Go figure, Lor and I went to one last convention before the end of the year. Botcon was held in Lexington, Kentucky this year, and featured an incredible dealer's room with a wide array of Transformers and robot toys to pick from. Being a Transformer fan, this was *the* con to go to, and it was quite the last minute excursion for us. Some of the more memorable pictures are posted here. I was surprised to find out that the voice of Optimus Prime and Megatron pretty much voiced my entire childhood, from Ghostbusters to Predator. They ruled the eighties.

Anyway, I got the Soundwave figure I'd been searching months for, (he's staring at me right now), so yeah, Botcon rocks.

~Vyle

Anime Iowa 2006 closes out our convention season this year, and I have to say, it was a blast! Lor and I did so many new things this year, everything from seeing Lor's fantastic character he designed printed on the flyers advertising No Brand Con to doing commissions at cons for various fans.

Special thanks for our friends at Studio Anti Thesis for setting up our forums. Stop by, say hi, chat about art or videogames or whatever else is on your mind.

And even though conventions are in hibernation for the winter, we're still working hard on new and old projects.

It has been awhile since this was updated, but now that the con season is starting, let's update the main page!

Lor has uploaded some really gorgeous pieces in his gallery recently, and there's still a few left to put up. Sorry it's been taking me so long.

Our convention scheldule is updated under "conventions" so please take a look. And hey, if you're in the neighborhood, we'd love ya to stop on by.

On a sidenote, our friends in webcomics, Studio Anti Thesis , has updated their website and I must say it does look very snappy. Plus, it makes Of 2 Minds look better, which I simply love. XD

~Vyle

Lots of stuff happening here at Rainarc Rhapsody. We're busy working on commissions, but still would love more! There's a giant "CONTACT US" link up there, so let us know if we can make anything for ya!

We've set up an art trade with artists in the Midwest that we've met at conventions in the area. This is a Secret Santa for our artistic community, and I'm happy that so many wonderful and gifted artists have agreed to donate their time and talent to bring a little Christmas cheer to one of their peers. I've set up a DeviantArt account
(http://ArtTrade-Revolution.DeviantArt.com) to showcase the finished pieces on December 24th. Until then, each week an artist participating in the trade will be featured with an animation showcasing their artwork, with information to learn more about them, and their projects. Check it out!

Anime Reactor is on Oct 21-23. We are attending incognito (read: We don't have an artist alley table), but the convention should still be fun. We might be willing to do a quick commission or two....if you catch us! Buahahaha!

Of 2 Minds, issue 1, is officially complete and recieved a wonderful debut at AnimeIowa 2005. Kim finished with the script for issue 2, and I'll be updating with new pages of Thea and Damon telepathic adventures shortly in the future.

Did ya see the new gallery? Pretty spiffy, huh? If ya got any problems accessing something, let me know.

Finally, we planned lots of new projects and prints for 2006's convention tour, which will be our most extensive yet! Look for our convention scheldule coming soon!

La la another test

Just testing the redesign on this site. Gotta make sure it works...

