Nick Bate -- Excursion Day -- Balnarring Beach, VIC (FIN)

[nickb]

Good morning (just)!

At the moment, this is just a placeholder to mark my intention to participate. Soon as I'm done submitting this post, though, it's off to bed! Mine will be the last words for the weekend: draw, excursion, and tough.

I'm going to be comicking on my own this year. I've just driven down to the beach for the start of a short holiday. Biggest difficulty is likely to be a lack of Internet access -- I'm tapping this message out on my mobile phone, and to submit it I'll need to wander around outside until I can find some reception! If I can connect to the cafe wireless from the carpark, I'll try to submit images tomorrow; if not, it'll have to wait until the cafe opens up again on Tuesday.

Yup, this is gonna be fun!

[jing]

Lack of internet? What a terrible obstacle to overcome! Best of luck with it!

[nickb]

Well, I tried! I finished my eight pages (now entitled Exchange Day) about ten minutes ago. It was the 30 minute mark or so in Denmark v. Netherlands. Now I'm sitting outside the coffee shop in Balnarring (Coffee Cult -- they have an excellent comic book library!), but they appear to have changed their wireless password since I was here last week. It isn't hulksmash any more...

I guess that means I'll pop up tomorrow morning and do some uploading when they're open.

Things I learnt this year:
1. This is way harder when you're doing it alone.
2. No Internet access during the challenge sucks.
3. I think I do my best entries every second year, so here's looking forward to next year!

So yeah, uploads tomorrow. Not sure if that disqualifies me, but hey, it's not like I expect prizes! Tune in tomorrow morning for robots, police officers, a generalissimo and a bus!

[Tsumi]

[nickb]

Thanks Tsumi (and jing -- sorry I didn't name-check you from the freezing front seat of my car last night!). Yup, I definitely prefer to do this with company, even if it's just the digital kind here on the forums! Anyways, here's page 1, finally!

[nickb]

Did I mention that I can only really do stick figures? And oh, hey, I can't make another post so soon after my last. Who knew?!

[nickb]

Page 3. When I first started plotting this comic, it was all about that little guy in the last three panels. Then I got distracted by robots and ridiculous generals (two of my favourite topics!):

[nickb]

When I'd pencilled this page, I took a break to have some lunch. One of things I absolutely love about this beach house is the grill, so it was toasted ham and cheese sammiges all the way. No grill in my city house!

[nickb]

By the time I was inking this page ("inking"! Who am I kidding!), the word excursion had stopped looking like a real word.

[nickb]

(Turns out the panels on these forums are less than 700 pixels wide...)

[nickb]

Almost there -- this is page 7. One of the things I missed the internet for was looking at photos of things (like tanks) to work out how to draw them.

[nickb]

And scene! So my words were excursion (which I used all over the place), tough (on page 7) and draw (on page 6). I'd like to thank the World Cup for keeping me entertained, Coffee Cult for the wireless and the ridiculously huge flat white, and you for bothering to read this far. Thank you!

[Tsumi]

YAY! Nicely done! Dug your character design for the robot - those three panels where he's walking along make me wanna see him as an animated gif! ^_^

And "Holy Potato"! I am going to say lots from now on - it goes really nicely with my usual cry of "Good gravy". Mmmm... potatoes and gravy... *drool*

Also: "That thing is tough. More Boom!"
That line rocks! ^0^