Author: bluedraggyxtumblr

Got Katherine moved last night

I managed to get KM moved over to katherinemanagan.tumblr.com successfully last night.  I was worried – I’d deleted everything here and wasn’t sure I could recreate the text and pick the right images. (I have them all – but I have more that weren’t part of the series).  I’m not a very religious guy, but when I got home from work, I found that my home PC still had the original page up and all the text and images were still cached there.  So damn lucky!

I even had time to do some shots for the next one.  And I think maybe I have a plan for the ongoing style of KM now.  If not a full fledged plot, at least a good idea for how to keep it “different”.  At some point I’ll want to promote it, but I feel I have to have a pretty good backlog of posts before I do that.

Using the SWC (Simple Web Comic) theme.  I was concerned at first since mine doesn’t use a single image but multiple ones.  However, turns out it works just fine.  It’s a bit staid in it’s presentation right now, but those are just tweaks I can work on.

And then Prequel updates!  Woohoo!  ALWAYS a good day!  Is it just me though, or does everyone think like I do:

“GREAT – AN UPDATE!”

(read, read, read)

COOL!

(reread, reread, reread). 

(slight depression sets in…) 

When’s the next one coming out?  

Must just be human nature.  Never satisfied for more than 5 minutes. 

Katherine M. Moves On

After only 3 posts, don’t think I’m abandoning Katherine.  She’s just getting her own tumblr blog.  Setting it up over at katherinemanagan.tumblr.com now.  I’ll leave commentaries here.

I INTENDED to move the 3 posts over there and delete them here.  I managed to figure out how to reblog them to there, and then I deleted them here.  But then I found out that if I delete them here, the reblog won’t display the whole blog and clicking doesn’t bring it back.

Sooo… now I’ve got to post them again over there.  

Katherine M. Commentary

Had fun with this one.  Saves SO much time not worrying about those silly balloons!  (the speech bubbles.  Get your mind out of the butts.)

One thing I really, really appreciate about Prequel – up until recently – was that it’s a lot more like real life (which is an odd thing to say about a web cartoon involving talking cats) than nearly anything out there.  I have a fondness for characters that have more realistic lives.  Never could get into superhero stuff, it just didn’t interest me.  It wasn’t real.  Prequel, as I said, was.  Now, I fear, it may be leaving that behind – but stories have to have a climax and an end.  I guess it couldn’t go on too long being about a regular cat with nothing special about her.  Something had to give.  

Long ago I used to be a little bit into Anime.  Old stuff.  My favorites were Maison Ikkoku and Kimagure Orange Road.  Still are I guess.  KOR had a bit of “magic” stuff, but only for comic relief really.  And yeah, both sappy romantic story lines.  (Though I REALLY appreciated the realistic split of the triangle at the end of KOR.  People get hurt in life, even squeaky annoyingly cute people.)

So, after I finished the last one, I thought about that a bit.  It was a bit of sexy humor to end the “strip” with, but it wasn’t real.  What would REALLY happen if KM did that?  Well, this is what would really happen.  Or worse.  Probably worse.  And if I like stories that are a bit more real, I’d best haul this one back in a bit.  With a bit of a teaser for “almost nobodies” since in real life, everything can change too.

Finally, I’m thinking seriously about if I should stop using the Katia/Prequel tags.  Seems kind of blatantly coat-tailing on the back of Kaz’s hard work with my ridiculously easy work.  If I do, I’ll just tag with Katherine Managan instead.

So if you like this, and want to promote it, and aren’t too embarrassed to do so, reblog it.  

But I feel kinda like a leech, and Kaz probably already knows I’m doing this by now, and I do respect his wishes and his work so much I’d drop this in a heartbeat if he asked me to.  But it sure is fun to do anyway.  So, is this officially a fanfiction of a fanfiction now?  How far down the rabbit hole does it go?

Katherine M. Commentary

Well, it’s an experiment.  One thing I found right off is my style doesn’t fit cartoons format well.  Too much exposition to fit in a couple balloons.  Plus, the balloons get in the way of the screenshot.  I may convert to image then text as I’ve done for a lot of this one and just keep the speech balloons completely out of the images.  It kind of breaks the image/speech apart, but I feel like it’s worth the slightly unusual format to keep the images separate.

