Category Archives: Uncategorized

fonts

Peggy
October 20, 2015

An important part of a comic is the lettering. Your choice of font will set the tone for the whole story, in some ways.

Most people are happy to just grab a “comic book” font and do it like it’s always been done in the superhero comics: all caps, in a font that probably looks like it was drawn in a brush. Not me. I don’t come from that world; my stories don’t feel right with that tone of voice. I like upper and lower case, for starters.

Rita used Myriad Pro for the vast majority of the dialogue. It’s got bold and italics and multiple weights, and it’s a nice crisp serif font that fit the tone of the comic.

But Absinthe? Absinthe was done in a different era of my craft. Absinthe was done back when I was still nailing things down on paper before taking them into Illustrator. And Absinthe was lettered in the real world, with dialogue that sometimes became a part of the overall design of the page.

I want the new pages to stylistically match the first chapter. But I really don’t want to hassle with getting a paper-based workflow going again. So…

 

Screen Shot 2015-10-20 at 3.50.24 PM

I’m gonna make my own font. I’ll still have to do some things by hand, or by doing a bit of paper lettering and bringing it into the computer. But I figure that tracing a bunch of these letters will give me a good start on a unique font that can have italics and bold. I’ll have to figure out how to have multiple versions of each character that change randomly; I hope that’s doable.

Right now I’m thinking of trying to make it with the lite version of Glyphs, which is a mere $50. If it does what I need then I’ll be delighted to not have to spend the $5-600 that serious font software costs.

(I may end up making the font available as a Patreon perk, as well. Dunno.)

 

edit. Here are some useful-looking links I found on making different character images cycle.

Engaging Contextuality

Contextual feature code samples – I like the idea of having a set number of variants for every letter that cycles with every character, rather than a lengthy hand-tuned set of variants. Seems like there isn’t an actual random number generator available; writing rules for selecting from multiple glyphs is what you have to do. (And what I ended up doing.)

also Common Techniques – I love the idea of making the glyphs move a bit by themselves, in the very last example. Might be a royal pain in the ass though.

getting down from a duck

Peggy
October 14, 2015

A question I see a lot of creators asking is “how do I promote my Patreon”. Or “how do I promote my Kickstarter”.

And, well, it just reminds me of the old joke: “How do you get down from an elephant?” “You don’t. You get down from a duck.”

The duck to a fund-raising campaign’s elephant is your own site. With your own work on it. For free. Find a way to carve out time and energy to make your thing, post it all online. And when you post it, make sure that there’s a link to that Patreon right next to it, every time. And make sure that when Kickstarter time comes around, you add a prominent link to that as well.

And put some money into advertising your thing. Promote that. Buy ads in places people who’ll like your thing seem likely to hang out. Use your analytics to figure out which ads do best – not just in terms of people clicking on them, but in terms of people clicking on them and hanging around to look at a decent chunk of your thing. Give your thing away as you build an audience of people who like your thing, then give them a chance to start paying for it. Some of them will. And some of them will promote it for you. Some will even do both.

It’s when I say “give your thing away for free” that people balk. They view every person who consumes the whole thing as a lost sale, and want to lock the whole thing behind paywalls. That works fine when you’re a big name who a lot of people will buy a new thing from sight unseen, sure. But it doesn’t work for you. Not when you’re a beginner. Reproducing your thing on the net is free. Embrace this; give it away. And politely ask that people who’ve read a lot of it consider paying you something, or spreading the word. Everyone who tells their friends about this cool thing they read for free? They’re providing value to you, right there: advertising.

I’m not gonna lie. It takes time to do this. A few years. I’ve been doing this with Rita for four and a half years now and it’s just barely starting to pay the bills. But I’ve found it a hell of a lot easier to repeatedly get down from a duck than to try to get down from an elephant right off the bat; the Kickstarter for the first volume of Rita made its goal in one weekend because I’d already built an audience for it.

(Of course, there is an elephant in the room here: your thing has to be good enough for people to want to pay you for it. That’s another matter entirely. If you’re building your craft at making your thing at the same time you’re gathering an audience, it’ll take longer than if your craft is already pro-level, like mine was when I started drawing Rita..)

an open letter to Adobe

Peggy
October 14, 2015

Dear Adobe:

I’ve been using Illustrator since 2000; it’s my main medium. I’ve drawn an entire graphic novel in it.

I’ve got a file full of bugs and feature requests I keep on submitting again and again and again. Some of the feature requests I see other people repeatedly asking for online. None of them ever happen. It’s like i’m shouting in a dark hole, and it’s pretty frustrating.

Back in the pre-subscription days, I could vote with my wallet by not bothering to pay for new versions that offered no new features for my workflow. But now that everything is on subscription, I can’t do that. I just pay Adobe my monthly fee and get to use whatever features get added. And I kind of feel like I’m getting the raw end of this deal when some of my repeatedly-submitted bugs and requests continue to be ignored; it feels like I’m more directly paying the salary of the people who maintain these programs now that I pay every month, with absolutely no say in what they work on next.

