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Reinder's muddleheaded meanderings

Posts tagged with "art"

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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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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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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Content free post

Wednesday, 7. September 2005, 15:08:22

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... just to see if the RSS feeds on the right get updated if I post something.
I don't like the slide show widget for the photo albums in the sidebar. Why doesn't it have a link to the album itself?
Speaking of photo albums, let me try this "Add images/files" feature I now see below my post entry field...

I still like this drawing, a lot.

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Photos

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December 2009
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Waffle

  • Doe Maar review, addendum

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  • State of the comics, updated

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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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  • December 3, 2006

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  • December 4, 2006

    Guest comic no. 6 by Timmerryn (2 of 4) Originally published on June 25, 2003.

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The Lives of X!Gloop

Chronicles of the Witch Queen

Reinder@deviantart

Reinder@livejournal

  • US states and European countries I have visited.

    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

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  • 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 ...