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Posts tagged with "Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan"

I only seem to use this journal when I have something to promote...

Tuesday, 20. February 2007, 21:43:14

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... and today's no exception. Nothing against this community site; it's a fine one with some nifty posting software. I just never got into it because even when I started it, I had more or less decided I wanted my own blog on my own space, and for the community stuff I ended up getting a livejournal.

Anyway, here's what I'm promoting today!

New Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story "Invasion".

A new Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story, Invasion, began yesterday, both on the ROCR.net site and on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. The story is about an invasion of nightmarish creatures in the peaceful Clwydian town of Dungill Fens, and about the search for the faerie Abúi, who has gone missing from her home in the capital of the Gnomian Republic. It reunites Jodoque, Kel, Ragnarok, Jake and Hildegard with some of Kel's friends and family from the Gnomian Republic, last seen in The Rite of Serfdom. The action of the first chapter is set in a forest on the farthest edges of the Gnomian Republic, where humans do not go. We will see humans in the second chapter though, as well as some very strange creatures indeed...

We've got some great artwork lined up for you, and I use the word "we" advisedly. The colour work in the opening chapter is done by Drooling Fan Girl, already a recurring guest colourist for ROCR. As the chapter progresses, you'll find she's outdone herself this time. Someone should give her a paid colouring job! She doesn't want me to say that, though. The second chapter will have colour by Mravac Kid and backgrounds by my studio-mate Calvin Bexfield. I hope you'll be as blown away by his drafting skills as I was when I first saw them.

The publication of Invasion happens while that other story, Feral, is still on hiatus. We'll be, er, co-ordinating with some other webcomics later on, and as a result, Invasion has to be run on a fixed schedule. Feral isn't abandoned, though; there are 10 new installments on my hard drive, which will only have to be cleaned up, coloured, lettered and prepared for web publication.

A preview (not safe for work due to nudity, but showing off DFG's colour work very nicely:
FWprequel-7-700px.jpg

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Remastered Guðrún ends today

Monday, 30. October 2006, 14:28:42

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The remastered edition of Guðrún ends over on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site today.

As far as I know, it's still very rare for any webcomic to be remastered, though reruns with commentary have occurred in a few places. Guðrún was the story with which I finally got serious about publishing Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan online six years ago. But that doesn't mean I immediately got it all right;the digital cleaning, lettering and resizing were done very clumsily and no high-res masters were kept from which I could re-do the work. So I eventually bit the bullet and re-scanned the whole thing from the original art. The new version looks a lot better, even though, in many ways, it's "rawer" - there is less tinkering with the analog art than there was the first time around, simply because it's no longer needed to make tiny scans presentable or preserve bandwidth.

I'll still need to replace the image files on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan site. To do that, I'll go back to the master files, cut the pages in half and upload those half-pages at a width of 800 pixels instead of the 600(-ish; getting a consistent width was one thing I did wrong at the time) pixels wide images the site has now, so that the originally-intended presentation is left intact and any pages containing comments can be preserved. That's a bit of a chore, but I'll get around to it eventually.

Potentially the best thing about the project: I now have lettered master files that are suitable for print, if anyone's interested...

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Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan back on Modern Tales as a free comic

Wednesday, 19. July 2006, 19:25:43

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All for one!
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan's archives at Modern Tales are now free as Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan has become part of Modern Tales' Strip Lounge. Nearly all of the comic's 15-year run to date can now be read at Modern Tales.

I left Modern Tales almost a year ago, but it turns out it's one of those setups where you can leave but never actually be gone. Like being a musician in Fairport Convention. I never deleted my archives there, simply because I couldn't bear to have my data entry work destroyed, and when Joey Manley announced soon after that he was going to make most of the content on the site free under non-exclusive terms, I eagerly agreed to be part of that. This week, the new version of Modern Tales went live, and I spent a bit of time getting the archives back up to date with the main site. And here it is! Table of Contents
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan will continue to be primarily published at rocr.net, but starting with the next storyline, it will update simultaneously on its main site and on Modern Tales again.

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The New Sheriff - New old Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline

Monday, 19. June 2006, 20:51:06

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A "new" Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline started today: The New Sheriff from 1994. It'll be the last of the 1990s storylines that I will publish on the site. In fact, in my opinion it pretty much represents the final scrape at the bottom of the barrel; there is more unpublished stuff but I think I might just burn it, and this one only just about made the cut, mostly because it introduces the Sheriff as a character. He will play a major part in the revised "King Groy" story and in the short story
"Feral" that I've got planned.

