harlancore

Oh my goodness! An update! It has really been a while this time. I really don’t have anything to show, only a few words to share.

Let’s get right to it, the subject of this post. I have decided to take a break from making papercraft and plan to put BOXPUNX on the back burner for a while. That only means one thing: I won’t be making new boxpunx models.

But, remember, before that thought sets in, remember that there are over 300 boxpunx models in circulation right now. A handful of blank templates waiting for people to draw all over. Boxpunx still EXISTS, I am just not making new ones.

Why not? It’s simple: I am tired. Even now, I sit here in my room, continuously drinking coffee after coffee, I think I am like on cup number twelve, yet I am still tired. I am so drowsy. Also, I really want to stop and think about new ideas, allow time for improvement, revelation, and evolution.

I watched this podcast called Lynchland, starring the very talented and very funny Liam Lynch, and I not only loved the brilliance of it, it inspired me to want to do more. Although I don’t know what “more” exactly means, I do know I have some unfinished business outside the realm of papercraft.

What I plan to do FIRST is something that probably NONE of my papercraft fans are going to like, or even care about in the slightest. That’s ok with me, because like I said, BOXPUNX Still exists, and I will one day, return to it. I Know I will. But anyone who knows anything about me knows I also like to draw, make music, and WRITE.

After reading THE DARK TOWER I was so very inspired to finish something I started on long ago. This crazy story idea I have had for a while, kind of a biography but one that isn’t true at all really, only some of it, but for the most part it is a fantasy story. It’s not a papercraft story, that’s for sure.

Writing is not a new thing for me. I have always liked writing, drawing, and making music. For the most part I think the music I make is something only I will ever enjoy, and I say that because it has never garnered the kind of response I get from my drawings or prose, most just kind of hurridly leave the room to avoid saying much. Again, that’s ok, I know with the music I try so hard to make something unique that the average person will find it unlistenable. Whatever. ^^

I can draw well, but I am no Da Vinci. I am not sure I want to be either, but I figure I will always draw. Period.

But what about writing? Well, I have always written. Poetry, stories, or role playing game campaigns. I never thought of myself as a “novelist”, simply because most of the things I write I have always thought would be less enjoyable than my music. Ever heard of an artist being his own worst critic? It’s so very true. Ask anyone who thinks he or she is an artist.

After reading a few books and seeing a few things in a way I had never seen them before gave me the strength (and courage!) to not only try to turn this series of stories banging around in my head into a full blown novel, but one that I might actually share with people.

So, in order to do this right, I need a re-education. I want to learn about a million things, one of which is grammar. A refresher course in all that is punctuation. It will take time, to learn what I need and then to actually do the work. I have already done an outline, one that gets more extensive everyday, and the introduction along with the first four chapters are written as we speak. I already know how its going to end. If it is good, I already know what book two and three will be about. Pieces of this story started forming when I was about 16, only now at age 30-something do I find myself fleshing it out, and can see it becoming more real with every word I type.

What does this mean for HEAVY PAPER? Well, you can maybe blame HEAVY PAPER ultimately for all of this. I wanted to make a comic strip, based on a different story idea I had, this one centered on BOXPUNX and papercraft, but full of crazy things as well. But when I got about 30 pages in, I couldn’t help but feeling I was putting a tremendous amount of effort into the wrong damn thing.

Why don’t you stop all this unnecessary madness, and write Damien’s fucking story already?

The world does not need a new papercraft zine, at least not of the sort I was making! I may still finish the first issue someday, if only to not completely waste what was done, but in all honesty, the comic strip was so AMBITIOUS that coloring one page could take days! It looks beautiful, I still want to show it off, but I don’t think it will be done anytime soon, it is so exhausting!

Anyway, I think that is enough of an explanation. If you are new to this site and my world, please, don’t think you missed out on BOXPUNX because there are still 100’s of posts here to browse, and 100’s of models here for you to download. If you cannot constructively kill an hour here at my site, even if it hasn’t been updated for months, then I really should take the whole thing down, because I have failed in what I have tried to do. Which was to create a website with substance, centered around topics I love.

