If you haven’t seen any Ashes Cricket 2013 gameplay videos yet, man, get yourself in on that action. It’s like Aliens: Colonial Marines and Moonbase Alpha had a sports-themed baby. It’s not often a game gets cancelled after it’s been released; I say cancelled rather than recalled, because it was only released for a few hours and even then it wasn’t even finished. Ironically, for reasons evident in the videos, it might have otherwise been the first Cricket game I’d have been tempted to buy.

The issue of Australia versus England in Cricket (specifically, the Ashes) goes back a long way, with a long and proud history of heckling the other side’s abilities. As someone who doesn’t follow the Cricket, I feel ill-equipped to explain how this works specifically, but fortunately I can link to a Clarke and Dawe sketch instead.

I follow enough to know Australia’s not done that well this year, though. Also, -1 spin, y’know, because of the trippy physics effects in Ashes Cricket 2013.

Last friday I mentioned trying out some different ways of pencilling the comic. For friday’s comic, I set the pencil* to 50% opacity and made it really wide. That way I got broad strokes, and could refine them by going over them lightly to put in details. That works well for some people, but I couldn’t shake the desire to cover my construction lines when I inked them, and that’s why they looked thick and weird. With this comic, I left the pencil on 100% opacity, but reduced the size to about half what I normally use. Then I could sketch a bunch of lines for each actual line, and I wasn’t trying to effectively retrace an existing line on a new layer while inking. I think it looks better this way.

*In a technique I got from David Willis, use Photoshop’s pencil tool and draw on giant canvases. It makes colouring way faster, and I like the look of the lines better.