Story & Art by Carl Tsui

Back in 2013

Looks like I’ve been away longer than I thought. I spent a good amount of time in the last half of 2012 trying to decide on what kind of story I really wanted to work on complete with numerous starts and stops on the writing end. I actually made some silent server upgrades to my blogging software that powers this place. Most notably moving to .NET Entity Framework as my persistence layer from LINQ-to-SQL and doing some code to support multiple blogs on one instance. The reason being because I felt like it and to support what I thought at late 2012 would be a comic project that could share space here. The latter I started and then stopped for “creative reasons” (mainly for an umpteenth re-write). Anyway, this is mostly a test post and to just journal what happened here to keep me away so long.

Sunday, April 21, 2013 - 11:26 PM (Eastern Daylight Time)

Grablebot

Originally intended as art for my friend Jesse's robot themed mini-comic. It probably won't translate well to B&W, but I just wasn't interested in producing B&W art so instead I used it as an opportunity to practice painting. This took about 12-14 hours total including concept development. I'm starting to get a better feel for going straight from sketch to colour. Story after the picture.

The Autopilot Vintage

The XP-802F autopilot was given a unique form by the Air Ministry in an attempt to lift the spirits of hard pressed RAF and Commonwealth pilots in North Africa. "Grablebot" (a name given by fellow flyers), was an exceptional combat pilot. She had 6 aerial victories before being shot down by Luftwaffe ace Hans-Joachim Marseille in late 1941. Grablebot was recovered from the desert and shipped to England for repairs, but was never seen again.

Update: After getting some feedback on a variant of the piece over on the ImagineFX forums I decided to make some changes that I think improved the piece greatly. What you're seeing now is the revised piece. Also included is a grey scale version that I did for the actual comic.

GrableBot_BW

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 12:07 AM (Eastern Daylight Time)