Rachael Moore

Hey all, it is Gam-O-Ween time! Meaning there is a Halloween crossover event going on daily over at Girlamatic.

Start with Matt Bayne's Knights of the Shroud and continue on to John Peter's Gypsy. I'm up third and there's plenty more to come.

Page 28 is up! I asked my boyfriend "Too much man ass?" and he said "no".

Page 27 is up!

Page 26 is up!

An experimental layout. Simone's climbing up the hill, but since we are english speakers she's getting higher as we go lower in the page. So I made her closer as time goes on instead of higher. Also, I tend to like rigid panels, so sometimes I force myself to lose them.

Page 25 is up!

Also, I put up some pictures from earlier this month on my Flickr account.

Before a parade in Santa Barbara I espied some "Free Hugs" kids. It was the first time I've seen that outside of an anime/comics convention. Teenagers . . .

Page 24 is up! And has been for a day or so now.

Page 23 is up!

Hey everyone! Girlamatic has undergone a major overhaul and it looks great. In addition to comics, it now has reviews and editorials and a new forum and a bunch of stuff. In addition, it now posts comments underneath the navigation buttons!

And with the new site, Pressing Dawn is back! The first new page in over a year went up today. Hopefully Marisa and I will be able to maintain a weekly schedule, but we've been off the wagon for a while now and it might take us some time to hitch up the horses again. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Horse!

I went to Comic-Con. See?



I went to some panels, met with dragonluk and kayjkay, wandered around a whole lot, and bought some comics.

All in all I had a fun time. You can see the rest of the pics here. Judging by hits, people like the one with Cammy clad in a thong a whole lot.

I have a small process demonstration up at the Kingdom of Loathing forums. See my awful scribbly sketches!

As noted in the latest Girlamatic editorial, Girlamatic is set to relaunch at the end of this month. This is only about a year later than we were expecting it to relaunch! However, this is a complete revamp and hopefully all the things that drove us crazy about the last website will be fixed. I got a sneak peak at the new site and it is pretty spiffy.



With the new website, Marisa and I will be relaunching Pressing Dawn, or, more precisely, starting back where we left off. In the year plus we had off, Marisa and I completed no fewer than two whole pages. With such a backlog, we won't know what to do with ourselves.

To be fair, I did finish writing the thing, which always helps. I'm estimating the comic will be about 120 pages long, so we're almost a fifth of the way there!

Photos here.

So today I spent many hours ID-ing my houseplants. I knew I had the cat grass and a Pothos, but those were the only plants that I had ID-ed.

( More riveting houseplant info )

More photos here.

Also, High School Reunion.

So I finally overcame my purchase anxiety and bought a drawing table last week.

It came in the mail on Friday and it turns out my anxiety was unwarranted because it showed up in one piece! (Well, many many pieces, but they were all intact). My boyfriend and I assembled it and a quick visit to Staples later, I had my table, a chair and a clipy lamp. I feel like a real artist!

Due to a nature excursion on Saturday, I didn't have any time to experiment with it until today. It tuns out the glass top is useful as a lightbox and you can see TV through it!



Over the last few months, I've been slowly working my way thorough the original Star Trek episodes because they are important for nerd cultural literacy. Today I learned that Khan wasn't a Klingon. Why did I think Khan was a Klingon?

Also, there is a "pencil tray" but it is more useful for holding papers and chocolate.

I found a blog through the comments of a Boing Boing thread called What's That Bug?

I looked a few pages in and found that the little caterpillars on my boyfriend's grape plants we were calling "Resistor Caterpillars" are really "Western Grape Leaf Skeletonizers". Usually when I name things I prefer the name I chose, but in this case the real name is pretty awesome. Beware the Skeletonizers!

Anyways, the blog often references BugGuide.net. Armed with this new depository of information, I set about looking up the crazy grasshopper I found a few months ago while hiking.



It took me a while but I found it. It turns out it is not a "Klingon Grasshopper" but a "Dragon Lubber", another acceptable name for an insect.

Here are a couple paintings from my painting class I just completed this week.

The first half of the class was color-wheel sorts of assignments. Pretty boring.

This next assignment was to make a collage and paint it. Also not quite up my alley but I tried to make the best of it.


Finally we got to choose what to paint. This was a photo that I found on Flickr while searching for cactus pics.


I did one other but I haven't finished it, so I'll upload that when I get done with it.

All in all it was a good class. However, I think I hate acrylics. My first impulse is to blend everything on the canvas to get the color I want and acrylics dry too fast to make this possible. I ended up layering layer upon layer of paint to get the color I wanted. I felt like I was in Medieval times using old fashioned tempuras or something. Bah!

So I've been thinking about getting a drawing table for a while. Up till now I've just used one of those pillowy lap boards while lounging on my couch. I suspect that if I get a drawing board it will be easier to get into and stay in "drawing mode". And it seems like every photo of a webcomic artist's workspace has one. However, I don't know what to look for.

I'm sort of tempted by this one:
http://www.dickblick.com/products/studio-designs-futura-craft-station/
Since I transfer my pencils to inks with a lightbox, it would serve two purposes. I would need to get it shipped though, and I'm not sure if the glass top would stand up to the process.

Also, is the texture of the drawing surface a big deal? I draw on top of a few pages of paper to begin with.

Any recommendations?

So it looks like the Jesusita fire has claimed a bunch of the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens, including a historic building. I adore the botanic gardens *and* old houses so this is pretty awful. Much of the garden is a showcase of the native vegetation, so it didn't stand a chance.

My thoughts go out to the biologist I met on Santa Cruz, who, my coworker had informed me, lived inside the botanic gardens when he wasn't on the island. At the time it seemed like a charmed life, but it has got to suck hard now. News reports like to focus on the sensational - million dollar mansions burned! and the like - but fires like this claim just as much from the less resilient as well. C'est la vie.

Where did my Sengi painting go?

It is portfolio time in my art class and I can't find it. That's what I get for trying to organize my possessions. I should have just left everything in a big pile on my coffee table like nature intended.

I hope I didn't throw it away :( At least it is on the internet.