Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, who would’ve thought? In this issue we’ll finally meet the captain of Murphy’s precinct for the first (second) time and get a whiff of his… special style.

In other news, to create a more social network-y repository for my “art” and make it more accessible for people who just like to browse images without my endless rants, I made one of those infamous deviantArt accounts. Do check it out here, if you fancy.

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, this issue coming directly from the cold North. In this episode we are stumbling into a dialogue with a mysterious stranger. Chilling.

More on my adventures in Finland coming up soonish.

The last month provided quite a bit of a hassle and procrastination for me at the same time. Apart from work and university, StarCraft II held me in its Ultralisk-like claws, giving me the guilty pleasure of wasting away in front of the screen for a few hours again. Well, wasting away in front of the screen doing something else than writing texts or fooling around with illustration software. God, that screen is shiny. And yours will shine as well, as soon as you lay your eyes upon a new (well, old remade) episode of Murphy’s Law!

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, now available in my usual slow update cycle. In this episode, we follow Corporal Florian Pleathers as he tries to hit up Detective Debjit Murphy. Irony ensues.

Well, what can I tell you about this one? Redesigning Pleathers was something for which I needed a sketch first. Going free-hand in Illustrator is nice, but I fail quite a bit at recreating my personal style without some reference material. The mission was clear: New Pleathers should be even more loatheworthy than the original one. From Murphy’s point of view, anyway. Basically I went with a weak chin, huge bulbous forehead and one of those 90ies gel’d up short haircuts. You know the one. Further abuse testing of their social interaction will show whether that works out visually.

As for the ranks, I’ve had a few switcheroos after reading up on American Police Ranks. Not really informed any more on that topic now than I had been in the beginning, but immensely more confused, I demoted the Chief down to Captain, as I hadn’t really intended him to be in charge of anything more than the precinct. But more to that, later. I’ve also made Pleathers a Corporal, complete with two inverted chevrons on his shoulders. I just hope that’s even remotely correct…

Adding the blood proved to be a whole new challenge. Or rather, I avoided that challenge by downloading a number of blood splatter brushes for Photoshop and slapping them onto my Illustration after I had already exported it. So, what you have here is the first post-produced Murphy’s Law comic in history, ladies and gents! Well, okay, apart from those with a sepia tone slapped on. And those where I enhanced the contrast and colours a bit. The first post-produced one I did in Illustrator anyway.

I will let you bask in its gory glory until the next issue hits the digital shelves. In the meantime, I shall ponder whether “splorch” really is a good sound effect.

I actually liked the hand-drawn art style in the old one better, as it is the most dynamical version of Murphy I’ve created up to this date. However, what it has in style, it lacks in detail and reproducability. So, while I don’t consider this illustration an improvement, but more of a sidegrade, it serves to level the comic’s style quite a bit. And I now have more templates to work with in the future.

But go ahead and make up your own mind.

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, which last time took six months to go from the teaser-trailer to page one. I guess you could call that an improvement. In this episode, we follow Detective Debjit Murphy as he puts the “tool” in “multitool”!

Initially, I wanted to give the cola a more fiery design and call it Phoenix Cola, but apparently some New Zealandian do-gooders were one step ahead of me. Herbal cola that’s not actually, ahem, “herbal” but contains Ginko, eh? That burns on a wholly different level. The worst thing? I wanna drink one of those now. Damn you people.

Oh well. Guess the reference works this way, too, if not even better. Stay cool the best you can folks, until next time. And remember to drink the Wright stuffâ„¢!

I guess you can now look upon it as the intro sequence. The prologue. The real starting point. Ladies and Gentlemen: Murphy’s Law is at hand!

Welcome to Murphy’s Law, where we follow the exploits of Indio-American all-purpose dective Debjit Murphy in the crime ridden city of Peaceful Hamlet. In this episode, we’re treated to… A TEASER TRAILER! BLAM-O!

All the work with Illustrator over the years finally made this one a breeze. Well almost. If you take the frustration out of trying to illustrate something and fill it with progressive success, it feels more like a breeze even if it takes hours. In summery heat. On a metal Mac. Oh well, at least I could do it outside in the grass. As long as the sun wouldn’t hit Steve’s patented über-reflective screen. Thanks man.

Technical difficulties aside, I retconned (link goes to TVtropes, enter at your own risk) Murphy into being of Indian (as in “from India”) descent now. I never could make up my mind what nationality he stems from, and how the name Murphy would make sense in that.
He started out as a sketch that I, at the time heavily influenced by the Ace Attorney series, based around the useless-but-amiable Detective Gumshoe. He ended up looking too much like the “grizzled detective” stereotype, so I reworked his hairdo to look a bit less conventional. That, again, looked so much better when I gave him dark skin. Following this completely arbitrary design progress, he appeared to simply be Afro-American at first. But that soon became unattractive as I did not want to invoke any Shaft-esque cop story that would border on Blaxploitation (crap, I did it again). Giving him the project name “Lavernious Murphy” didn’t help much either.
I then thought about where else he could be from, conceding with “oh what the hell, how about the Middle-East”. And there was Darius Murphy, of Iranian descent, whose parents came to the states and got a new name. Or grandparents. Or his mother married an American. As you can see, that backstory felt incredibly uncomfortable to form.
In the final design stages of the last few weeks, I shifted his skin colour a bit more towards Auburn, and bam, suddenly he had an Indio-Irish heritage… you may get a look at that scrambled up genealogy later. Soon as I have it figured out myself. All he needed now was something of a more stereotypical name. Thankfully, the internet is full of creative ways to name your baby boys, even in Hindi. He ended up with the name Debjit, which not only sounds like some sort of Irish curse and thus goes nicely with Murphy, but apparently also means “one who has conquered the gods”.

