After I had the entire page done, except for backgrounds, I had to redraw Kevin in panel 3. He originally looked rather sheepish, which is so not Kevin. He’s an ambitious kid, but that’s when it comes to things like his music (hence acing the poetry journal). The rest of it? Fuck it. Perfect is the enemy of done, and the time he spends on homework he’s not working.
Ms. Singh is pretty cool. Good sense of priorities.
I almost named this page “Disgusting” but I thought it was a bit negative to follow up “Blech” with, especially since I, personally, don’t think Nancy and Kevin are being all that gross. Okay, maybe a little.
I have this semi-serious intention to write Tomodachi Forever as a novel so that y’all can have it all at once instead of tiny piece by tiny piece, but then when I do the pages I often wind up changing small bits of the script, so then the novel wouldn’t entirely match up. How much does that matter? I dunno. I also have over a thousand pages of script, but the farther out the script goes the more open it is to changes. Not sure how I’m feeling about this.
That and I have this fantasy of pitching to HBO, but I don’t foresee that happening. Besides, HBO is surprisingly bad at sex scenes (see: The Tudors, True Blood).
I don’t even know if she’s on the correct part of the field from that perspective, but I don’t exactly care. I’ll look up all kinds of minutia and research things to death that you won’t even notice, but I can’t for handegg. It’s not happening. Sorry/not sorry.
Look how polite Amanda’s being! Making introductions and all. Gosh, I bet those two have a lot in common. Punk hair? Check! Body piercings? Check, check! Hmmm, what else? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I promise Maddy gets to speak again soon! She’s a quiet one, that girl. She’s actually a really hard character for me to write because she’s so quiet and I’m… not. Like, at all. Amanda, on the other hand, pretty much writes her own damn self.
Someone should totally start a tally of how many times people blush in this comic. Probably by character rather than just a sum total because it’ll be a really neat visual after awhile. Of course, now I’m thinking about “who NEVER blushes?” and I think there may be a few folks. So either we don’t see them very often, or perhaps I haven’t done a great job with their emotional range since blushing happens for a few different reasons…
Can you guess yet who on this page blushes the most and who blushes the least? I’d love to hear your guess!
I had to do the backgrounds twice because I realized after the first time that I had oriented the room wrong. I built a 3D model of the school in Sims 3 several months ago, specifically to save me from this sort of thing. Otherwise I’d just be guessing all the time and every building would have Escher-style architecture.
I actually tried building sets in Sketch-Up so I could use filtered screenshots for backgrounds, but the learning curve was way to high for the amount of time and patience I had. Instead I plan spaces out in Sims and then draw them in Photoshop. Works well so far! My goal is to be able to reuse a lot of backgrounds. Even though there’s a ton of different set locations, most of them come up in multiple scenes.
Oh, and I was thinking I’d release the Sims-created sets for download, though I’m not sure how much interest there would be. I did, of course, create Sims versions of the characters as well, to, uh, test the buildings. Yeah, that’s it.
New classroom! New character! New TATTOOS! Get it while it’s hot!