I’d love to see Illustrator’s bug/feature requests made public. And allow end users to not just submit them, but to add their support for them. And to know that the top bugs/feature requests will get some resources assigned to fixing or implementing them.

(This probably goes for the bug databases for Adobe’s other programs, too. I’ll bet every pro has a handful of pet bugs or never-filled feature requests they keep on having to work around in their most-used program.)

the dream of uncovering a mysterious conspiracy with my father

Peggy
October 13, 2015

Huh. I just had a dream with my dad in it. That hasn't happened in a long, long time. The rest of it was mostly random conspiracy stuff – I was a kid sitting on the handlebars of a bike as we rode out into mountainous terrain behind the house (I grew up in a residential area in New Orleans, there was nothing remotely like that) and found a secret shipping/printing plant where Things were Weird. He seemed to have some sort of adventure there that he mostly kept me on the sidelines of, because I was, well, just a kid. We escaped. With a pile of evidence, that upon looking at it looked like a lot of the standard spurious stuff one sees on schizophrenic-sounding conspiracy blogs.

Then we were in the house I grew up in, and it was windy (as it is outside right now for real). While he was on the phone, I saw the tree outside swaying in the wind a lot; someone had hacked a huge chunk out of it near the base. It fell, but not quite on the house, and took one in the neighbor's yard with it.

Then I woke up, feeling like I'd just been watching an episode of Twin Peaks. Except with my dad. I haven't dreamed of him since… I can't even begin to remember. He died so long ago now.

His birthday's coming up soon. November 1.

raise that freak flag

Peggy
October 11, 2015

Apparently today is National Coming Out Day?

Hi, I'm a queer transwoman. I'm also poly, and prone to spanking and role-play in the bedroom.

None of this is probably new to you.

another con weekend

Peggy
October 10, 2015

So thanks to Dana sharing her table in the Geek Girl Con dealer’s room, I got to sell some comics today.

I came within about $30 of selling more today than I did in all of APE. And I got in late. And my travel/lodging so far is $20 for an Uber because it was raining this morning when I got moving. It’ll probably be about $40 all told, as I’m bringing in some more books tomorrow and don’t want to hump them on a bus. I ran out of Rita 2, as I just went with what was in my con suitcase from APE this morning.

Definitely applying to GGC for next year.

This is the last of four cons in a row. I really need to never do this to myself again. Next weekend I’m just gonna sit at home and play Bloodborne; maybe I’ll finally manage to kill Mergo’s Wet Nurse, which will mean I’m something like one boss away from the end of the game. JUST IN TIME FOR THE DLC.

at long last, a beginning

Peggy
October 9, 2015

This morning, I opened up Illustrator.

And I opened up the template I’d made at my table at APE. And I opened up a script. And the experimental drawings.

And I roughed out the first page of Drowning City.

It’s a real thing, now. At some point in the next few days I’ll start painting that page. Or I might rough out most of the rest of the chapter first. I’m not sure.

Can I make it live up to what I want it to be? I think so. I’ve learnt a lot since initially coming up with it back in 1995. I feel like my outline is solid, and I’m confident I can fill in the gaps now.

Right now, though, I should go get something to eat. I didn’t bother with breakfast and I have a bit of a headache.

(Other things I should do: get at least a basic skeleton of the website for Drowning City together, brainstorm some sample story outlines for Parallax. But not right now.)

decryption complete

Peggy
October 7, 2015

After four and a half years of work, I’ve finished “Decrypting Rita”. I was originally going to trickle out the final chapter over the entire month, but this morning I woke up and decided to post the whole thing at once.

 

You can start reading from the beginning here, or you can read the last two chapters here and here. There’s a discussion thread for the ending here, along with some acknowledgements and whatnot.

A Kickstarter for book 3 will happen as soon as I have the energy to do it, unless someone hooks me up with a publisher willing to take a chance on an omnibus. A girl can dream.

Peggy
October 5, 2015

I’m feeling pretty good about my comics, despite a poor showing at APE this weekend. Rita is done (well okay like 10 more panels plus a last editing pass). My script for chapter 1 of Drowning City looks good. So do my roughs for chapter 2 of Absinthe.
And doing Rita proved that I can do Serious Comics by myself. That’s really powerful. Working alone, I can get kind words from folks with multiple major awards on their shelves. A lot of my creative intent with Rita was to do something more accessible than “furry porn”; I’m not quite sure I got that right what with it being such a byzantine storyline, but I’ve certainly stepped well outside the furry ghetto with it! 

Right now, it looks like I’ll be drawing pages of Absinthe before I start on Drowning City; I still have some prep work left for the latter, while the former has full roughs that’re just one edit pass away from starting to draw. If you’d like to see those roughs, I just posted them to Patreon.

So I guess… things are getting back to normal, despite me still processing my mother’s death.