Right now, I'm not sure which of those two I'll run first, by the way. For the past few months, it's been my intention to run "King's Drama" first, because that would immediately close the gap that exists in the archives. But the writing on a crucial early scene has proven to be difficult, and it may soon become harder for me to work on a project of that size, because I just might have a 32-hour job soon. "Feral", in any case, is already largely scripted; the script already exists in at least two revisions. And it's a much more manageable story of about 20 pages.

Neither story will run immediately after "The New Sheriff", anyway. I will first rerun some material that has been published here and there on the web, and maybe some of the guest comics that I never fully transfered off the Keenspace server when I switched to using Xepher.net and WillowCMS. Those things together should tide me over through the summer without missing any updates.

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"Alcydia" starts on Webcomicsnation

Tuesday, 6. June 2006, 09:08:16

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Alcydia page 1 - click!


Alcydia by Daniel Østvold and Geir Strøm has started on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. It will run in full-page installments on Tuesdays and Thursdays, until finished. Alcydia is intended as a companion piece to Guðrún, which relaunched yesterday. Or vice versa. In both stories, Duchess Guðrún of Dungill Fens is kidnapped during a stay in Iceland, and it's up to Tamlin's gang and the Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel to find and rescue her. The events as told are not exactly the same though: think of it as a crossover told from the points of view of both casts involved, with both stories being incorrect recollections of what actually happened.

Many thanks to Adam Cuerden for his editorial input, especially in the second half of the story.

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Guðrún remaster at Webcomicsnation.com

Monday, 5. June 2006, 13:19:23

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Intro to Gudrun - click!

The first, introductory, page of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline Guðrún is now up over on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. The whole 64-page story will run there in three full-page installments a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Guðrún is the story of Duchess Guðrún's kidnapping in Iceland. Tamlin's gang join up with the infamous Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel to find out what exactly has happened and rescue the Duchess. Guðrún was previously published on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website and is one of the most popular storylines in that series. The quality of the scans, however, left a lot to be desired, so to take care of that, here's a new, revised and enlarged edition.

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The Death Warrant - new old Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story.

Wednesday, 1. March 2006, 09:38:11

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The Death Warrant cover detail showing Tamlin and Opportunitas
The project to bring the pre-web Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan stories online continues with The Death Warrant from 1993.
In The Death Warrant, Tamlin and his gang intercept the King's Death Warrant for their most dangerous competitor, Barnardus Pothelmus. When the courier who was carrying the documents escapes them, they are faced with a dilemma: should they deliver it themselves and risk capture, or miss the opportunity to get rid of their enemy? What they don't know is that the hanging, if it happens, will be the scene of a plot against the King.

The Death Warrant is black and white, and after 13 years, its faults are painfully clear to me. But on the other hand, it's fast-paced and joyful. There are a lot of laughs in it, with many fun characters and puns that can kill cattle at a hundred paces.

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Speed colouring madness.

Sunday, 26. February 2006, 23:39:40

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I've got a big list of recently-recoloured pages from 2001 up at my DeviantArt site. I must have driven my Watchers over there nuts with over a hundred updates in just two and a half weeks.

Like I wrote in my proper blog on February 9, I've been going through the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives for 2001 and cleaning up old episodes, looking especially for black and white pages in stories that also had colour pages. At the time, I'd started the project on a bit of a whim, because I was a bit ill and wanted something to do that was easy and free from pressure. The aims were two-fold: to make the archives for The Corby Clan, Dolphins and Dragons and Sauna Opera more consistent, and to become more comfortable with Photoshop.

Being comfortable working with something, of course, is very different from simply knowing how to do the work. It's an important difference: it's what keeps me going back to Paint Shop Pro even though that package's poor stability very nearly cancels out any productivity gains I make by being able to work the lettering tools, the vector drawing tools and the vector object organisation without having to slow down and think. I haven't done a whole lot of lettering as part of this coloring project, but I have been able to do a little bit, so I'm getting closer to that goal of being able to do the lettering and word balloons in Photoshop smoothly and efficiently.
Other things I've learned:
- I've memorised the most-used keyboard shortcuts to the point where I know them at least as well as in PSP;
- I've familiarised myself with how Photoshop handles input from the tablet. In other words, I've got a better 'feel' for drawing lines and shapes digitally. This 'feel' has eluded me for a long time while working with other programs.
- I've learned to use layer effects. They're a bit of a hidden feature inside the layer palette, but once you've found them they're easy enough to use.
- I've learned to use adjustment layers, particularly the Hue/Saturation/Brightness layer. I've colorised and decolorised pages with those. I'm not quite sure how to properly prevent parts of an image from being affected by the adjustment layer - simply cutting parts out of the adjustment layer mask doesn't quite work, and stacking the parts I want to exempt above the adjustment layer can become tedious if those parts themselves have pixels in multiple layers.
-I've learned to deal with PS's straight line tools, which at least in PS 7 are considerably more cumbersome than PSP's vector-based straight lines, but workable if you create new layers for them manually.

