Slightly Damned

I’m always whining that Slightly Damned is crap because it has basically squat in terms of “notable” attention. No professional reviews, no awards, no Wikipedia page, etc. So this year, I want to try to win an Ursa Major Award.

What are the Ursa Major Awards?
“It is intended as Anthropomorphic (a.k.a. Furry) Fandom’s equivalent of the Hugo Award ® presented by the World Science Fiction Society, mystery fandom’s Anthony Award, horror fandom’s Bram Stoker Award, and so forth.”

For those of you that want to know more about the UMA’s, you can visit the official website here: http://www.ursamajorawards.org/index.htm

Nominations should be opening up sometime in January.

In the mean time how about we work together to get Slightly Damned onto the 2012 Recommended Anthropomorphic Graphic Story list?

THE DEADLINE IS JANUARY 15, 2013!
PLEASE DO NOT SPAM THE EMAIL

We’re good until nominations open on the 17th or so! Thanks for your support and stay tuned!

…of course, only if you actually believe that Slightly Damned should be recommended/nominated/awarded.

I know it may seem silly to covet an award like this, but… I dunno, I figure I have nothing to lose by giving it a shot. Some of you might be confused as to why I care about a furry award when I’ve fought against being pigeonholed by the label for years, but I have two good reasons for this:
1) I think this is the only webcomic award where I have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually being eligible for. The Harvey and Eisner awards are just… yeah, no way, the Hugo Awards require registration for expensive cons (one in San Antonio, TX, one in London), and the Webcartoonist’s Choice Awards have been dead for years. If there’s anything else out there that you guys know of, I’m all ears!

2) Hey, I figure if Pixar’s Brave is elligble for an Ursa Major award, why not Slightly Damned?

(P.S. Thanks to Tec for writing the logistics stuff!)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, guys! From Christmas Day until the 30th, there will be an update with a new page from Monster Hive’s 6-part comic collaboration about a mysterious holiday party.

Fern & Cal from Grayling, by Arby (page 1 & 5, overall script)
Joe & Gaia Cow from The Good Life, by Glaucus
Frim, Ra’aj, & Jinjo from Within a Mile of Home, by Rx3 and Cei (page 3)
Locke, Shaela, & Kaia from Lunavis, by Pompolic (page 4)
Eldora & Akiara from Messenger, by Bugbyte (page 6)
… and of course, Crunky, Cliff, and Duster from Slightly Damned, by yours truly (page 2).

No matter what holidays you do or don’t celebrate, here’s hoping you’re all having a wonderful time. Cheers!

A reader asked me for some art advice and I typed out whatever came to mind. I decided to share it here:

1) If you want to draw better, you must love to draw. You must love to draw because you need to do it as much as you can, as often as you can, wherever you can. The only way to get better is to draw. Don’t worry about making things look good all the time, just draw to get used to drawing. For example, I usually doodle when I’m waiting in restaurants, and I used to draw in the margins of my notes and homework when I was in school.

Famous animator Chuck Jones once said, “You’ve got a million bad drawings in you; you better get started.” in reference to new artists and animators. There really are no shortcuts. You have to draw all the time. I don’t bother to upload half of the stuff I draw because it’s not worth it– I just draw to draw.

2) Practice sketching using long, unbroken strokes. Not the scritchy, precise, little lines stuff. Doodle. A lot.

3) Learn to understand what you see from real life and draw what you see, not what you think something “should” look.

4) Experiment. Make mistakes. If I spent all my time trying to fix all the things I see wrong in Slightly Damned pages, I’d never move past the first page. Just keep moving; nothing is perfect. There are things you will only learn from doing, and you’ll never be able to even see the flaws in your work if you don’t move on in the first place.

5) Read tutorials and real anatomy books. Not that “How to Draw Manga” or “How to Draw Furry” crap. Those are mostly useless and will teach you how to replicate someone else’s “symbols”– how they interpret real life, not how you interpret it. Disclaimer: Imitation CAN help when you’re learning to draw something new and difficult, but you don’t want to depend on it.

I recommend Posemaniacs.com, books on animation (even if you aren’t animating, they will help you make your characters look alive), Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, and any art books.

6) Break complex forms into simple shapes to give them volume. There are literally thousands of drawing books and tutorials that can explain this better than I can. It’s very important.

7) Look for other people’s advice. There may be someone out there who disagrees with everything I have to say, so look for inspiration everywhere. Use deviantArt, use Tumblr, or whatever. Absorb and reflect on as much as you can.

…These thought aren’t very well organized. I haven’t made any tutorials for anatomy or page design because I do things very inefficiently and wrong; I don’t want people to copy me and learn to do things in a way that could stunt their growth. So use these nuggets as a starting point, not the end all solutions– investigate what I said and find tutorials, books, and rants from artists who actually know what they’re doing. Figuring out what’s valuable and what’s bullshit is all part of the neverending process of improving your artwork!