Parallax: towards version 2

Peggy
March 31, 2016

Or, “how the sausage is made”.

So remember that show pitch I made to show to Nickelodeon at SPX? They didn’t take it, but I’ve been continuing to work on it, with a lot of help from Nick – to the point where the front page of the pitch now has both our names.

We’ve been hanging out and figuring out things about the characters and the world. It’s starting to become fairly strange and very much its own thing; hopefully soon it’ll be in shape to toss a new version of the pitch by my friend who works in Nickelodeon’s development department and has offered to pass it around there.

Recently I decided we had enough textual revision for me to start fooling with a theoretical intro for the show. Or rather for a pair of intros, since there’s one for each side. I spent a morning watching cartoon intros on YouTube, and ultimately decided to start by borrowing the shot sequence from the “Real Ghostbusters” cartoon from the 80s. It’s a pretty efficient minute-long sequence that nicely introduces the team, gives you a tiny hint about their personality, tells you what they battle against, and that they are pretty confident in their job.

I rendered this down to its bones – just a quick list of shots described in the most generic terms possible – and started drawing versions of each shot that fit Parallax. And as I did this, I had to make some visual decisions I’d been putting off. Namely, what everyone’s spaceships looked like. And what each side’s logo looked like, since I wanted to swipe the way the Ghostbusters intro filled the screen with the logo like three times. That’s a nice piece of sigil work right there.

But mostly the spaceships. I’d been putting off the spaceships. I do not love drawing spaceships and didn’t really know where to start. It needed doing, though, so I finally sat down and came up with a good way for the two sides’ battle craft to combine: the Federacracy’s fighters would just happen to be the right size and shape to be carried around by the Union’s mechs. Which are faster-moving and more maneuverable, but lightly-armed.

This choice cascaded into other things: I wanted the Federacracy’s ships to be better-armored than the bigger Union mechs, but I also wanted them to be light enough to be carried around, so I ended up deciding that their Lucky Ancient Technology Find was great force-field technology. Which then gave me some inspiration for their logo.

I also figured out things like explicitly codifying the Union’s spooky take on VR – every ship/planet/etc they own seems to be much larger on the inside than the outside, because a large percentage of the people there are actually simulations being run by the local AI, in a sprawling virtual world. Conveniently these people are referred to as “ghosts” who live in the “ghost halls” of the ship, and can’t be seen by non-Union folks without the standard augmented reality implants they all have, so they come off as Creepy People Who Talk To Ghosts We Can’t See. And that gave rise to a plot idea about a Union “ghost ship”, drifting between stars in power-conservation mode with the whole crew living as ghosts. Who then become fitful holo projections, then half-finished “zombies” crawling out of the respawn tanks when the Federacracy crew finds them and digs through what they think is a dead hulk looking for intelligence/a mcguffin/Ancient artifacts/whatever.

We’ve got a nice little list of A- and B-plots that we’re in the process of winnowing and shuffling into about a dozen episodes. Turn those into a couple paragraphs apiece outlining each episode, and I think I’ve got a pitch. There’s still some art to do – I’m redrawing all the character portraits now that I’ve redesigned the uniforms, and taking a second design pass on at least the Union crew – but I feel like that’s not a ton of work. I could be wrong on that. We’ll see.

Anyway. The rest of this post is a bunch of the sketchbook pages I filled up while thinking up all this nonsense. Enjoy this glimpse into the process of designing a whole world.

: okay where are the second two characters on each side hanging out

: maybe I’ll use a different pair of characters in the first shots, I dunno

: also what on earth do their ships and launch areas look like oh geeze this is a huge can of worms here

: your body gets dissolved into goo to pilot a Union mech, it helps to basically be made of infogoo pretending to be a biped.

: maybe I’ll think about the propaganda shots instead

: the checkmarks were added afterwards, of course

: okay, logos. Starting with the stuff I doodled in the original pitch.

: hey what if I try putting a few bits of majgickal imagery in these logos?

: Have I mentioned that for a while we referred to the sides as just “red” and “blue”? Red is the Galactic Union (thrifty posthumans rising out of the ashes of the Old Empire/creepy space goths), Blue is the Federacracy of Planets (a peaceful trading network/dire industrialist polluters).

