Compost

I have decided to hold off on starting to post episode 4 of The Word Smith for a little while (hopefully not too long) so that I can get more of it done before starting and hopefully not have to pause in the middle of the episode.  Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I know, but that's stuff for you.  (It's like stuff.)

I'm still sketching though so I'll continue to inflict my sketches upon the internets, like so:

This is a couple of variants on a design for Ellaire (or is it Elaire?  I don't remember how it's spelled...), a minor villain from the Kyoujo RPG which I have a feeling I may have mentioned in this blog once or twice.

In completely other news, I took down my balcony garden last night (/sadface).  Partly because of the storm (though we seem not to have gotten much of it, comparatively), but also because the tomatoes and basil have been looking rather sad of late.  Indeed, the wind over the last several days has stripped the basil of pretty much all of its leaves.  I did, however, harvest another seven (unripe) tomatoes of decent size before sending the plants to their doom, which will hopefully ripen in my kitchen.  I also plucked off another handful of jalapenos.  My parsley is still looking relatively lively, however, and I'm thinking of looking into freezing it or something.  As I think I mentioned in my previous post, I consider the garden experiment to have been a reasonable success, and now I have to figure out how to use up all these tomatoes and jalapenos I've got.

Well, that's all for the present.  Until next time,
Freak Out.
-TFitC

Combing the Desert

The exciting (or not) conclusion to episode 3 of The Word Smith is now available.  I am going to try to keep plowing ahead with episode 4 at the same schedule, though I expect there will be some inevitable pauses due to life and the universe in general.

I think I'm going to post a couple of sketchbook pages today, drawn from my current sketchbook and not from the archives like last week.

 A quick sketch of Gillin, one of my FR characters, in mid-stride, who hasn't appeared on this blog in a while.  I misspelled her name on the sketch label (fixed in the sketchbook, but I didn't notice it until after having scanned it in) - I used to spell her name with only one "l" but at some point switched to two.  How's that for some useless trivia?

This is just a bit of a desert landscape.  It started with the swirly spiral in the upper-left and I thought "hey, that could be a hot desert sun" and what does one find in a desert but disembodied robot arms?  There's also some Tim Burton-esque things happening in the background with that one sand dune.

Anyway, that's all for now.  Until next time,
Freak Out

-TFitC

Drawing on the Past

So, it seems that page 5 of the Word Smith, episode 3 is now on-line in the usual place.  Tremble in fear, o mighty interweebs!  Or just go read it, whatever.

In light of last week's sketching exercise, I decided to dig up my original sketchbook an marvel at its terribleness.  It was pretty terrible and I shall spare the internets the terror of it all for I am a magnanimous Freak.  Also, I'd be pretty embarassed to put that stuff in what is basically a public forum (even if there are only a few people who actually read what I choose to vomit onto the internet - how's that for imagery?)

Suffice it to say, my early forays into drawing were somewhat, in retrospect, not good.  I had no sense of proportion at all, or at least very little, and it was all kind of laughably bad.  And whilst I make no claims of being particularly good or anything now, I'm certainly rather better than I used to be, which is a good thing, I suppose.  Yay for progress.  At the very least, I can cobble together stuff that I don't think I'll be terribly ashamed of ten years or so down the line.  Of course, part of the whole purpose of this is to practice and get better.  At least there seems to be some tangible evidence that it's all paying off, at least a little bit.

Even in that first sketchbook one can see some progress - towards the end there's a few things that I don't think are completely terrible.  In fact, I picked one to show in public:

In fact, I think it looks kind of neat, though it probably helps that it's not human.  I'm not 100% sure what this was meant to be (aside from some ridiculously complicated contraption) though I suspect it may have been an idea for the Super Computer (from my FR project).

Until next time,
Freak Out

-TFitC

Sketchy Business

It appears, curiously enough, that page 4 of episode 3 of the Word Smith has found its way onto the interwebs.  Rejoice?  Or not.

In other news, I am running another comic workshop this fall.  It is a follow-up to the one I did last year using a follow-up book to the one we used last year by the same authors.  Our first meeting, in addition to all that fun organizational stuffs, we to talk about the usefulness of sketchbooks and do some time doing some free sketching.  I figured I'd post my sketchbook page since I've, you know, been doing that for a while now.

It's all just assorted random sketchy stuff which was one of the points of the exercise (though certainly not the only way to approach a sketchbook page - I primarily went this route because it's not how I usually approach sketching).

Anyway, stay tuned to next week for the next page of the Word Smith and more random babble on the interwebs.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Prepare Yourself

The Word Smith episode 3, page 3 is now up on my sorry excuse for a website.  It is also in colour and seeing as we're now half-way through the episode, I'll probably just finish up the whole episode using colour.  So, yay for that?  This page includes some gradients so it's kind of fancy.

From the sketchbook, today we have The Pen in fencing regalia:

Of course, she should really be wearing a full fencing mask rather than just her visor, but that would hide her face so I took some liberties.  Drew this whilst at the first CTRL-A show of the term and had a small audience for part of it which was, different, I guess (they were quiet so it didn't bother me much).  Can't imagine it was overly interesting to watch me draw, but who am I to judge?

