Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hard Bargain

Peggy
June 2, 2014

Hard Bargain
Hard Bargain

Oh hey here’s a commission I took last year at Anthrocon.

After drawing that fake crack screen, I still had the kinds of palettes I used back on the Amiga on my mind. Which were pretty similar to the color schemes the Nosepilot guy used. I did a card for Furoticon today in that sort of space, then decided to knock off another thing that was Not Rita by doing this as well.

Basically the method is this:

1. Pick 3-4 colors. They should have different values.

2. Blend between them. Three spaces in between is about right.

3. Eyedropper those middle colors into new global swatches.

4. Draw lots of shapes under my rough, in the same way I draw stuff for Rita. Try to keep each object pretty much in one color ramp, aside from the occasional accent.

No gradients, no blend modes, just solid shapes in a thoughtful palette. Pretty simple, and a nice place between “really colorful” and “takes forever to draw”. I may have to try doing some more stuff like this for a while; I feel like I’ve been bouncing between the super-abstracted colors of Rita and a way-too-modeled place for too long.

Ultimately, I’m just coming back to a way of coloring I was seeing all the time when I watched demos on the Amiga. I’m back where I began, except a few levels higher; progress is as much a spiral as a straight climb.

Movie: Time Masters, dir. Laloux, design FREAKIN’ MOEBIUS.

Peggy
May 31, 2014

Nick came over without his usual USB stick of media. But we needed media. So we went out to Scarecrow and browsed around. He said he wanted something psychedelic and gorgeous… and I found it for him.

This is a 1982 film directed by Rene Laloux, mostly known for “Fantastic Planet” here in the States. It is designed by Moebius.

Watching it is like reading a Moebius comic that you have never heard of. I mean holy shit. This thing is packed full to the gills with gorgeous alien landscapes and prettiness. The plot isn’t at all bad either – it’s full of a lot more things happening than I expected going in, and is surprisingly clever in places. It’s thoughtful and really dense; there’s a lot of future detail that’s completely shown and implied, rather than told.

Strongly recommended. Because, I mean, I’ve read all the Moebius, you know? And now here’s more Moebius just dropping out of the sky into my lap.

An Amiga Moment

Peggy
May 31, 2014

Sssso apparently some folks on the Internet have declared today Amiga Day. It’s the birthday of Jay Miner, the guy who designed its graphics chips.

I wasn’t planning to do anything for it beyond snark about how the Amiga was ten years ahead of its time when it came out, then Commodore refused to do any R&D for the next twenty, but then Auntie Pixelante put up a font that she described as “evoking the feel of dumping cracked Amiga games”. And then I found myself in Illustrator, putting a fake copper-list through the text, and starting to warp and twist it in a manner seen on a lot of demo crew logos. While listening to Jarre.

cracked-by-collapsar!

The Amiga shaped one of the fundamental ways I approach color; I grew up using Deluxe Paint, which worked fairly directly with the Amiga’s thirty-two color palette entries. So I got used to a process of blocking out shapes, then fiddling with the color sliders to get just the right look – and possibly fiddling with those sliders as one of the last few things done on a piece. Being able to reproduce that method with “global” color swatches is the reason I started using Illustrator when I shifted from Amiga to Mac; the infinite scalability was a nice perk, but I was really after that very selective power to change colors with very little effort.

Bayeux

Peggy
May 28, 2014

Bayeux: horizontally scrolling comics for Comic Easel.
bayeux-1.8

I have decided to package the custom theme I use on Decrypting Rita into something that other people can hopefully use.

This is the first release, and still has a few things hardwired for my comic – if you’re afraid of editing a few bits of text in a PHP file, and poking at some CSS, this theme is not yet for you. Check out the readme.txt in the archive for more details.

The name, of course, comes from the Bayeux Tapestry, which presents the story of William the Conqueror in the form of one very long horizontal scroll. Scott McCloud cites it as one of the precursors to what we call “comics” in his book Understanding Comics; it’s arguable whether something lacking the modern innovations of “panels” and “dialogue balloons” qualifies as “comics” but it’s definitely “sequential art”!

Anyway. Good luck; let me know if you get it working on your site. If you can’t then I may try to help you out but no promises – those pages of Rita ain’t gonna draw themselves!

(And if you add in controls for the stuff I didn’t, please toss me a copy of your modifications – I like it when other people do my work for me!)