: Hey the Fed’s logo is a NETWORK that COOPERATES, what if their fighter ships can do a Voltron thing? Rad!

: Nick thought the whole Voltron idea was kinda dumb and I agreed. had to explore it though.

: “the Fed ships can be used as guns by the Union’s creepy mechs” yes this is very good

: “Enemy Mine” is the working title for the season 1 closer, vaguely inspired by the book/movie of the same name.

: i googled “sci fi gun’ and kitbashed a few things on the first page of results with the R-Type ship, nailed it.

: how do these things dock in the mothership, okay I can finally rough out the “Fed character runs to their spaceship” shot

: now I gotta figure out how the Union mechs look when waiting

: new plot idea comes from the world, links to another idea in the pile! Yay!

: “the union mothership is a huge-ass spacegoing tree that looks like a giant squid made of cathedrals”

: I’d done some design on the uniforms for both sides, and wanted to see how the characters would look in their new gear. And do some redesigns that involved actually looking at the animals they’re supposed to be.

: I googled “baby alligators” to make sure Atber is the cutest damn alligator you can imagine. He needs more ‘robot’ signifiers though, I kinda forgot that angle. Or I might just drop it.

: “okay how does Dana draw the unicorn in Heavenly Nostrils” yeah that’s good let me use that to inform the shapes of this unicorn dude then

: what the hell am I gonna do with this little vampire bat dude I dunno ugh

: then I talked to Nick who reminded me that Edward is a disaffected rock star type and it came together quickly

: always leaving his jacket open to show off his meticulously sculpted pecs like the narcissistic trash he is, nailed it. the glasses might end up being a big visor instead.

Next: design Union mechs (which is coming along), do a round of work on the Federacracy characters who are not already Just Perfect (Olivia and the Baron were designed back around 2003, and I really just can’t improve on them, I’ve tried), do nice drawings of the revised cast in their revised uniforms, (possibly in ZBrush, which I am attempting to learn this week) make at least one decent picture of each capital ship and a drawing of the fighting craft, and of course hammer on that list of a dozen episodes and that list of plot ideas until it feels like there is some flow between them all and a decent balance of standalone/arc-y stories, and turn those into nice tasty little paragraph summaries. Then it’s ready to start pitching to the various Sausage Factories as a tasty new kind of sausage they could hire me to make.

phone hassle

Peggy
March 30, 2016

As to why I needed a new phone background…

This weekend I did a social thing that involved taking the light rail down to the Ranier Beach station and getting picked up in a car. In the gap between getting off the train and getting in the car, I managed to drop my phone somewhere in the dark; when I got back to the station, it was gone.

But this is the future, and Apple lets you track your devices. So I know that the next morning it went to a homeless shelter just off the Othello rail station. I’d set it to lost mode that night, so all it was doing was displaying a message asking to contact me and give it back; I’ll assume that whoever found it ignored it, given that it’s been a few days.

So today Nick gave me back the old phone I’d given him; he’s never actually gotten it set up with a SIM, and wasn’t using it.

All this felt like something that should be marked with a new picture of a cartoon fox to be my background for a while.

The phone I lost had been bought via this new program where you pay for the phone on installments and get one upgrade, which worked out fairly cheaper than my usual upgrade cycle of not minding being a generation or two behind; I guess I should drop by the Apple Store and see how losing the phone affects this. And mmaybe get a new one because I’m really gonna miss being able to pay for stuff via NFC.

Khatrici

Peggy
March 30, 2016

Khatrici

My phone needed a new background. It got this business fox. Her name is Khatrici and she is a virtual assistant.

Illustrator, 2h, about half of which was spent on names and sigils.

bug report: “unwanted toads in my brush palette”

Peggy
March 23, 2016

So there’s this side effect of Adobe’s attempt to retool Illustrator into something that can be driven entirely by a touchscreen: an uneditable, undeletable “Touch Calligraphic Brush” appears at the top of your brush palette.

This has annoyed me for a while, as I am pretty committed to driving it with keyboard and stylus. It’s not a huge annoyance, but it’s just this… intrusion… on my otherwise neatly-organized files. I finally decided to write it up as a bug.

In other news, this Purple Arrow I picked up at American Mary the other day on a budtender’s recommendation is some pretty good stuff.