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Hi again, tis’ been awhile, I know this. But I have returned with a small preview, and 5 new models. Five tiny new models, this time they are interpretations of the band DETHKLOK from the Adult Swim cartoon Metalocalypse. Click any of the preview images for a larger version!

Initially I was going to include these models with the first issue of HEAVY PAPER, but since then I have changed the format a bit, and one of the significant changes was the resolution. Instead of making it 150 DPI I have dropped the zine down to 72 DPI, with is too low to print. I figure since it will be a zine about ART not TEMPLATES maybe it shouldn’t be printable. I also changed the page size from 8.5 x 11 to 17 by 11, so I can make two-page spreads without having a line thru the center.

More changes: Instead of emailing a sample issue to artists that I think might be interested in contributing, I have now decided to make the preview issue available to everyone, and if you want to submit something, you will have to download and look thru the sample issue to find the guidelines. All it took was someone asking me “what if you miss someone?” to cause me to change the plan. Hopefully it is for the better.

So, expect a downloadable preview issue of HEAVY PAPER #21 when next I post, and inside you will find the submission DO’s and DONT’s. Please don’t send me anything till you have looked at the zine.

Besides working on HEAVY PAPER, I have also been reading a lot. I have become obsessed, and I think my strong interest in video games is finally dying out. I am still into games, and still plan to play games, especially the games I own but haven’t finished, but I am slowing down, playing less often. It’s like all my focuses are shifting at once. Instead of playing video games and reading comics I want to play tabletop rpgs and read as many books as I can. Instead of making new boxpunx I want to make new illustrations, using boxpunx as the inspiration, and still use my skills to promote papercraft as ART and papercrafters as ARTISTS. I am even more into electronic music now more than ever before.

I will say this about HEAVY PAPER, it will be BOXPUNX HEAVY, no doubt. But instead of new stuff, I fully intend to recap all the old stuff throughout the life of this zine. Even though each issue will have a theme of some kind, the overlying themes of this concept are:

1.) To represent papercrafters as talented illustrators.

2.) To glorify that which has already been done, and perhaps forgotten. Or never seen. To remember how interesting the past can be!

Here are two more preview pages, to sweeten the deal, but that’s it, when I return, we will have a full blown preview issue, 30 + pages. And if I can get people to submit, hopefully it will be 75-100 pages long in it’s completed form. That’s of course counting every page as 2 pages, like an open book or magazine. Regardless, if no one submits, it will be 50 pages for sure. The whole thing is already laid out, and many pages are done already. Just a few more tweaks, and maybe by this time next week it will be downloadable.

Click images to enlarge them!

Until next time, here is The Knife with the amazing “Forest Families”. This is a live clip, and the recording is good, so don’t be put off. Plus, they have some really cool animation playing on a thin screen in front of them (or something, I really don’t know!) and the effect looks really neat. Watch it for that if nothing else.

If you are one of those people who never watch the videos I post, that’s too bad, because I always try to pick something either visually or aurally interesting, in what I think is a truly creative manner, and sometimes, if I am lucky, it’s both. I understand not everyone will like what I post, I just hope people click the videos every now and again, and hopefully you find something new to love. Kind of like me with The Dark Tower. As far as I am concerned, Nothing is more exciting than finding a new thing to love!

Wow, I rambled on a bit there, but eh, I guess that’s what a blog is for right, a place where we can all publicly ramble. I hope at least some of it was interesting…

Anyway, (*ramble*ramble*) now that the Dark Tower has been finished, I am reading both the Elric of Melnibone saga by Michael Moorcock and the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries by Charlaine Harris. I am also inches away from cracking open The Stand by Stephen King. I feel like I may have felt if I had never played a Final Fantasy type game before now and somehow I ended up with a copy of part 12, played it, loved it, and now have not only 11 more Final Fantasy games to play, but a whole host of other similiar things. I am not so daft that I didn’t realize “Books are a magical doorway to the wonderful world of Imaginationland!”, there just didn’t seem to be enough time before, since I was dedicating so much of it to all these other things. I always thought I would get around to serious reading one day.

