Nathan (the purple guy) both know, that trusts the reader to make some satisfying conclusions of their own. From those six words, we know that it's not just that Ray has fire powers and Nathan and Leigh (wait, the gang duo has rhyming names? That's cute) have water powers. There's this whole system of elemental powers, that have Pokemon-style type matchups, and that was the main reason Ray didn't jump to beating Nathan's ass until he had backup (as opposed to, say, Nathan being a kewl action hero). We can also deduce that if Ray, a bully, was nervous at a type disadvantage and didn't learn anti-Nathan lightning magic to deal with this recurring nuisance, then he probably can't do it, and this is an Avatar-style world where people can use exactly one (1) element, only unlike Avatar there's elemental weaknesses. That's really a lot of information to be able to glean from six words!

It's also a good use of genre convention. The magic system in Kattabolt is "Avatar with type advantage", which is a system that's very easy to understand. Kattabolt takes advantage of this tropey magic system to be able to explain the entire thing in a single throw-away line and get to the interesting part of the comic.

Y'know what, I think I've talked myself into it. "Your advantage over me is null" is a bit of a clunky line, but it carries a ton of expository weight and lets me catch on to the magic system myself instead of treating me like an idiot or pretending "kung-fu with elemental magic" is some kind of novel idea worth spending six pages explaining. And that's more than worth a single somewhat awkward sentence.