if all you feel is pain and suffering, get someone to suffer with you

every year, the physics department would have a "visit day" during which all the gradschool applicants who have been accepted into the school get invited to visit the department for 2-3 days. hotel and accommodations are fully paid, so in a way this is how the department lured naive undergraduates to join them in spending the next 6-7 years of their lives in pain and suffering. that, and constant ego-crushing from faculty members.

i myself went to one of these 2 years ago. i was entirely impressed by how organized the event was, and decided that maybe gradschool was not such a bad idea anyway. now here i am 2 years later, realizing what a naive idiot i was back then. but that's not the point i'd like to talk about in this entry.

the physics department always uses the 4th floor lobby to socialize, and 4th floor conference room to hold seminar for events like visit day. for the past 2 years, the walls of the lobby had been covered up by posters that grad students make for presentation... until today. on my way home today, i went to the 4th floor to drop off some stuff, and there it was, a shiny new whiteboard out on the lobby wall. why anyone would stick a whiteboard on a lobby is beyond me, but seeing a shiny new whiteboard being used to write stupid shit like PHYSICS RULE or E = MC^2 just irked me, especially since the people who wrote stupid shit like that are physics graduate students. they can at least use it to derive maxwell equations or something more significant.

so i picked up a red marker,



and what else is more fitting than two of my most favorite physicists, facing off in a loincloth?

i can't wait to see the looks on the professors and the prospective grads tomorrow morning when they went up to the 4th floor to get some bagels and muffins.

i've been looking at the last 2 pages over and over and decided that page 11 just doesn't flow well to page 12. so i decided to move page 12 to 13, and insert a new page as page 12. ___sasuka@LJ asked for some sort of tutorial on how i do my pages... but i don't really know how i can possibly make a tutorial, especially with the way i draw things, so instead of a tutorial, i'll just post how the page actually looks like before i channeled it up on photoshop.

this is the actual raw scan from the sketchbook:



this is after the mode is switched to red channel:



i sketch the page first with a red pen, and then i "ink" with a blue pen. when i sketch, i just try different positions until i get one that i think is right. that is the main reason why the page looks really messy with red lines everywhere. this doesn't always work because sometimes i'd draw 5-6 different positions and none of them would work and before i know it the entire panel is already filled with red lines and i can't see which one i should work with anymore. panel 3, for example, was redrawn SEVEN TIMES before i finally went with that pose. i tried top view, bottom view, bird's eye view, zoomed-out, and other angled shots and none of them worked at all.

this is the page when it was halfway done.



enjoy. i'll try to work on this more over the weekend.