Wizard World update. An impromtu visit to Wizard World went a little better than expected and a little worse than expected this Saturday.
First of all, let me explain we generally only attain anime conventions, and ACen is the biggest con I've ever gone to. Stepping into the Donald E. Stevenson Convention Center yet again, only to be directed to a differant, much much larger section packed full of comics and various merchandise was mind-boggling! How can we possibly get through this dealer's room in one day?!? Very quickly.
We ran across the Tokyopop Section first. (It can't be called a 'table' or 'display'. The place was so huge that they had a separate 'bookstore' section with their latest manga, an advertising section with people trying to sell you manga and get your attention then two separate sections for two editors to quietly do portfolio reviews.) I brought the newly finished Of 2 Minds, issue 1 to have someone there look at it. As we were standing in line, there was some interesting canidates before me. I took peeks over their shoulder to see what was in their portfolios and the variety of differant styles in just the four people ahead of me was so eye-opening. There's a Japanese manga style, and an American comic book style, but then there's so many many more styles out there yet to be tapped. Dunno if they sell or not. Dunno if mine sells or not. The editor that looked at Of Two Minds was very nice and very informative (think her name was Carol. It was very loud in there, and I was too nervous to ask her to repeat it. yes yes, bad for business, but live and learn.) She gave me and Kim some very good suggestions on improving Of Two Minds, and seemed to have liked the book. Some of the people in line said they liked the style and the way it looked also. (I don't think they knew I could hear them.) I also gave her a copy of the AntiThezine 3 and our business card. Hopefully it'll give her some reading material on the planeride back to LA.
Afterwards, we went shopping, because when the largest comic con consists solely of one gi-normous dealer's room that's what you do. Weaving through the endless aisles, we stumbled upon a 18" Wacom monitor tablet that was set up for display. And yes, we could draw on it! There were so many artists there, a line was constantly forming to try it out. Lor's been checking into the monitor tablets for a while, so we had to queue up!
General Allie impressions: Lor was right, the calibration was slightly off to the left. The screen was sturdy. I could comfortably rest my hand on the monitor to draw. Swiveling the monitor to get a proper sweeping line was like the monitor gave a giant raspberry to Photoshops inability to rotate the canvas. It would take a little while to get used the sensitivity, and how the line will move, but the potential is there. If I liked the way digital inking made my artwork look, I would consider getting it. And it's really expensive, but I'm glad I'm not the only one to guffawed at the pricetag. And we'll need to sell alot of commissions to afford it. Better get cracking.
Scouring the rest of the dealer's room was a daunting challenge. Rows after rows after rows are packages American comics. Entire tables set up for only the crappy comics everyone's trying to get rid of for 50 cents a pop. The 'finds' in the dealer's room consisted of a Kirby shirt, a cool Vincent (FFVII) poster, an arcade stick and a Malice Mizer CD. Traveling further into the depths of Wizard World, we noticed a saddenly lack of videogames. And by the time we reached the Gamestop area, there remained a meager half hour of looking time before Wizard World shut down for the day.
We decided to case the Artist Alley as quickly and frugally as we could. The quality of the artist alley is astounding. Any small press comics out there that can't afford the Tokyopop or Marvel or Sony set-up in the front bought a table in the Artist Alley in the back. Amazingly, I found "Finder"! Even picked up a free comic from the man running the booth (obviously not Carla, the creator, but nice). I said "Hey! It's Finder! Kim loves Finder!" And he gave me a free book. Pretty cool, huh? Kim needs to get back from vacation so I can give it to her. She'll love it! About the time that our commissions can pay for Wacom's monitor tablet is about the time we'll be ready for Wizard World's Artist Alley.
All in all, we managed to accomplish quite a bit in the five hours we were set loose on the con. I'm pretty happy with our excersion. Randomly con hopping with Lor is always a blast, and we're probably going to visit again.

Kim and I are finishing up O2M (adding extras and all that fun stuff). For those interested here's a sneak http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/20989112/ peek of the first page.

Finished the screentones for Of 2 Minds. Got some formatting to do but it's all screentoned and currently there's nothing that I can do to make them better. Been working on getting the extra art pages together for the final print version. It's nice to know there's a reason of all the biddy doodles and mess up pages I do. It makes great filler art. Gotta still check on the extra pages Kim wrote. That'll be the last thing I do. Gotta make sure the rest of the book is ready to print before starting on those. K. Just thought I'd announce, cause I'm happy and stuff. ^__^

Lor here. Might as well get into this whole blogging thing. Z to the OMG.

Things on my end? Thumbnails for Convention Promotion artwork: Check. Attempting to squeeze in time for the Anime Iowa art contest: Pesudo-Check. Apparently best intentions to do artwork are all for crap when life gets busy. Hweeh. But when I get productive... well, I sure can work fast sometimes. I suppose that doesn't make up for the hours I've wasted CONTEMPLATING on a particular decision, hm? I'm at least content with the coloring method I chose for the A.I. project. That was something that held be back for quite awhile.

Allie's screentones look nice :D Very contrast-y.

--Lor

My vacation is over. A little sad yes, but it's nice to be back into the swing of things. Didn't get as much done as I wanted, but I don't think if I had more time off I would have done any more than I had already done. Totally didn't finish any portraits. Sucks, cause money is always good. I did screentone everything up to page 22. 8 more.