******BUG******
Concise problem statement:

An uneditable, undeletable “Touch Calligraphic Brush” appears at the top of the Brush palette for every single document, including ones that predate touch devices. On my Macbook Air, which is not a touch device, with files that have never been loaded on a touch device.

Steps to reproduce bug:

Start Illustrator on a computer with no touchscreen.
Load a file or create a new one.
Try to edit the “Touch Calligraphic Brush”.
Try to delete the “Touch Calligraphic Brush”.

Results:

The Touch Calligraphic Brush stays there at the top of your brushes palette. It refuses to move. Refuses to let you change its settings. It mocks you every time you look at the brush palette, an unasked-for, unwanted squatter in the middle of your tools, like a toad that’s plopped itself down in the middle of your pencil box. It’s polite, as toads go. It doesn’t demand you feed it flies, it doesn’t excrete all over a work in progress and ruin it, it doesn’t even croak. But it’s always there right in the middle of where your tools are. And sometimes you put your hand on it when you reach for a pencil without really looking, and it’s all clammy, and gross, and why is this toad in the middle of my pencil box, taking up space I could keep drawing tools instead? When you call the people who make the pencil box, they tell you that, oh, yes, the toad has to be there for the benefit of people working in the exciting new medium of toad secretions, so that when they try to use a toad to draw with, there’s always a toad there, and this just leaves you (as an artist working in the medium of pen and ink) rather baffled as to why this means everyone has to have a toad in their pencil case now.

I mean, also sometimes the pencil box summons this five inch tall giraffe made of fire who burns your drawing up, and that’s something both you and the people who made this magical pencil box are more concerned with, but still. I just keep on putting my hand on this toad sometimes, and it’s just moderately annoying on a constant low level.

Expected results:

The Touch Calligraphic Brush acknowledges that its presence may be unnecessary or unwanted for some people, and lets you edit and delete it.

Or even better, perhaps the Touch Calligraphic Brush never even appears if you’re not on a touch device.

edit: In 2023, I put this in the new Illustrator bug/feature request system. It’s 2024 and this toad is still there, and I still touch it by accident now and then.

I hate costume design

Peggy
March 19, 2016

Tonight I went by Iris and Nero’s place and watched the Speed Racer movie. Which is fucking amazing, it’s one long eyegasm, and think I need to see it again on a bigger screen than their TV. Before the movie, I spent some time pondering uniforms for Parallax.

I started with intent of redesigning the Federacracy outfits. Tried some asymmetrical stuff because I feel like a good Space Pilot outfit is often dramatically asymmetrical. I really like the swirly accent on the hip pocket in the upper right on this first page and might play with that some more…

But I ended up going with the same blue jacket with two light stripes down the front center that I had in the pitch. Just couldn’t think of anything that worked better. I may try another round later. (Looking at where I ended up with the Union flight jackets, I think I might want to either stay with straight stripes, or maybe try curves/circles as a design motif so as to contrast with the Union triangles.)

And then I shifted over to the other side, who the asymmetrical uniforms worked a lot better on – they’re the Creepy Post-Human Space Goths.

There are a lot of ways to make a coat interestingly asymmetrical. I did some image searching for inspiration and think I finally got something good, as marked with arrows at the bottom of that page up there. (Note to self: maybe tweak it so that the three buttons are in a line.)

Tried a profile and back view, think it works. Needs a little more red on the back but I can’t decide how yet. Will see how it goes when I do a second round on the pitch bible art.

In summation, I hate costume design.

I still need to redesign the spaceships, too. I’m not happy with the existing drawings of the Whalesong and the Spinward, or with the Tactical Pants or the Combat Armatures – I’m probably gonna completely drop that link to its roots in my guest strip for Gabe’s comic in favor of something that better fits the themes of the show. There’s something better waiting for me to find it before I can do presentation boards for the pilot.

It’s coming together, though. Nick and I have been tossing it back and forth, and we now have enough A and B plot ideas that we can shuffle them together into about a season’s worth of single-paragraph synopses of episodes.

If the pitch becomes A Thing then I will probably be asking a few friends if they are interested in taking some money to iterate on costume and ship designs for a bit. Because I feel like I want to do this the way George Lucas made Star Wars: by getting a bunch of awesome people to contribute to a big ol’ cauldron of stone soup.

