Nelson vs Bug

Here's a page from a wee scene where the main characters run into a GIANT BUG!!

Club Scene (2nd scene)

So here's the draft/storyboard for the second scene. click the first pic to go into more of slideshow mish.

Downloadable Fonts. So many great fonts out there!

So an important part to any comic is how you approach your text and text bubbles. I think white speech bubbles are the most universal and fitting colour for comics. White is a base colour, everything works with it so your pictures wont clash. Font is another important part. Some comics work well with font that looks like type. Some comics look shit with type and a more freehand look is needed. I've written some speech with my wacom tablet but its really not the most efficiant way to it. What I need to do is create my own font out of that freehand text or go online and find someone who has already used a programe to turn their freehand into a keyboard ready font.



There are many great sites that hold a big variety of fonts. It's worth checking them out and just downloading a bunch of free ones. Some you have to pay for, other sites only list free fonts made by good samaritans. Here's a couple of really good sites that should be mentioned. Full of free ones:

http://openfontlibrary.org/font/averia-sans
http://www.1001fonts.com/   (this ones great!! all free as well)
http://www.blambot.com/fonts_sfx.shtml

There is also;

http://www.typographyserved.com
http://www.behance.net

http://new.myfonts.com/http://vi.sualize.us/popular/
http://www.thedieline.com/
http://lovelypackage.com/
http://www.swigstudio.com/
http://www.typographyserved.com
http://www.behance.net

Sound FX fonts (BAM!! CRUNCH!!)

BlamBot.com has a great selection of fx fonts though a lot of them will cost to download.

http://www.blambot.com/fonts_sfx.shtml

Also here are some instructions to install fonts onto your computer (which means that photoshop, illustrator etc. will automatically put them into it's own library of fonts).

For windows:

1. press Start > Control Panel
2. Look for the FOnts Icon .. double click on it
3. File > install new font
4. Locate the folder we created ..
5. when u select the folder the screen will start reading the fonts.
6. Press on Select All
7. Press OK .. Vwala .. u have your new fonts on your PC ..

You usually have to extract a .zip file. Just extract it to a folder you create eg. Tom>fonts and then from there, drag the extracted open type font files, or truetype font files (.ttf, .otf) into the 'Font' file found in the control panel.

Should I make S.E a webcomic or tradional?

So one thing I've thought about is whether or not I release this as a webcomic or if I would do it in a more tradtional way. With the success of handheld multimedia devices like the ipad, everything from books to boardgames are being transformed into digital for this new era of ipad technology. I personally love my Ipod touch. It rules. I can go to the app store and download anything I want. And with the emergence of microtransations its a really profitable market as well. But I find it really refreshing and meditative to take a break from all this new crazy awesome digital crap and go outside and read a book in the sun. Ya know? Like they used to do in the good old days. And I think after this wave of media digitalization has swept through, people will go back to old formats. Because not only can they take a break and get lost in a good read, they can take a break from a fucking computer screen.

So I'm pretty keen to create this comic traditionally as a book because it is a format I have come to understand and I believe it works perfectly fine. In saying that, there are some really awesome and inventive webcomics out there where the creator has taken advantage of the computer screen. Comics definately are evolving. Here are some really cool webcomics:

(aaaaah the comic I wanted to show wont load)...fail (will put up later)


Here is a talk by Scott mcCloud, a comicbook artist who has also written some amazingly helpful books called 'Understanding Comics' and 'Making Comics'. They are honestly a must if you wanna learn about all there is to learn about comics. He's really open minded about the artform and has experience as a professional comic book artist. A real GC. Check out his talk he does for ted.com

Chuckdee: Marv from Sin City.

This is a pic done by a dude on Deviant art called Chuckdee. Deviant art is a great source for digital art, you can get lost there for hours.

"The original piece was done on gray paper with Microns, brush and copic grey markers... the rain and highlights were whiteout pen, and a white prismacolor pencil .... I couldn't resist tweaking it a bit in Photoshop and adding a bit of blood and slight glow to the rain!"

See more of his work at:

http://chuckdee.deviantart.com/

The Singularity: The expodential growth of technology, The emegence of A.I and life extension.