Of course, now that I've finished the colorings, I want to upload them to the ROCR site as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I can't do that just yet, because some of the functionality in WillowCMS isn't quite working for those sections of the archive that were imported as a batch, and tinkering with those parts of the archive could become a very tedious and error-prone process. So for now, that listing on DeviantArt is the place to go if you want to see the revamped images.

By the way, I've been meaning to put up some more images in my photo albums here on my.opera.com. What's stopping me is that I've already got so many places to post images: the DeviantArt site where I post a lot of images I want to show other artists, the main website where I try to entertain the general public (or at least the couple of hundred people who follow the comic), my Livejournal scrapbook that I use as storage for images that I want to have available but don't want to show right now (a function suggested by the fact that the gallery interface on LJ-scrapbook is pretty poor, unlike that at Opera.com), and the one here. I'd like to use that to showcase some of my best images including some comics. That's going to take some time to sort out though, what with me having spread myself so thin.

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New Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story in colour

Monday, 9. January 2006, 12:23:02

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Headsmen, page 1a

The Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story The Green Knight's Belt has ended and, as promised, the follow-up is a new story that I've been working on since the end of November. Headsmen has started today. I hope people like it - it's very unlike a typical webcomic in that I've really worked hard to give it some production value.
One thing I've been telling people I wouldn't be able to do is release it in colour. For a while I considered asking a volunteer colorist, DFG, to color the story for me, but I decided against it because I couldn't offer her a decent deadline.

Then I got some Photoshop tips that helped me cut the time to colour a page in half - tips that will also come in handy when I'm working for print. And suddenly, adding colours — simple ones at least — changed from something that I'd have to set aside large blocks of time for into something I could do in stolen moments. So I decided to put in the effort and add flood fill colors to the high-res files. I may even be able to print the comic in colour when the time comes. Each comic now takes less than an hour to colour, unless there's a new setting or character that I've got to pick a colour scheme for.

I expect to be able to simplify my workflow further in the future. Right now I letter in a different program than I colour in, but between Headsmen and the next new story I'll start doing that in Photoshop as well.

Meanwhile, enjoy Headsmen! It's set just days after the events in The Green Knight's Belt, with Kel taking a different role from the one we've seen so far. In the stories from the 1990s, we saw Kel as a surly, put-upon character, but considering what we learned about her background in stories like The Rite of Serfdom, she must have initially considered being with the Gang as a step up from working for the Green Knight. Also, she can't have had much of a notion how the human world worked in those initial weeks in the forests near Dungil Fens. This story, then, is intended as a bridging chapter between The Green Knight's Belt and the stories that follow it.

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Sketchbook Bonanza

Thursday, 1. December 2005, 19:28:53

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I'm sick at home. I don't do convalescence well. I find myself looking for things to do and end up doing the sort of work that I would otherwise have put off. It's not that I concentrate better when a virus has taken the edge off me; I just don't find the distractions as compelling as I would when I'm healthy. Here's what I've been doing:

I've been working on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archive listing page with Mithandir. This involved restructuring the database entries for some of the chapters and changing the tagging code for that page. The work isn't quite finished - Mithandir says he'll look at the tagging code and fix the final oddities tonight - but it's good enough to link to it on the other content pages, so I've done that as well.

Cover to the latest sketchbook
I have liberated a bunch of sketches from The Book of All Things, the sketchbook feature I used to have on Modern Tales. This used to be available to subscribers only, but has been unavailable to anyone since the Modern Tales crash in March. Most of the material will now go to the Sketchbook section of my own Gallery, where it arguably belonged anyway. I've added a large number of storyboards, panel layouts and sketches to the Rite of Serfdom Sketchbook subsection. I initially thought this would take about an hour, but there was much more material there than I remembered. The Rite of Serfdom Sketchbook now contains 52 items, and there's more on my hard drive.
T.S.Sullivant Wallpaper stuff
I've also created a subsection for a series of sketches I did for a wallpaper in imitation of early newspaper cartoonist T.S. Sullivant a while ago. The finished wallpaper is now free and can be found in the Artworks section.

A third batch of sketches in the Book of All Things consisted of storyboards for Courtly Manners 2: The Unicorn Race. Those will now be re-run in the Odds and Ends section of the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website, over the weekend and beyond. I'm thinking of making Odds and Ends a permanent feature to run on the site whether there is other new content there or not. I'm not sure if I have enough material, but I expect something will show up.
Today and tomorrow, by the way, Odds and Ends features Adventure a Daniel Østvold solo comic from 1998 in which Countess Alcydia and a Wolfman pass into the real world to harrass Geir and Anne-Kristin. Nice stuff!

