NaNoWriMo(esque)

Posted on by

So we were talking at the writers’ group today, and the subject of NaNoWriMo came up. NaNoWriMo is National Novel-Writing Month, basically a dare to write 50 000 words in thirty days, the month of November.

One of the members had a spreadsheet of something similar, called “Fifty Thousand Words in Fifty Days”. This seems a little less intense, given that I’m doing other things as well, like art and work and finishing The Lonely Little Fridge.

I asked to use it, and got the okay. Here’s my version of the spreadsheet, as a Google Sheet handily embedded in this post (find out how):

It starts out quite small. Work was running fast today, but I had plenty of chances to think about things. I am going to work on “Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!”, first finishing off some planning with Jackie, then onward.

First things: three endings and three beginnings to the story.

Drawing Blog Posting 2021-10-05 (or so I thought)

Posted on by

So what I want to do is put a hashtag or something in each on my Tiny Sketchbook posts on Facebook, and then gather them all up on a page here on my WordPress blog. However, using the WordPress embed for Facebook to access the first of my Facebook drawing posts… did not work.

Looking at the WordPress embeds documentation…

https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/

…tells me that Facebook has decided to ‘close the oEmbed end point for embedding Facebook links’.

https://wordpress.org/support/article/facebook-embed/

Well, it turns out that you now need to provide a FaceBook Application ID and an authentication token to use the Facebook API to display posts in other locations. I think. Facebook does provide ways to embed posts:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/embedded-posts/

Fortunately (?) I have a Facebook developer account, from when I was taking web development at Durham. I went back in and discovered all the FaceBook apps I had written as assignments, forgotten, but still there after all this time. I archived them, and am now trying to refamiliarize myself with the whole thing.

Books: How To Think When You Draw (and Write)

Posted on by

Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #2

After 2018 I started following things on Kickstarter and Patreon. After pledging to a Kickstarter project to create a clock-radio using actual nixie tubes for display, I started to look at descriptions of other projects.

One such project was a series of cookbooks of art and writing tutorials by the Etherington Brothers out of England. Lorenzo Etherington handles the drawing; Robin Etherington handles the writing.

Lorenzo has a very intriguing, very traditional style of drawing. It’s very 1940’s dieselpunk, all big internal-combustion engines strapped to race cars. It reminds me of the old CARtoons magazine I used to read when I was a kid, or the original Mad Magazine, or even some of Will Eisner’s work (for examples, see Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art).

Continue reading →

Books: How to Draw Black People (updated)

Posted on by

Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #3

It is very good to be able to look out into the world and see yourself reflected back.

As a writer and cartoonist, I want to be able to portray and ultimately connect with all sorts of people. I have been noticing that all my people drawings tend to look like Generic White People, just as my trees tend to look like Generic Maple Trees. I have to remember to explicitly make things look different, to match the variety of people (and trees) I actually see on the street. But how to do that?

A week or so ago, I stumbled across a very interesting Kickstarter. 

Continue reading →

Books: Malaak

Posted on by

Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #1

This was my first Kickstarter support.

Malaak is a series of comic books by French-Lebanese artist Joumana Medlej. It describes a Lebanon invaded by demonic spirits of war, and what the ancient guardians of the land must do to defend it.

In 2011 I was looking for drawing tutorials, and I stumbled across this incredibly-detailed chart of how to draw cats. Every type and variation of cat appearance was laid out in almost mathematical precision. Who could have done this?

I followed a link and discovered Cedarseed and Joumana Medlej. And a world of new colours and ideas.

Continue reading →

Useful books and Other Resources

Posted on by

Various writing, story design, comics, art, and animation books. The beginnings of a list…

The Understanding Comics series by Scott McCloud:
Understanding Comics
Making Comics
Reinventing Comics
A pioneering exploration of what makes comics tick.

Drawing People by Joumana Medlej
A book remarkable for its examination of different skin colours and body forms of people from around the world. Look in Joumana’s shop for the ebook.

Digital Prepress for Comic Books by Kevin Tinsley.
Goes into the details of preparing comics for print.

Continue reading →

When Can I Use Real Names and Products?

Posted on by

In the Devilbunnies universe, writers used the names of existing concepts, characters, products and companies. Some of them were associated with the Bunnies or their enemies:

For the Bunnies

For the Bunnies’ Opponents

  • Elmer Fudd (from Warner Brothers; lent his name to the anti-Bunny forces);
  • Moxie, Irn Bru, D&B (“uncute” drinks);
  • Vanilla extract (the Bunnies were actually supposed to be allergic or even burned by it);

In some cases the group authors took the name and ran with it.

Continue reading →

How I Colour a Comic in Photoshop

Posted on by

This is how I build a colour comic in Photoshop.

Scan the original drawing.

I start by scanning a black-and-white drawing.

The drawing should be drawn with colouring in mind. Large dark areas are generally added during the colouring, so they should not be done as part of the black-and-white drawing.

The colouring style I describe here relies on using the ‘bucket’ tool to fill large areas; they can also be filled using brushes.

Continue reading →