Posts authored by Dylan Edwards
I run the show.
Valley of the Silk Sky page 76 stops in; also: convention news!
Chapter 8 continues, and page 76 awaits your eyeballs! Read it here:
Speaking of Patreon, a couple of things:
I now have page updates set to early access, which means $1+ Patrons get exclusive access to them on Monday. On Thursday, the post goes public. (Note: This doesn’t apply to all the posts I make on Patreon, just finished comic pages. Things like work-in-progress posts will stay behind the paywall.)
That particular post has some additional details about eating habits in the Valley, so check it out if you’re curious.
Even if you don’t pledge, you can still follow creators and see their public posts. So if it’s convenient for you, feel free to follow me on there and get updates that way. The “follow” button is on the left under the total pledge widget.
As for convention news: I got into TCAF! I will have my own table this time around, up on the second floor. I’m very excited to return to Toronto and one of the best indie comics shows in all the land.
I’m working on lining up a couple of local events for February and March, and will post when I have more info.
As ever, you can keep track of all my convention appearances on the Appearances page.
Until next week,
Dylan
Valley of the Silk Sky: The Long Run – page 76
For a little more insight into eating habits in the Valley, check out this Patreon post.
Valley of the Silk Sky page 75 is up! Plus more VotSS news
Chapter 8 rumbles along, and page 75 awaits your eyeballs:
Little-known fact: 75 is the sesquipedalian anniversary.
Another little-known (until now!) fact: I have finished the pencils for chapter 9. It’s true! So if you were wondering, “Are you gonna do like last year when you posted one chapter at the beginning of the year and then bupkis?” the answer is “probably not!”
And while a penciled chapter is not the same thing as an inked, painted, scanned, lettered, and formatted-for-web chapter, the pencils are usually the most time-consuming part of the process. Having all the pencils done for the next chapter when the current one has barely started is a darn good sign.
This means I’m still on track to wrap up Part II art by the end of February so I can get the book to the printers in time for a mid-April release. So! Things proceed apace.
Until next week,
Dylan
Valley of the Silk Sky: The Long Run – page 75
Valley of the Silk Sky page 74 awaits you
Want to read page 74 of Valley of the Silk Sky? You got choices:
This page references some stuff from chapter 1, so if it’s been awhile since you read it, pages 12 and 13 can help you out.
In other VotSS news, I’m about halfway through the pencils for chapter 9. Oh yes! I’m taking advantage of this quiet time of year to pad the ol’ buffer as much as possible.
Also, if I’m to hit my goal of having the Part Two book out by mid-April, I’ll need to have all the art done by end of February at the latest. I believe this is doable, I just have to knuckle down and draw draw draw.
Finishing chapters 9 and 10 will give me a buffer of weekly page updates through about July (this assumes a couple of breaks between chapters to post updates to the Appendicies on the VotSS website, for the edification of world-building nerds such as myself.
Finally, I just wanted to point out a new feature on this here website. Over in the right-hand column (which gets pushed below the main content on mobile), you will now see a “Newest Comic” widget that shows the most recent page I’ve added. This is a quick and easy way to jump to the latest installment of VotSS.
Anyhow, back to work on making more of those installments. See you next week!
Cheers,
Dylan
Valley of the Silk Sky: The Long Run – page 74
And now, page 73 of Valley of the Silk Sky
It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for another installment of Valley of the Silk Sky. Page 73 is now up, and you can read it here:
Since everyone knows teenagers always make good decisions, you can expect the next page to be the final page of the book. It just says, “And then everything turned out fine. The End.”
SPEAKING OF EVERYTHING TURNING OUT FINE: As I posted on Tuesday, I believe the redesign for Studio NDR is basically done. I’m sure I will find stray bits and pieces that need to be fixed/improved, but these should (in theory) be minor corrections.
So please do have a look around. I added a bunch of comics that hadn’t been collected on here before, and streamlined the content to focus on stronger, more recent work.
Cheers,
Dylan
Valley of the Silk Sky: The Long Run – page 73
Website redesign is basically done, I think?
I mean, there are more minor tweaks here and there, and I’m sure I’ll find some typos or whatever, but the bulk of the work is done.
I took down about 300 pages of comics and art, leaving a mere … 250 pages of comics and art for you to peruse. The guiding principle for what got cut and what stayed was framing this site as more of a portfolio and less of an archaeological dig through every single comic I’ve ever bothered to create. So the focus now is on more recent work.
That does mean I took down the anti-Valentine’s Day cards. They were at one time the most popular thing on this site, but they don’t really fit in with anything else I do (so they weren’t driving traffic to the rest of my work), and I haven’t felt motivated to make any new ones in several years. So eh. On to new things!
I also removed all the comment boxes. In the five years I had comments enabled here, I think I got a grand total of sixteen non-spam comments. Obviously this was not a feature people were all that interested in using! I’ve found people are more likely to communicate via Twitter or Tumblr than a comment box. Other cute but non-essential widgets got pulled, like tag clouds, cuz mostly it was adding clutter more than anything else.
Because the redesign involved a major under-the-hood rebuild, I ended up deleting basically all the old pages and started from scratch. That means any permalinks you might have set up will probably no longer work, so I guess check yer bookmarks.
There are some big improvements: the new structure is responsive, so you should now be able to view the site on tablets and phones and have it adapt to your device.
I also learned a new way to save graphics that cuts the file size dramatically without sacrificing quality. A great many comics on here are now bigger and clearer while also chopping about 1.5MB off the file size. That should mean faster load times (and less data usage for folks on mobile devices).
I finally added a new section for my autobio comics. Most of these weren’t on the site before (or were difficult to find), so take a spin around and see what there is to see!
Cheers,
Dylan