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Showing posts from 2010

Story Toy

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As I work on the story for Nonplayer, I'm frequently reminded that I'm not a very good writer. Which isn't to say I can  never  be a good writer -- after all, I'm just barely making a dent in my ten thousand hours . Clearly, I'm thinking about story much more than I used to -- there's a new dread that seeps into the back of my head whenever I watch a movie or read a comic that has the same shortcomings I'm encountering in my own work. How is it that I walk away from those experiences with the feeling that I've failed somehow? I didn't even  write  that movie! It's a strange thing. Here's a tentative first pass at a definition for "story": a story is sometimes more than, but never less than, a sequence of significant events. I might even venture that those events need to have some narrative connection to one another, but maybe a thematic relationship is all that's really needed. Jackass 3D worked fine, right? Well, okay, maybe

IllustStudio First Impressions

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I’ve got a week of IllustStudio under my belt. The verdict: spectacular. As I mentioned in my last post, IllustStudio has a similar interface to Photoshop’s. Many of the macros are the same, most of the button icons are similar, and you’ll recognize the same basic tools -- magic wand (comically transliterated from the Japanese as “magikkuwando”), color picker, lasso, etc. The key difference between the two programs is that IllustStudio allows you to make either raster or vector layers. In a raster layer, you draw with pixels. In a vector layer, every line you draw has at its core a tweakable, transformable mathematical spine. The important thing here is that from a user perspective, the two feel mostly identical. But boy, are they different. The Eraser In the IllustStudio demo video , you see this little guy in action a couple of times. Until I actually started drawing pages in IllustStudio, I hadn’t fully grokked how this tool, paired with vectors, could revolutionize my p

Second Verse, (Hopefully Not) Same as the First

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I’m visiting my wife's family in Seoul for a couple of weeks, which means I’m temporarily Cintiq -less. We timed this trip to coincide with preproduction on issue #2 of Nonplayer, so I’ve been concepting, writing, and doing some rough layouts on a “pad,” which is a non-digital wood-pulp-based substrate for graphite residue. I think it might be broken, though. The undo button doesn’t seem to work. I skimped on the preproduction for issue #1, and everything took twice as long because of it. Driven by a desire to show pretty pictures to my friends as quickly as possible, I hung my final artwork on some very flimsy layouts -- sometimes they weren’t much more than stick figures. No surprise, then, that I ended up redrawing a lot of finished panels because of botched camera angles and bad poses. Here at the beginning, it turns out you have to go slow to go fast. A little extra clarity, especially during the layout phase, can give you a lot more confidence going into the final artwork

DIY Not?

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I just finished reading " Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World ," by Mark Frauenfelder (founder of Boing Boing and editor in chief of Make magazine). I never thought of myself as much of a DIY guy, but I enjoyed his Colbert Report interview enough to hunt down his book at the library. It chronicles his misadventures in do-it-yourselfing -- undeterred by failure, he hacks his way through several ambitious projects, including the building of a chicken coop (and the stewardship of its residents), the construction of several cigar-box guitars, and the raising of a colony of bees. I wouldn't have predicted I'd have been interested in any of those things, but it turned out to be a fun ride. Frauenfelder quotes some interesting folks. For example, there's this gem from Charles Martin Simon's "Principles of Beekeeping Backwards": Our apicultural forefathers, those great men who defined the principles of modern beekeeping, Langstroth,

Sitting Duck

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I just realized that I hadn't gotten around to posting the color version of page 8. Here it is. Click to enlarge: There seems to be a lot of disagreement about the usefulness of sound effects. The anti-SFX people point out that big words look cheesy, cover up the linework, and ruin the general fine-artness of things. The pro-SFX partisans counter that sounds can make things more visceral and engage the other senses (if indirectly). Then there's Japan. They'll add a sound effect for a gentle breeze or the sound of somebody blinking. This tool must have some value if it's been used for decades on multiple continents. Then again, so has dynamite. That doesn't mean I should use it to loosen a stuck spark plug. I guess the real question is whether sound effects make sense for Nonplayer. I started out staunchly against them, but was surprised to discover that some pages seemed to come to life when I added them. Of course, I then went whole hog and put in too many

Bombs Away!

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When I announced on Facebook a couple of weeks ago that I'd finished the first issue of Project Waldo, the plan was to post something here the next day. Since then, I've been making the comic a little more finished. Today, I finally threw in the towel for good. It's done. So first things first. "Project Waldo" has a new title: With any luck, you'll be seeing this soon on a shelf at your local comic store. Justin "Moritat" Norman went with me to Arcane Comics yesterday and we brought the cover along to see how well it would stand out among the other comics that started with "N." It'll be parked right next to Northlanders , which is some rotten luck, because that's one amazing-looking comic.  Northlanders notwithstanding, I was happy to discover that most modern comic covers are so dark that a yellow-and-orange pile of fruitsauce like mine glows like a little campfire in the forest.  One last thing: from now on, I'll try

Breakaway

Why on Earth did I wait until last month to rent a studio? As with most of the delays that have plagued this project, chalk it up to a failure of imagination. It takes a firm commitment to convince your mental hinterlands that you’re serious about a new course of action, and there’s no firmer commitment than the financial sort (that’s not true, but let’s proceed as though it were).  Having moved my stuff to the studio, I find that I’m exactly twice as productive as I was back home. I can’t completely account for the speed gain -- perhaps when I’m working at home, there’s a part of my mind that’s stuck in some domestic slacker-torpor. What’s nice about this new arrangement is that when I am at home, I can enjoy a TV show without being terrorized by the solemn beating of the tell-tale Cintiq in the corner. I have three office mates , and they are all cool bros who have yet to ice one another. Inspired by the artistic slipstream effect that seems to have accelerated our outpu