“manga” vs “comics”

Peggy
May 21, 2014

I was looking at a thread on DA started by a girl who wants to make manga. Someone was saying “geeze, you're Western, use the Western word, call them comics”. Which I personally tend to agree with. But I started thinking about who tends to say “I want to make manga!” Instead of “I want to make comics!” and why. This is the response I wrote…

To American kids who grew up reading imported manga, “comics” means “those superhero things sold in those weird shops full of creepy old dudes”, while “manga” means “stories about things I can actually give a shit about”. Especially if that kid is a girl. American comics are really not friendly to women; manga are. You can get manga with female protagonists very easily; this is incredibly rare in American comics, and finding one who doesn't look like a twelve year old boy's porn fantasy is even rarer. I think it is very telling that most of the kids I see saying they want to make manga rather than comics are girls.

And while there are certainly Western creators who are Asian-influenced, if your work looks pretty much exactly like Asian comics, you're not going to have any luck getting published by anyone but a publisher who specializes in amerimanga. Publishers have limited resources, and often tend to focus on a specific sort of work – it's not just “is this great” but “is this something we actually know how to market” and “is this something we, personally, love enough to put our time into”.

That said, it grates on my ears to see American creators calling their work “manga” instead of “comics” too. And if an American who comes from a manga-reading background wants to sell their work outside of anime cons, they'll want to start calling it “comics” eventually. Or maybe a “graphic novel”, which is free of a lot of the superheros-for-little-boys stigma. But then again I formed my opinions in the 80s B&W boom, when “comics” meant more than just “creepy superhero stuff”.

anyway they both suck bandes dessinėes are where it's at :)

 

huzzah! curtains!

Peggy
May 19, 2014

Yay! I just pounded a couple of drywall anchors in and screwed down the brackets for my living room curtains. Light still seeps through the velvet, even with the blinds closed, but it’s cut down far enough that I can sprawl in there and suffer a few deaths in Dark Souls in the middle of the afternoon if I feel that desire.

This will also open up possibilities like “sprawling in the living room with the boyfriend and a movie in the middle of the day”.

I would still like to add some finesse to the curtains, as well as add some sheer red ones behind the purple ones for visual flair, but they are fully functional for the reason I got them.

I spent about $100 for the double rods, clip rings, and spiral finials, and close to $200 for the raw velvet. I could have spent less but, I think, not a TON less. I could have also spent a lot more.

some stuff happened

Peggy
May 18, 2014

This weekend I decided to put some curtains in the living room. There are times in summer when I just want to sit down for a little video game break, and the sunlight coming from outside is way too intense for my little projector to throw a visible image. I’d been taping up some spare art board but that was (a) a pain in the ass and (b) ugly.

So I did some research online into the basics, and walked up to Northgate to hit Bed, Bath, and Beyond for a double rod, some swirly finials, and some clip hooks, and the fabric store for about four and a half yards of dark purple velvet. I’m planning to add some sheer red behind it once I get things arranged to my liking; one thing at a time.

I just got it up and liked what I saw, then took it down because I was using holes the previous occupants had drilled, that weren’t really up to the task of holding these heavy things up. I’m going to have to slip some screw anchors in there tomorrow for a solid grounding. I’ll also see how well it cuts down indirect sunlight reflecting off the white building next door; I may have to add some sort of lining to make them a bit more opaque. They’re not amazing but for about $300 total they look pretty good, and will likely look even better once I spend maybe a half hour hemming it, sewing some folds into the top of it, and hooking the rings in so they’re hidden by the top.

Hmm. What else have I been up to? I haven’t updated this in a week or so. Nothing amazing: slowly working on the next page of Rita, which includes a crazy background; getting some flowers to put on the coffee table in the studio, going to pole dance classes. I’m still not even anywhere near “terrible” at pole but I’m learning, and getting in shape as well – there will be days when my legs ache all day long, and I just grin, because it’s the ache of shaving stretched them like crazy the day before.

I’m also getting definite results from having that chin-up bar on the bathroom door. Unless I’m completely wiped out from doing something else beforehand, I can very consistently get my eyes up past the top of the door, go up and down a little bit a few times, and then bring my feet back to the ground in a slow, controlled fashion.

And now, some progress shots from that page…

Hopefully I’ll get this page done tomorrow. Just in time for me to go off to Portland for Furlandia!

A Kickstarter tip.

Peggy
May 14, 2014

When ramping up to a Kickstarter campaign, and while running it, back a few other projects. Nothing crazy, you don’t need more than the “give me the thing you’re making” level. Some in the same territory and scope as your project, some a bit outside.

This will get you cool stuff, of course. But just as importantly it will give you a sense of proportion. You’ll have irregular updates from other people about their troubles fabbing umpty-leven programmable rave bracelets, discovering that they left out a page when they assembled the book, finding a glaring typo in the middle of their cool poster, realizing they undercalculated international shipping costs on their book, etc, etc.

If everything about your project goes off without a hitch, you get to feel ahead of the game. If things go awry you’ll feel like less of a dolt when you see other project’s delays. And their updates will remind you how long it’s been since YOUR last update.