Potrzebie!

Peggy
March 18, 2016

Black metal pioneer Potrzebie’s 1954 debut was far ahead of its time, and sunk without a trace.

Medium: brush, india ink, and a whole lotta weed.

Some Thoughts On Lettering

Peggy
March 18, 2016

A friend was trying to do some comics and having some trouble with getting the lettering to work, so I did a couple quick pages of Things I Think About When Lettering My Stuff.

I do not claim that any of these tips are The One True Way To Letter. Just that they are things that tend to make my own comics more legible. (I say this because I see a lot of lettering tips about How To Superhero Letters that take a super dogmatic tone.)

There’s a lot of stuff I left out: I did not go into using differently colored balloons, the use of different types of edges for thought balloons or for shouting/electronically transmitted stuff (or for hints about tone of voice), or why I sometimes choose centered text, sometimes left or right justified, and sometimes do paragraphs with indents. I also didn’t go into translucent word balloons – I feel that solid white balloons look super clashy over modern softly-colored art. I also left out the rant about how I feel the ALL CAPS SUPERHERO LETTERING is something best left in the past, where it was a good idea due to the terrible reproduction those things got then. Which also means I left out the digression about the weird little rule that you should never write a superhero comic about someone named Clint Flicker because of how it looks if you type it in all caps and aren’t super careful with the kerning or start having the ink bleed…

Anyway. Hope this helps someone a bit.

How To An Illustrator: Messy Brushes

Peggy
March 17, 2016

Here’s a thing I’ve been kind of wanting for a while, and finally nailed: that dotty, super-spitty-airbrush look.

Draw a black circle.
effect->brush stroke->spatter, play with the parameters until it looks good
object->expand appearance
object->image trace->make
window->image trace, play with the parameters until it looks good
object->image trace->expand
drag into brush palette, make a scatter brush

All the brushstrokes in that screenshot are done with the same green with varying opacity settings: 50% for all of them, normal/screen/multiply mode.

You probably shouldn’t try to fill in a whole image with this as things would get pretty slow to render; use it to create accents.

You could try different starting shapes and different effects – maybe a triangle that’s been put through the ocean ripple effect is just what you want. Kinda looks like a lot of messy angular brushstrokes, huh?

Or how about if I add a ‘roughen’ effect to the paths I drew, on top of using the scatter brush?

Wow, it sure looks like I made a lot of twitchy little brush dabs there, doesn’t it. Thanks for doing the work for me, Illustrator!

Edit, some time later: Or how about that oh-so-coveted spitty airbrush look? Seriously, I see people asking for that one all the time.

Caveats: You don’t want to try and draw an entire picture with these kinds of brushes. Illustrator will slow way the hell down. Lay in flat shapes with simple filled paths, then come back in and paint highlights/shadows with your Messy Brushes.

At The Tiki Bar

Peggy
March 16, 2016

Commission for Tabbiewolf and Spotweld. She wanted their characters in their basement tiki bar.

My tiki bar reference mostly consisted of typing ‘shag tiki bar’ into Google Images. People used to compare my stuff to his a lot, because we both have that 1950s animation concept art flat color kind of thing going on, but I haven’t heard that in a while. I guess his star has faded or something.

Her Joy

Peggy
March 16, 2016

A sequel to the previous picture, with my ex-with-benefits’ rubber jackal Hesire fucking succubus-Kellyn.

Afterwards, there was dinner and a movie. And lazily prepared breakfast. Succubi are much more likely to return when you treat them right.

Also included: the earlier rough I sent my XWB as a way to say “ok which one of your characters do you think would be hot to see stuffing it in succubus-Kellyn”.

After drawing that other picture, I found myself thinking about my various characters, and decided to change Kelvin’s name to Kellyn. I don’t know how many years I was drawing her as a girl but still using her old boy name; she kinda vanished for a while during my transition, with only the most sporadic appearances.

(Well, actually, she kinda vanished and reappeared as a cobra named Kalinda, who changed into a bird for a while, and now seems to be a raccoon again. Complicated things happen to fursonas sometimes.)

Illustrator, about 2:30.