Oh, have I got plans for you, Murphy! Stay tuned for more of my Redesign Retcon Rampage.

And there goes my resolve. With that reworked borderless design, and customizeable highlights in rugged-ish lines, they finally look exactly how I imagined them. All in all putting that sketch into an illustration only took me a double lecture (hey, guy’s gotta keep his hands busy during long, excruciationg philosophical dead-end discussions) so it might be sensible to go with semi-clean illustrator cubism after all. Ahh, decisions decisions. And what to do when my lectures end? I’ll keep you posted.

Folks, there is an evil lurking on your hard drives. No, not a virus. Not some sort of evil corporate OS either. No. Read those words with as much contempt I had writing them: Comic Sans!

Yes, I know. Just another whiny rant about a font that has been scorned by designers and typenerds ever since its unholy inception. But I have had it with this one particular font. People use it because they think it’s endearing. Because it looks like fun. Because it feels more hand-written. Because it looks like you’re not really serious about what you are writing. Well, I can agree to the latter point. It’s what I always think when I read something written in Comic Sans. You cannot be serious!

Just look at those letters. Really look at them. They appear slightly bent, but not in any natural way. No-one would ever write like this. They look sickly, a mere husk of an actual font, empty, and soulless. So, cue the drum roll for my grand analogy of the day: Comic Sans is the Zombie Apocalypse of all fonts.

According to that wiki, the font was first implemented for use with MS 3D Movie Maker, so let’s call that program “Patient Zero” (…looking at the characters, the description is quite fitting). MS Bob only narrowly escaped that horrible fate. From here the font spread, with Windows 95 as its catalyst, to infect PCs and all the poor helpless Macs over the world. Its purpose? To devour human brains, especially that tasty section responsible for your sense of style.

“Oh, but Tim”, you say now, “that font is supposed to just be fun; there is not that many fonts out there that convey the same feeling!”
First of all, they got you! The font zombies got you! There is no hope left. You can’t stop the infection, well, except for the usual method. Consult the Zombie flick of your preference for further details. Secondly, yes, yes indeed, even Times New Roman and Papyrus fail to induce the same degree of nausea and dread that Comic Sans brings. However, if you want well-designed comic-style fonts, see Dr. Blambot for a prescription.

Make the world a better place. Only you can prevent font zombification!

Edit: Learn something new every day… Illustrator actually has a “Russian Poster” colour set! Immediately went to improve my propaganda revolutionary poster. Looks so much better.

It is a tad awkward when people actually like your drawings. You think you owe them more, hell, you owe them a copy to take home. So, quite naturally, they ask you whether you dump them somewhere. And then, the dance starts:

“Yes, I’ve got a blog, had it for years now, but I really rarely update it, in fact I kinda cancelled updates altogether, ahahaha…”
“Why?”
“… don’t know.”

And that’s where the conversation usually drops off.

So, why? I’ve been asking myself that very same question quite a bit. Nothing important to tell? Only whiny shit? My art not fit to be released into the wilderness of that vast land we call the internets? Balls. This is the internet. All of the above infest it with abundance. I’ve been semi-active on ze twitters ever since micro-blogging became the in-thing, and half of the stuff there ain’t worth more than a chuckle.

The truth is, I’ve been neglecting my drawing for all kinds of activities, some required, but most should never have been as high on the priority list. The result? In the last one-and-a-half years my skills have not really improved. A song I’ve known too well. But no more. I bought a shiny new sketch book, and I will use it… with a vengeance!

And maybe… just maybe… I will finally get to tell the adventures of these two.

Screw technology. Screw pretty. Rugged is my style. My pencil is my sword. The paper is… mine… enemy?

I’ll be working on that metaphor till next time. I’ll have a word with my favourite webmaster to rework the site design as well. I’ll also inject myself with some manner of vile poison, and the antidote will only be dispensed upon a new blog post. Wheee.

No way that plan can fail.

What? What?! How long? But I hardly even did anyth-… oh, hello dear viewers. Today on “Cooking Up Graphically Challenging Constructs With Tim” we will have a look at what fussy work it is to digitise your drawings with a vector graphics tool.

Actually, it wasn’t all that bad. So here it is. Shiny, tasty and still scaldingly hot: Episode 4 of Murphy’s Law.

In some aspects, it was quite easy getting my sketches into Illustrator. The faces, for one, were quickly done. Other things like the hands were not. Oh, those hands. It’s hauntingly difficult to draw them as it is, but only using paths and anchors, it’s pretty close to hell. Still, after I did the first two panels, I only had to reposition some of the characters’ joints to make them look alive and not just copy-pasted. To add some more dynamics to their actions, I also added a little entropic white backdrop to the characters.

Anyhoo, I think it turned out quite well. Didn’t care much for shading, though. Will have a look at this tediousity on the next few episodes. Well, maybe after I cranked out a few more like this. Gotta learn how to crawl before you can levitate.

PS: Gotta love the pattern on Chief Randolf’s shirt. <3

Well lookie here. Looks just like the original. Well, apart from the sloppy pencil lines and crayon colouring. With a few modifications to his facial features I may be able to pump out those comics more quickly. Well, at least they’ll look more like something from the 21st century. Next ep will be all illustratoriotionorized; just takes a bit longer to build the character templates for the first time. Stay tuned.