Until next week,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Flattened

Page 2 of episode 3 of the Word Smith is now available.  As fate would have it, I ended up colouring this page too, due to continued insanity.  Actually, I downloaded a couple of plug-ins that handle some of the more tedious aspects of doing the flatting and they sped up the process considerably.  They're not perfect, mind you, as you have the same basic problem as flood filling:  if there are any holes in the line work, the colour for an area escapes into connected areas.  This means I have to go and make sure there are no gaps in the linework which is still a tedious and error-prone proccess, though still faster than flatting by hand to the point where it's at least twice as fast.  This means I may actually be colouring a lot more pages than I had intended - or, at least, I'll probably do episode 3 fully in colour now (I have page 3 nearly coloured already).  Adding shading is still laborious though, so I may just use flat colours in the future to save time if I decide to keep colouring things, unless I come up with some better way to handle shading.

Here's how the flatting for page 1 looks like compared to what I did by hand:

It doesn't really handle hand-shaded areas very well and can produce lots of little areas, but still faster than doing things by hand, at least so far.

The sketchbook has, sadly, been a bit neglected of late due to my focus on the Word Smith stuff, but here's one of the more recent sketchbook drawings which may have some relevance to page 4 of episode 3:

Those are suppose to be swimming trunks, by the way, not boxers.

Anywho, that's all for now.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Behind the Lines

Page one of episode three of The Word Smith has now gone on-line.  As an added bonus, I, for reasons I cannot fathom, decided to colour this page which was very time consuming!  Thus, do not expect to see many coloured pages in the future (unless I get much faster at it) and do make sure to go look at the final coloured page because it was kind of a pain to do.

I also figured I'd take a few moments to talk about how I went about colouring the page.  For those familiar with Photoshop or colouring comics in general, this is probably all old hat.  For those who aren't terribly familiar with either of those things it might still be a bit dull, but go and read it anyway.

So, naturally, I started with the scanned in inked pages.  One could, of course, do everything digitally, but I'm still doing thing drawing/inking the old fashion way, at least for now.  Here's the black and white page:

Yay!  The first step is to put the line art on a new layer (leaving the background blank) and set the layer to multiply.  This makes the white parts transparent, allowing you to draw underneath.

The first step is a technique called "flatting".  I'm not going to go over this in excrutiating details (tutorials exist on the weeb for the terminally curious), but the basic idea, is that you outline each area (in my case using the polygonal lasso tool) and fill each area with a solid colour.  Generally, the outlines should be created under the inked lines so that, when filled, there are no gaps betwixt the lines and the coloured areas.  This is all done on the background layer (or, I suppose, any layer underneath the line layer) with all forms of anti-aliasing, feathering and so on turned off.  The idea is to create areas of solid colour that a colourist can easily select when doing their colouring.  With the line layer turned off, the flats will look something like the following:

See?  Kind of a neat looking effect, in and of itself.  You  can actually use any colours you want at the flatting stage, but since I'm doing my own colouring, I just flatted with the final colours.  As you might imagine, doing all of this by hand is a bit tedious.  I understand there are plug-ins that can help with this so I will probably look into that the next time I decide I'm crazy enough to do some colouring.

Now, one can leave things as flat colours, but I decided to go a little further and add some shadows.  I actually did this fairly similarly to flatting.  I created a shadow layer between the flat and line layers set to multiply with about 80% opacity.  Then I just created my shadow areas in a similar manner to flatting, except there were a lot fewer areas so it didn't take quite as long.  With the line art turned off, it looks like the following:

Similar to above, except now with shadows.

Well, that was basically it.  One can add hilights and other effects, but I decided to stop with shadows.  And don't forget that you can see the final, full colour version here.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Ripe Tomatoes

Today, I am starting to post episode three of The Word Smith.  I know, I know, I'll bet you can hardly contain yourself for joy so I'll just get to the point.

Added some toning in photoshop for something a bit different.

The plan is to post one page per week, probably Tuesdays.  I'm fairly close to being done drawing/inking episode 3 so that should be doable.  I'm not sure if I'm going to post these to my blog or just to my website (such as it is), but at the least I'll link to each episode from here.

In other news, I have now harvested four tomatoes (one of which became part of today's sandwich, so far with no ill effects) from my garden so I suppose I can consider that part of the garden a success.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

That'll Leave A Mark

Hello internets.  Today I give you page four of "The New Adventures of The Freak in the Cape".  It goes a little something like this:

Dear readers:  this is a work of fiction and no Freaks were harmed during the making of this comic.

Could this be the end of The Freak in the Cape?  Assuredly not!  It is, however, likely to be a while until we see the aftermath since, in addition to my normal disclaimer that future pages will be drawn as time and inspiration allows, I suspect that there's going to be a long-ish flashback before returning to the matter at hand.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Foliage

Taking a break from posting sketches this week to show some pictures of my balcony garden experiment in progress (not seen since it's first mention way back when).

The tomato plant in my hanging planter is doing quite well and is laden with several developing tomatoes.  I'm crossing my fingers and hoping they ripen so I can have some fresh balcony tomatoes at some point.

My jalapenos are also doing fairly well with lots of proto-peppers in development.  I hope they all ripen too and that they turn out nice and spicy.

Finally, this is my box of basil.  It's growing quite well - much more basil than I'm going to manage to use up myself, I expect.  One plant would have been plenty and I planted three.

Not pictured are my green onions (I've harvested about 2/3 of them so far) and my potted tomato plants.  Overall, things are certainly growing, now I just have to hope the tomatoes and jalapenos ripen at which point I will consider the experiment a success.  I started everything from seeds, so if I do this again next year I'll either start with seedlings or start things indoors about a month or so sooner than I did this year to hopefully be able to start harvesting sooner.  Crossing my fingers right now in the hopes of being able to harvest at least some tomatoes and jalapenos this year.

Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC