It's been a busy past few months. I'm about to finish up my first quarter at the Art Institute of Atlanta, and just got employed by Clearwire (It's a wireless internet company, you might've heard of them). With me working a job and going to AI,it's going to be tough getting artwork done, but whenever I get some free time, I'll keep working on my comic life. Speaking of which, as you might've figured out, Artificial Sweetener has turned into TriCrystalis. This might upset a few of you, but I'm actually thinking about cutting the original Artificial Sweetener at episode 8, and shifting my focus entirely on TriCrystalis; in fact, 2 pages are done for it already, which I hope you enjoy! TriCrystalis is not a completely different story from Artificial Sweetener at all, it's more of a refined story, with a departure of some of my art techniques. In order to get this published into a graphic novel (if it happens, that is) I have changed a few things, for the greater good, in my opinion. Whereas AS was in a strip format with a weird looking layout, TriCrystalis is in a page layout, with hand crafted panels and bubbles. Since Artificial Sweetener was intended to be a webcomic, I didn't care too much about a print version, so I went heavy on the Photoshop effects; TriCrystalis is completely different in that aspect. Instead of using fancy filters and shades of black and white, I've transitioned to just a black and white publication. Heck, the only time I've used Photoshop on these pages was to clean up any physical errors that I made, nothing else. The art style is the same, and as always, was influenced by Bryan Lee O' Malley. That basically sums up the transition! I'm currently working on pages 3 and 4 of TriCrystalis Act 1, and am slowly getting around to completing episode 8 of Artifical Sweetener. AS had a short run, but isn't dead by a long shot, it merely evolved into TriCrystalis, which has a more focused story and dialog, with printer-friendly art. If you guys have any comments or suggestions, then feel free to hit me up! Almost forgot! TriCrystalis has an official website too, and sooner or later, I'll get down to putting up all of the crap I've made for it on there in a matter of weeks. Check it out if you're interested, the URL is:
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