Secret Santa return gift

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Here's the Drunk Duck secret Santa gift I received in the exchange. All the cast of Character Development in cute chibi-form. This was drawn by theshazerin. Thanks for the wonderful gift, theshazerin. You can check out his webcomic, The Mannequin Waltz over at Drunk Duck.

Secret Santa strip (4 of 4)

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The conclusion. Thanks to Darwin for allowing me to post these pages, and for sending people in the direction of my comics. And thanks to Drunk Duck and all those who organized the Secret Santa webcomic exchange for 2010.

Secret Santa strip (3 of 4)

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The secret Santa project was a lot of fun ... I'm looking forward to seeing what I get out of this process.

Secret Santa strip (2 of 4)

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The brooding (half) vampire.

It's difficult to get Playmobil to brood ... they have smiles fixed as firmly as any campaign politician or beauty pageant contestant ... so I had to play with angles a bit.

All up it took 85 photos to make the 4 pages. There's always a few out of focus, but I experiment with odd angles and ranges just to see what I get. Sometimes, if the lighting is right, you can get a little bit of brooding from a plastic figure.

Secret Santa strip (1 of 4)

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The webcomics community Drunk Duck has an annual secret Santa project, and I took part in this years one. I was assigned an webcomic creator's work to do something xmasassy with, and got an interesting vampire story, Only Half (the other story option by the same author/artist would have been too difficult with Playmobil). I think I was just meant to draw a single panel, but I went a little overboard and set a story within the timeline and universe of the comic.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the four page results over the next few days.

BTW: Over at the Character Development blog you'll find the end of episode 18 today, and the start of episode 19 tomorrow ...

Merry Xmas

... and a happy **hack** new **cough, cough** year **wheeze**.

Busy, busy, busy

A frantic week of child-rearing, working, writing, online shopping, and cooking. Which has seen me fail to find time to post anything.

Started my xmas shopping, which is always a bonus in August.

A children's story poured out of me over the last couple of days, but there'll be a lot of editing and tweaking to get it right.

I cooked cajun blackened fish last night (with assorted veges), and rogan josh for tonight (I can smell it slow-cooking as I type, and it's making me hungry).

I had some webpage work this week, which was a little frustrating, but I hope to finish it this weekend if I get some alone-time.

Our wee boy has decided that he's not going to sleep during the day anymore, which has made it much harder for me to get anything done. The good news is that he is sleeping through at night in longer stretches ... so I can now at least think clearly about all the stuff I don't have time to do.