Probably won’t surprise anyone to notice that I found the facial expression/modification features before I posted this one!  Some of them were quite fun to work with too. Along with some mouth positions, they really widen what I can do with screenshots.

I think I’ll keep Mr. H offscreen too.  After all, we all self-insert as the man behind the camera to some extent anyway don’t we?  That may get a bit tricky to pull off though.  I do imagine him as a Khajiit though, for what it’s worth.

Ok, enough for now.  Comments always welcomed though!

Another Katherine M. coming soon.

I’ve actually NOT been procrastinating on this project.  Instead, I realized that I need a screenshot of every possible pose with a reference so I can find it again to do this right.  So that’s what I’ve been up to.  I’m hoping that I will end up only RARELY ever re-using the same pose – and even then mixing it up with different angles to keep it from looking too obviously repeats.

I’ve also learned quite a bit about different techniques to use when doing Skyrim screenshots – varying focal lengths for example.  Between that and the hundreds of poses I have to choose from (I’m probably 75% done with my reference screenshot project), this should be fun!

I’ve got a couple of storylines already in my head – but I’ll probably make it up as I go anyway. 

It does help that I have such a lot of time between Prequel updates that I can feel confident that I can beat it.  (Of course, I’m not programming minigames either!)

Katherine meets Sabhira. Just Sabhira.  Sabhira is a Khajiit. Katherine is… something else.

So today I was poking about in Fanart page and saw that someone (finally) posted a link to Cartoon Katia mod for Skyrim.  NOW I have something to put my Arena armor mod onto!  So I did so and made some screenshots.  Some turned out (to me anyway) awfully funny so I’m posting them here.

First up – Katia posed to fight fire with fire.  (yeah, skirt gets wonky in this pose.  Owell).

Second – Now she’s fighting with weapons.  But note the axe.  Note it real close.  Yeah, that’s probably Katia.

Third – Shiny Butt Katia trying to lose some enemies in the sawmill…

Fourth – I can see no possible way this could go wrong.

Fifth – Just another pose – though I do note a painted bra strap under her arm.  Nice touch modeller guy!

Sixth – creeping Katia.  Dunno why but I really like this screenshot. Probably the shiny knee.  I do like the shiny.

Seventh – fire magic puts a lot of light on… places.

Eighth – This is not Katia F. Managan.  With weight slider maxxed, she gets a new name.  And probably a conservative estimate at that!  Happy coincidence that I caught her in mid-blink.  Looks like she knows what I’m up to here.

Ninth – Katia DD Managan again, with her lethal weapons.  You’re probably safe from fire, but you could well get smothered.

At the risk of copying KillerFishSG’s coloring project, I did a couple.  One I thought was lost to the 4chan ether but I just saw it up on PrequelFanGroup on facebook.  So I thought maybe it’s not so bad and did another.  I may like QW better than Katia frankly, but it would be a close thing.  And I’ve abandoned my Skyrim modding – the game is just no longer interesting to me enough to do anymore with.  But hey, not bad for a game that’s almost 5 years old right?  

So now I’m playing with Coloring.  Maybe I’ll even learn shading one day but hey – this is something anyway!  First is a Kaz colored sketch, second is a Gripes special.

Standard Skyrim Arena Armor Mod (pt. 3)

This thing is taking forever – because I keep NOT working on it.  But I did some more finally.  When last we left, we had this texture file:

I’m now down to THIS texture file:

So I’ve really lightened the color, added the blue borders and “wolf” icon, changed the front skirt into leather fringy things and almost (but not quite) removed the rear of the skirt.  I also did some modding of the “normal” file so the fringes don’t have the same roughness or pattern as the cloth sections – they stand out as more independent material that way.  Result?

Coming along.  Those shoulder pauldrons still needed, and some touchup in the back needed, but all in all, I’m pretty happy with the progress.

(All my starting/stopping of Skyrim for the work today popped Kaz into my chat to speculate on me modding – he was right of course.  But I had to un-friend him in Steam so I wouldn’t keep bothering him with my constant start/stopping!)