So yeah, it’s very exciting to see that day finally arrive! Here’s one more video from THE KNIFE! This is a get up and RUN THE HELL OUT OF THERE song, if it was on the soundtrack to your life, this would be playing the day you did something incredible. It’s called LISTEN NOW.

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Here is a little preview of HEAVY PAPER. Over the next couple of posts I plan to show a few bits and pieces, today I will show off the comic strip I have been working on. I call it “Adventures in Boxes”. The first image is a scan of page 24, unfinished.

This is page seven, fully inked.

This is the completed page seven.

I have cranked out about 30 pages of random nonsense so far. The comic is not strictly about papercraft, but it will reference it, as well as feature an intrusive boxpunx slant. I am not only making a comic to put in the zine, but various drawings as well. Next time I will show some scans from that element. With each preview I will explain more and more about the zine, slowly unwrapping it until the first issue is completed. Oh, and it won’t be “issue number one”, instead the first issue will be number 21. Why? I will explain later. Until then, here is another track by The Knife.

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Happy new year.

Maybe I should have posted that on January 1st. I think I may have even wanted to. It is hard to say, so much has happened since the last time I posted something. Dec 24th was it? ( I had to cheat to know that of course^^) Not that long ago, but it seems much longer.

For the most part, I have been working hard on HEAVY PAPER, trying to create a sort of sample issue, something I could parade around to other artists who might be interested in the concept. I also have been playing Dungeons & Dragons with my roommates. This is something nerds like me do. We haven’t played it in weeks though, further back than the last post even, but it is worth noting that over the years we have made characters on more than one occasion, played thru various modules, tried different classes, had various types of fun. So even though we don’t play all the time, we do play often enough that it would be fair to say we are always in the middle of an adventure.

I had been thinking for a while that I might like to run a game. I have before, but it has been a while. I have run games using various systems, ranging from D&D to Mage: the ascension to Cyberpunk 2020. Vin and I together have run live action Vampire: the masquerade games, on more than one occasion…full-on hardcore nerd and lovin’ it, thankee-sai.

If you hadn’t got this before, the boxpunx photographer and the boxpunx creator are very good friends. Boxpunx wouldn’t be what it is without his touch.

What was I going to say again? Oh yeah, what it is I had been doing recently….so anyway I wanted to write a game and after playing Fallout 3 I thought what a beautiful time to run a Gamma World adventure! Let’s play the first three modules, old rules and all. I even as time went by decided to not just play using the old stuff, but to maybe “re-write” the old stuff, just enough, so that my friends and I could play with the old flavor, but with my own twist.

This is also something nerds like me do.

That was when Vin insisted I go and see Roland first. I really needed to. In a way I knew that I needed to, it came up too often. I guess now was as good a time as any.

Harlancore began following the gunslinger, who was following the man in black.

Vin suggested, “Before you write a Gamma World adventure, maybe you should read The Dark Tower!“. So I did.

Or I should say, so I am. I am not done yet, it’s a seven-book long series, and I am somewhere in the middle of book 5 at the moment, “Wolves of the Calla”. I am not going to say anything about the story. Not a word. But I will state a few things and then briskly move on.

1.) I have never read a Stephen King book before now, but have seen pretty much every film and TV mini-series. Although I know the books are better. ( How can I not? it’s the kind of thing people never stop saying! )
2.) I have heard about The Dark Tower books from someone somewhere pretty much since they came out. Seemingly all my life, and always glowingly.
3.) I have spent perhaps too much time dedicated to reading mostly comic books. Perhaps way too much.
4.) I am madly madly in love with these books! It’s like the coolest RPG I have ever played, entirely in my own head!

It hasn’t completely distracted me though, on certain days definitely, it couldn’t be helped really, but for the most part, a large chunk of time has been dedicated to the new project. I am so very close to being so very close. I need to make a couple new models and post them to pass the time. Maybe I will go do that now…( …as I reach for the Stephen King book lying by the bed…calling me…Ka is like the wind… )

Next time I will post something actually from the ‘zine, like maybe the cover or an un-colored page from the boxpunx comic strip. You can see some of the photos Vin has taken NOW if you can find his link in my blogroll, it’s called VIN’S TUMBLR SITE. Good luck. Here’s a clue: it’s alphabetical…

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