So science is getting pretty hardout. Craig Venter made headlines when he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute created "synthetic life". Basically what they did is made their own sequence for a genome. This genome was implanted into a single celled organism which could then begin to replicate like any living creature does.

Here's a vid of Craig Venter Talking about his truely Sci Fi discovery:

Fact: Science can now custom design organisms!

Combining that sort of discovery with genetic engineering quickly leads me on to thinking that we are soon gonna be able to design more complex organisms. Get the DNA code of a bat, put it with a cat, and not only do their names rhyme but that batcat will have sonar! (bad example, but imaging extracting the quality that makes a tiger massive and chucking it in a house cat. It would keep growing until it was huge. I doubt the science is as simple as that but the concept can't be far off!

With this new technology, made a reality by Craig Ventor it could be possible to make not only domestic tigers but giant freaking spiders and lizards. Even a..dragon..

Technology cannot be underestimated. It is growing at exponential rates. A fact that sees predicting the future pretty futile. One thing for sure is that computers are getting faster at an ever increasing rate. This is explained and expanded in a story done in TIME Magazine called 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. It has many predictions by Ray Kurzweil, a scientist who was awarded the Medal of Technology by Bill Clinton. He talks about the emergence of A.I (yes thats right, robots) and according to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away...

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299-1,00.html

The Process: I think I'm gonna ink it for real.

I've been trying to figure out how I'm gonna draw this comic. I first thought to do all of it with my tablet (on the computer (photoshop)) Which is fine when it comes to drafting: 

...But pretty shit when it comes to inking...

I think its due to a number of reasons. Its incredibly slow. And considering all I'm trying to do is immitate a real ink pen - it seems pretty wierd to put up with it. Also, because I can zoom in and out whenever I like while working on the line art, I don't get a true focal point. When your drawing on a real piece of paper, you can tell what distance the paper is suppose to be viewed at. Its usually about a foot and a half away. This means I know, when I'm drawing people or things in the distance, that they are not going to be that recognisable. So simplifying those things down into more obvious shapes helps with clarity and brings out the REAL focal point. Which is usually in the foreground.

The problem with inking on paper. Is when you f**k it up. You f**k it up. I have yet to find a good twink that doesn't effect the texture and bleed of the pen when you draw overtop.

When it comes to doing the colour, nothing beats digital. Hands down. Turn around. On the ground. Charlie Brown. So what I've been doing is drafting in photoshop on my wacom tablet:

Then printing it out (dulled down), Drawing over top with a 'Stabilo Permanent pen. (size 's' I think) and a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen ('s' as well) then scanning it back in.

For colouring, I bump up the whites as much as I can to get rid of the black (something that has not been that successful so far). Setting the layer to 'multiply' then colour underneath (using a number of layers).

With photoshop, you have unlimited range of colours to use. But I think it is better to limit your pallet. I used to re-use a lot of colours but just change them subtly. But I don't think this is the best. I like colour, but if your gonna have something nearing the same colour as something else, they may as well share that exact colour. I think it just looks...cleaner.

Also, this process didn't take that long. I did the Inking and colouring for these 3 in about 7 hours.

I also did this page today. FYI I wont be keeping those nuggety adverts...(in fact I probably wont be using any of these pages for the final comic)

Intro Scene: Frame by frame

So, I've posted this scene on the main page but the images are on two whole a3 pages so you can't read a thing. With bloggers new image scroller thing, this should be a nice way to view the draft scene.

Cosmo White

Cosmo White. An amazing illustrator and comic artist. With a lot of his work, he uses felt pen on bristol board. My guess is that he would make the physical drawing a lot larger than the standard 6x9 inch comic page. He would then scan the lined drawing into photoshop, then digitally colour it. Creating illustrations on a large scale seems to be a great advantage when your wanting to get smooth endless lines.

Here's a link to an interview with him and the other co-creators of Blue Spear, which is apparently a pretty kick ars comic, so I might have to get it..

http://www.brokenfrontier.com/lowdown/p/detail/bluespear-revisited-com-x-return-to-the-world-of-forty-five