My life is a busy one. This is my stress relief.

(003) Miss Ismo's Costume Corner, Part I

As a female reader who has tried (really, really hard) to get into comics, the most persistent problem I run up against is the ridiculous costumes worn by the female characters. I mean, for cryin' out loud, why don't they wear clothes? If I were going to be flying around, kicking butt and fighting crime, you can bet that I'd be wearing something comfortable, durable (none of this "outfit torn to pieces during a minor scuffle" crap), and modest. If I'm going head-to-head with a supervillain, the last thing I want to have to worry about is whether or not I'm falling out of my clothing.

All youngsters trying out at the Sidekick Audition (that's what the flyer was advertising) need to supply their own costume. Starlass, hapless girl, is trying to come up with something to wear. Unfortunately, all she really knows about costuming, she learned from "Miss Ismo's Costume Corner," a fashion column of . . . questionable . . . reliability.

She's a little embarrassed about taking all of her clothes off, but if that's what she's gotta do, darn it all, she's going to do it.

(002) Officially Sanctioned

I love that last panel. Star looks so happy.

Our young protagonist, having found a stray flyer advertising for Superhero Sidekick Auditions, has decided that she really needs to try out...and auditions are tomorrow. While other young heroines might be tempted to operate without parental permission, Starlass has a pretty good relationship with her mom and would never dream of sneaking around without permission. (At least, not yet.)

Mom, by the way, might seem reluctant at first, but she wholeheartedly supports her daughter's superheroic aspirations.

They say it's easier to get forgiveness than permission, but Starlass has no trouble getting either one.

(Speaking of great parents, by the way, I just got a package full of cookies from my mom. Happy day!)

(001) Awkwardly drawn hands

Her hands look to be in a very painful position, don't they? I was so preoccupied with trying to make the fingers look right that I forgot to make sure her wrists were bent at an angle that didn't induce screams of pain.

Oops.

Oh, well. It's happened before, and I don't doubt that it will happen again.

A lot of people say that hands are really hard to draw. They're not, exactly. They're comprised of lines and shapes and light and shadows, just like everything else. They're no harder to draw correctly than eyes, or knees, or noses or ears or hair. Thing is, hands are complicated.

I know that "they're not hard, they're complicated!" doesn't sound like much of an argument, but bear with me here, because it's absolutely true. Why? Because we simplify most of what we draw. Most things can be reduced pretty easily. Hair, eyes, and ears can all be simplified into something that takes only a brushstroke and a half—and they will still be recognisable. Hands, unfortunately, tend not to follow that pattern. There's only so far you can simplify a hand before it become unrecognisable—a blob, perhaps, or a couple of pen scratches gruesomely missing most fingers.

So while we simplify almost everything else into larger and simpler shapes, we still try to get details right in hands. The extra detail makes things a little awkward. Even making sure that your subject has the right number of fingers will probably mean that their hands are over twice as detailed as any other part of them.

So yeah. It gets a little awkward. And since hands are awkward to begin with, it's easy to attribute the awkwardness to the hands themselves... instead of the fact that your character's wrists are broken, or you accidently drew something completely backwards.

Yeah, that doesn't help much.

"Front" (A Cover Image)

So this is Starlass. She is (rather inexplicably) sitting on a star over a city.

Of the three completed pages (remember how important the three pages are), this image was the most recently completed. I totally jumped into this project feet first (arguably the best way to jump into anything, as it rarely results in concussion), and in my enthusiastic haste, I neglected to create a cover (or, as it is known about these parts, "front") image.

That's all taken care of now, though.

Despite the fact that Starlass looks a tiny bit soulless here (creepy hollow blue eyes!) I like the way it turned out. Also I got tired and didn't want to mess with it anymore. That's okay.