A final set of drawings liberated from the Book of All Things is a small selection of Life Drawings. I have more, but I'll need to find them before I can add them.

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Press release: Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan leaves Modern Tales, launches new storyline

Sunday, 16. October 2005, 22:20:24

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After three years at the subscription-based portal Modern Tales, the fantasy webcomic Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is making its archives free to all readers again at a new location. The move coincides with the launch of the next storyline, The Green Knight's Belt, on Monday, October 17.

The Green Knight's Belt is actually the first Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story, written and drawn almost 15 years ago for print. Fragments of it have been shown on the web in the past few years, but this new serialisation will be the first time the story has been published online in full, with everything re-scanned, re-translated and cleaned up. Over the next year or so, creator Reinder Dijkhuis intends to complete the web publication of the early works.

In The Green Knight's Belt, the original gang of four Rogues hear of the magical powers of the legendary Green Knight's Belt. They brave guards, dragons, puns and other horrors to get to it.

The new archives are hosted at http://rocr.xepher.net. Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan updates on weekdays.

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I feel dirty now, but it's a good kind of dirty.

Saturday, 10. September 2005, 19:12:25

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So the Comixpedia Webcomic Wiki has been going for almost ten days. Initially I was just going to sit it out - I was planning to wait until somebody else would put up something about Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and then put up corrections for those errors that only I was in any real position to correct. ROCR was not on the initial big list (which was mostly imported from Wikipedia), but that didn't bother me so much. After all, ROCR doesn't have the level of mass popularity where you'd expect it to be listed in a major webcomics encyclopedia immediately. If it had it in itself to get that level of mass popularity, it would have bloody well got it by 2001. No, make that 1994 - when it was a small-press comic and making its first steps on the web.

So I gave it some time. Even though the rules of the Webcomic Wiki allow it, writing an encyclopedia entry on your own work is a bit tacky, so I didn't want to do that.

But today, I saw that the list had grown to include what seemed to me like some pretty obscure webcomics (not naming names - this is not about envy). So I decided it was time I started looking after myself a little better, swallowed my pride, and wrote the entry. It's very basic - just an overview of the series' history, main cast, influences, that sort of thing. It does include something that is very important to me: the dates of the initial online publication. 1994-1996. I would really like to see that early entry into webcomics acknowledged some time. Doing it myself somehow isn't as satisfying.

Writing for that Wiki is interesting. I'll try and dig into my archives and look for some material on the very earliest webcomics, some of which are now gone and unacknowledged as well (Afterlife of Bob, anyone?)

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Photos

Atra_cast_image_by_Reinder_1.jpggmb-voorplaat-versie3-shade.pngCraigg_Corby_and_Ethelfried_by_Reinder_1.pngabd.jpgKrakatoa_new_cast_pic_1_by_Reinder_1.pngKrakatoa_new_cast_pic_2_by_Reinder.pngaam.pngGreen_Knights_Belt_cover_art_by_Reinder_1.pngAll_for_one__finished_by_Reinder.pngabe.jpg
December 2009
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  • Invasion original art for sale

    Original art for page 29 of Invasion . It's taken me months, but I've finally put all originals from the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story Invasion up for sale through my ComicSpace Galleries . So if you want an original from this popular series, you can now buy them there. Prices are somewhat negotiabl ...

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan

  • December 2, 2006

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The Lives of X!Gloop

Chronicles of the Witch Queen

Reinder@deviantart

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    visited 5 states (10%) Create your own visited map of The United States or determine the next president And worldwide: visited 13 states (5.77%) Create your own visited map of The World or determine the next president

  • Invasion original art for sale

    Original art for page 29 of Invasion . It's taken me months, but I've finally put all originals from the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story Invasion up for sale through my ComicSpace Galleries . So if you want an original from this popular series, you can now buy them there. Prices are somewhat negotiable ...

  • Feral originals now for sale through Comicspace

    (Cross-posted from my blog) All original drawings*) for Feral are now for sale through my ComicSpace Galleries . Prices are differentiated according to my own estimate of how good individual pages are, with the pages with backgrounds drawn by Calvin Bexfield being rated highest. Your opinion may d ...

  • Selling more originals to finance future print edi ...

    All original art from the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan stories Headsmen and Devil is now for sale through my Comicspace galleries . Moneys raised will go towards financing new print editions of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan , which I should finally be able to get together in 2008. When I was in my financial crisis ...

  • Maintenance status on ROCR.net - use mirrors inste ...

    ROCR readers: to get your thrice-weekly fix, go to Invasion on Webcomicsnation . To read the archived stories, go to the archives on Modern Tales . ROCR.net is currently in maintenance status in order to fix the Internal Service Errors that have been plaguing it lately. Unfortunately, this status ...