Rainy Road Warrior Newsletter
April 10, 2023
Off We Go!
The Kickstarter for Epic of Darkness #2 launches on Thursday, April 13th!
If you’re in the sharing mood, please feel free to send this link to all of your friends and enemies. (Think of it as an olive branch! Bringing peace and love to the world… in the form of horrific, disturbing, adult stories. Huzzah!)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rainyroad/epic-of-darkness-2-adult-horror-anthology
Whatcha got?
All of the sequential artwork is in the can and 99% of the lettering is done. I’ll do a couple of more passes on every page to tighten up the dialogue and make sure everything makes sense.
Brian was never able to send the original “Fallen Angel” artwork because he said the post office in his country was requiring him to declare the value of each page as what he charged me for them and pay a tax based off that. So it would have been ridiculously expensive to send them. I guess. Whatever. This is the only time I’ve ever run into this issue with an artist and it really sucks because it would have been nice to have the original artwork, not to mention that it could have helped the campaign greatly to be able to offer them to backers. Unfortunately, it looks like that will never happen.
I finished a prototype of the mini-bust just yesterday and updated the campaign with some photos, like the one below. This is a very rough prototype that was stripped down and repainted about 5 times as I tried different techniques, colors and brushes so it doesn’t look fantastic but it’s the best one I’ve done so far. I’ll still keep trying to fine-tune it but this is pretty close to how the final version will look.
I was originally painting them with a black primer to fill in the chest tattoo but I tried the flourescent paint idea and it worked so I stripped down all the prototypes and re-primed them with white. But I wasn’t able to remove all of the black primer so that’s one reason why it looks rough. Also, I dropped a few of the prototypes, breaking off some pieces. Once I realized that I wouldn’t be able to sell these prototypes, I just started manhandling them.
So the chest tattoo and her eyes are painted with two different types of flourescent paint. I used a yellow flourescent spray can from Home Depot for her tattoo and a “Flourescent Red” from Vallejo for her eyes that I applied with a brush.
I did this because I have to mask off the tattoo when using the rattle can. Then I have to lightly sand the edges to blend in the yellow with the base or else theres an obvious “ridge” that won’t be covered up by subsequent paint layers. That’s not a big problem with the chest area but trying to sand the area around her eyes was impossible. (I tried it once.) And that’s the only brush-on flourescent paint I could find. Unless I could spray some of the Home Depot paint into a little cup and dab it onto a brush? Hmm. I’ll have to try that.
Anyway, the sculpt has been modified slightly to shorten her arms a little, give the lacing an “X” pattern and some other minor tweaks here and there.
Hopefully, this mini-bust will be something that people will want because it will help raise some funds and, if nobody wants one I will be really pissed that I spent the last 3 months trying to figure out how to paint this thing for nothing!
This Week In Randomness
I recently finished reading the original Jurassic Park novel. I’ve seen the movie about a hundred times but I had never had the chance, until now, to read the book. Man, it is really different from the movie! I won’t spoil it but some characters have completely different personalities, motivations and fates. The movie definitely has a much more fluid progression. I know that movies and novels are different “animals” and novels typically meander and explore tangents but that’s not what I’m talking about in this case. The book just doesn’t have the same “poetic rhythm” of the movie, if that makes any sense. (If not, sorry. I’m not explaining it!)
But what the book does have is a lot of typos! I’m always surprised by how many typos I find in mass-produced books. You would think a big publishing house would have staff that could find and correct errors before a book went to print. It’s just sloppy. I don’t like sloppy.
I’m just one dude and I don’t think there’s been a single typo in any of the books I’ve ever published. (That’s your cue to get all riled up with righteous indignation, purchase one of my books from the forthcoming Kickstarter and prove me wrong. Buy a book, find a typo and prove me wrong, you magnificent warrior!)
Until next time!
~Michael T Gonzalez