*squeek!* Sat around today and Thursday trying to figure out exactly how to do this whole webdesigning thing. This is the third revision the homepage, and it turned out exactly as I imagined. Whether that means it's good or bad, I guess that's for you to tell me. I'm working on filling out the rest of the links, and afterwards, I'll worry about getting our own galleries on this site. Until then, Deviantart is a wonderful host. And I hear I can make custom error pages. While I hope no one will encounter any errors, the next best thing is show everyone that we here at Rainarc Rhapsody care that you can't get where you want to on our site. It anyone finds a faulty link, or this page just isn't showing up properly on your browser, please let me know. I'll never learn otherwise. Then I'll never be dubbed a webmistress and I would cry. So please....let me know if you find something wrong.

And, yes, we do except commissions, and we sell prints of our previous original works. I know there's been some confusion out there. Plus we just like talking with people. I really do try to check my mail everyday. Catch ya when I'm one number older!

Page 9 and 10 are screentoned for O2M. Did that on Tuesday's art night. Pretty productive for 3 hours. I've figured it takes me an hour and half to screentone a page if I don't have to worry about Thea's crazy hair. It looks good when it's done, but her hair is time consuming. Haven't decided if she needs a haircut yet. I don't think the story is ready to give her one, so I still have time to negotiate with Kim if nessacary. ^__^

Pete showed me a need thing in Photoshop. By going into Bitmap, and clicking a certain selection, I can what a screentoned page will look like when it's printed. This is wonderful, because I've been scared to try some effects that I'm not certain will print appropriately. Armed with this totally awesome info, I've got some effects to fiddle with!

Another co-worker of mine gave me a picture of her son to copy for her. She's already thinking of putting her son and her grandson in a portrait too. One a time, Lady. I'm thinking of raising the rate just so I can steady the incoming demand.

Getting the description for the 2nd portrait in the series I'm doing for my first co-worker by the end of the day. I'm in no rush. The 1st portrait is tougher than I imagined, only because I need so much reference. Need her head, the tanktop and jeans she specified, the hawk she's holding, the panther she's petting and the lotus flower she's sitting in, plus a nice African savana sunset in the background. I have about half of these. Google is my bestest friend. *huggles Google*

Dad called me today with a quote in getting more t-shirts printed. I'm pleasantly surprised people at ACEN liked the t-shirts we designed. My mom and dad, who work as a Production Manager and Sales Rep respectively, gave me a nice deal for the first batch (loving daughter discount). That was nice of them, because without that we wouldn't have gotten them made. But now we can use the money that we made from the previous shirts to pay for these. It's nice when business balances out. He's also looking into us getting calanders made, with a Rainarc Rhapsody original for each month. Would anyone be interested in purchasing something like this? I'd love to know.

If anyone would like t-shirts, other clothing, and various items (such as pencils, pen, mousepads, calanders, mugs) printed with something on it, you can contact
LeRoy Dyal
American Outfitters
3700 Sunset Ave.
Waukegan, IL 60087
(847) 997-2197
or
(800)397-6081 (and talk to the receptionist. They might be able to help you too.)

I should post a picture of the shirts and banner they printed for us. Everything always comes out really really well.

Really...I meant to work on that portrait! Got caught up in designing website stuff last night, though. It was 1:00 am before I realized it. The emptiness of this site...the chaos...It's driving me nuts. I like the layout I was working on last night though. I think it's easy enough to navigate, but it doesn't have a professional flair to it. Still pounding out a few ideas i have floating around in my head for it visually. My current problem is I don't know where to start, or what would be the best way going about building it with HTML. Should I build a table and fill it with pictures, or try to just place them on the screen...It's a little overwhelming. I'll post a picture of what I want the homepage to look like, and maybe someone out there could point me in the right direction. Little tips and tricks are pretty useful too. ^__^ I'll get it to work one way or another....
My vacation is coming up next week. (My birthday too ^__^ Fireworks all for me!) Maybe I'll get some of my projects completed then...