Gōngxǐ fācái! {name}!

I've been looking forward to this chance to reach out again. Over the past couple of years I've made a pretty big deal of celebrating the Lunar New Year. This time around, I thought the mighty Wood Dragon would probably not be needing much help from me.

Readers of my alternate newsletter Tiger Talk already had the chance to read the special comic I did end up creating for the new year. Actually, it was more a meditation and celebration of the year previous. The year of the wet hare.

It was inspired by a handful of conversations around the January's new year. I kept noticing similar themes about the year's initial start, intensity and imminent resolution. This brought to mind a classic tale about the Chinese Lunar zodiac - I wrote a version of it for readers at this time last year.

The story itself was fairly straight forward, but as I worked on the tiniest of thumbnails (smaller even than my own thumb nail) I discovered that adding or subtracting panels was very easy in the 1:1 aspect ratio. From there, I realized I could create impact by doubling that ratio vertically or horizontally. This provided an interesting framework for using the 18 square panels and 3 impact panels (that have a 1:2 or 2:1 ratio) that ultimately made up the comic.

I was able to play with a variety of tiled compositions and layout the comic with anywhere from 4, to 8 panels across. or in the case you see here; 3 panels across. The rest of the comic is hosted in a flexible container where the browser window can have an effect on the panel layout.

I've also put together this 1 minute video. I made a point to illustrate this comic under specific constraints. Specificly so that I could record this aspect of the process. Watch for a future blog-post where I'll go into much more technical detail.

As I have no specific plans for crowdfunding a book this year, I feel particularly compelled to invest my own attention and enthusiasm into projects in which I'd like to play a larger part. So I've suddenly come up with this new section to my MUSEletter Missives. A Cool Stuff Department.

I'll have a new chapter of Go Doggo next month: promise!

–PLUGO