Onward to the Lovecraft Comic

I seem to be doing a lot of banner ads for Skotos lately, which I suppose is good, because it means that we're doing exciting stuff that we want to tell people about.

Next up is going to be the Lovecraft Country comic, which was actually the impetus that got us going to release the aforementioned (and aforereleased) Castle Marrach comic. We knew that the LC comic would be a good hook for the LC game, and when we ended up with two artists due to various weird circumstances, we decided to do the CM comic as well.

So I've been doing up banner ads for the LC comic. They've been harder to do because of the style of the comic. With CM, I either had full grayscale pages, which had plenty of depth for ads, or fairly simple line art in black and white, which I could color in.

The art for LC has more shading on every page, but it's all straight black & white art, no shades. So first up I did some sepia tones of the artwork, which gave the banners the depth I wanted:

( Sepia Ads )

Then there was just one that I couldn't get to work, so I colored it, and in the process I learned more about coloring black & white artwork. I'd colored one of the CM pieces too, and intuitively realized that I wanted to use the selection tools to color various layers rather than putting the pigment straight on the black & white piece. I did that again here, but also learned a bit more about doing layer blending.

When I did the CM piece I did normal blending, and so the top layers covered the bottom layers, and as a result I couldn't figure out how to color in a part of the picture that had black line art. Here I instead used the "multiply" blending option, and that did just the right thing, with the black lines and the colored pigments both showing up. Woohoo.

( Colored Ads, Then and Now )

I also did a bit of texturing on the green/snake layer and played some games with the background/beige layer.

One of our fans did a beautiful full-color version of the first page of the Castle Marrach comic, and I don't even know how she got some of the effects that she did, with lots of careful attention spent on gradients, shading, and texturing. But I'm just happy that my second computer-driven coloring attempt is a little better than the first.

We should have the comic ready to go in a week or two.

Sewage Tuesday (& Other Fun)

Here's what I didn't write about concerning yesterday's events:

Me (Monday): Y'know, it's been two years since we had any problems with our sewer line. I think killing that pine tree in our yard really took care of the root problem.

Me (Tuesday): Hello, Rescue Rooter??

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Our sewer line has been the biggest problem since we moved into the house. It's an old cement pipe and roots like to get inside, and eventually block it, resulting in a $200+ plumber visit.

We really need to replace the whole line with something that keeps roots out--before the pipe inevitably collapses--but some fool poured a cement garage floor on top of the line at some point, so this would require jackhammering and other major stuff.

We had two emergency plumber visits in 2003, then nothing until ... yesterday.

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Today's my writing day. I haven't managed to use it as such in about two months for various reasons. Today I'm going to try and take back the day. We'll see. Thus far I've been mucking with creating banners and also rotating them at RPGnet.

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BART did not go on strike. I get to go EndGaming tonight, and people will be able to make it to my house tomorrow. Yay.

Writing Successful!

I outlined the next issue of the Castle Marrach comic. I have a very broad outline written of the whole six issue arc, and that, plus having read the comic several times recently (plus having read all of The Dreaming plus the latest volume of Lucifer over the last few weeks, both thematic cousins), helped a lot.

It's funny, I've been playing around with different openings for the comic lately, but when I read my arc outline, I discovered a suggestion of a first page that was more appropriate than anything else I'd come up with. Heh. But some of my other ideas for the first page ended up scattered throughout the comic. I think one's on page #4 and one's on page #6, if things hold to my outline.

I've got a lot of story planned for this issue, and I hope I can fit it all in right. Some of it feels a little tight, but we'll see how it works out as I go through the issue.

Speaking of which, I also drafted the first three pages. I probably could have done more, but I feel like I'm easing back into the water of writing, so I don't want to go too far too quickly, lest I gloss over things.

I'm hoping to get some work down on the Elf Book this Friday evening (after the nights of gaming) and with all that I'll be back on track for the writing projects currently in my queue, which had gotten derailed at the start of May.

Hoorah.