Webcomics little helper

Here comes more helpful links and tips for (web)comic artists 

1. list of (free) programs

Inkscape - For your layout and illustration

Gimp - For sketching, inking, coloring, and adding text (Inkscape might be better for that task).

2. list of miscellaneous helpful links for the making 

Now if you don't have drawing skills you can always fall-back to use some nice comics stock resources free.

For Office comics
Check http://www.designcomics.org/ for usage details.

The whole source files (Characters, Background scenes, etc ...) is available for download in JPG (64MB) or Adobe illustrator format (207MB) at http://www.designcomics.org/source.html

For drawing references
Check this deviantart account, where a lot of renders are available


For caricatures and public domain pictures
check openclipart.org

3. Lettering

For a good selection of comics fonts
Check www.blambot.com (it's a reference)
The website even has some nice tips for letterer

4. Hosting 

Wordpress & Comicpress - Both for your basic site setup and webcomic layout.

(A nice alternative where everything is already setup is comicspace.com)

And finally Webcomic List - Great forum, get tips, help, or have people critique your work!

Inkscape Live Path Effect goodies

Inkscape Live Path effects (LPEs) are neat, but unfortunately not well known and therefor underused.


Lately I found this video and the end results are very pleasant, but because of the lack of explanations and the speed of the video - it's hard to follow

I'll try to decompose it -- Basically you follow 3 steps

1. you draw a shape with the Path tools

2. You open the Path Effect Editor, and add "Spiro-spline" to this shape, this effect will smooth the nodes position and creates nice curves, easy on the eyes.

3. Then You add "Pattern Along Path" and click on the first symbol next to Pattern source (the one in orange)

This will generate a little node on the top left corner of the canvas and will allow new transformation on the current shape.

The next steps are up to you, because it's just a matter of finding the right shape - then duplicate it,  transform it (Object to Path) and resize, change the orientation, duplicate some more, change the color, etc ... until you find the right shape you like.

How to make cool T-Shirt

Making your own T-Shirt is a fun hobby - It requires about a good design and then you can go into a printing shop or post your creation on zazzle.com and then have a cool "unique" T-Shirt.

There are a number of rules to follow though
The design has to be contrasted, not too much colors and should be around 1800x2100 pixels in 150 dpi.

Having that in mind, you can go crazy.

3 Ways to create a new font from scratch

More detail on this method at http://cleversomeday.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/inkscape-dings/

If you don't have Inkscape or find this too difficult then you can use the "quick and easy" Handwriting font creator: "Free online tool to create a vector font from your own handwriting."


Now dedicated for  t the hard core geek there's "FontForge" but Warning! this tool is not really user friendly - but a lot powerful, that is ... if you manage to use it.

Inkscape - customizing keyboards shortcuts

This post is all about the attempt to standardize a bit the keyboards shortcuts within Gimp, myPaint and Inkscape.

Essentially the Zoom, the undo, accessing the layers, and exporting a file. What mainly caused this urge to maintain the same logic within these applications is the fact, that sometime you have to use all of them during a design process, and ctrl+L in Gimp to access the layers panel is doing a destructive simplification of the shape you're working on in Inkscape - also pressing Z in myPaint to undo the last command is such simpler than the ctrl+Z that it made sense to have that setup as well in the other applications.

This post will only focus on how to change Inkscape shortcuts - since it's really easy to assign shortcut in myPaint - (basically you open the command menu and press the key you want to assign) - same in Gimp you open preferences and change whatever you want to the menu command ... but when it comes to inkscape you have to dig deep into the config files to find the way to change the shortcuts ... they're hidden in ./config/inkscape/keys/default.xml

The following default.xml file is assigning the keys :
- ctrl, shift x = export
- z = undo
- ctrl z = zoom
- ctrl l = layers
- ctrl, shift l = selectionsimplify
- ctrl, shift e = xml editor

http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=Y975Q57R

You can download the config file at pastebin

Inkscape 0.48

Inkscape version 0.48 is available now!

Inkscape is a free vector graphics editor, the 0.48 release notes  covers the new features among them (in a nutshell):

• A  new Spray tool
• multipath editing
• improved editing of nodes selection
• improved Connector tool
• a number of crucial changes in the Text tool
• even better snapping
• some changes in the bitmap handling department
• a number of new extensions

Also worth mentioning a detailed review on Libre Graphics World

Inkscape - filters magic

Inkscape is an Open Source "Free graphics vector Editor" - that you can download and use under Windows, Linux and OS X.

It doesn't work like Photoshop or Gimp - but more like Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X ; which mean you will deal with vectors instead of pixels.

The huge benefits of vector is that compared to pixels, when you zoom into the picture,  it stays crisp - you won't get large square or stairs.

You draw shape, square, triangle, stars, and color them, use gradient, you can mimic 3D ... but when it comes to textures, and photo effect, usually people start to look at Photoshop (or Gimp) - while in fact Inkscape is perfectly capable of doing it too - have a look at the scenery below.

It's in fact very basic shape for the sky, 3 layers for the grass and the tree - where some filters were applied.

Rock'n'Roll trip with Super5 - page 4 (and 3,2,1)

Okay, since today's page 4 was actually easy - and yesterday I had the opportunity to watch an excellent tutorial on how to make comics bubbles on Inkscape ... guess what ?

Yeah, I remade all the 3 pages (already posted in the last days) ... exactly what a true Super5 fan would do !

Here's the original post Blog d'un robot: Rock Robot

NB: the whole comics is online at https://lerockavanttout.org/rock-bandes-dessinees/a-virus-in-the-computer/

Comic Bubbles Tutorial

Aaarh, I wished HeathenX's crew had this tutorial posted a few days ago ... this is about drawing comics bubbles - very excellent tips there

Screencasters.heathenx.org Blog Archive Episode 091

Also the link for the comic's fonts
blambot.com

Nice collection of caricatures

If you like caricatures (like I do) - then you will be interested by this set from openclipart.org - also good to know all of them are published as public domain.

See the link to Open Clip Art Library johnny_automatic

Announcement openclipart release version 0.19 (cont'd)

While I'm using the new ocal version ... I noticed the 0.19 release includes 248 html files with quick preview - this is new (compared to previous release) and really makes the ocal's browsing experience fun ...

For exampel I found this excellent set of cartoonish animals from StudioFibonacci.

Here's the link to the official announcement from Jon Phillips co-foundator of the openclipart website
Open Clip Art Library Release 0.19 Announcement and OCAL10K Goal Exceeeded | rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

On a sidenote I also noticed a few cliparts that were included in the 0.18 release have disappeared in the 0.19 ; like this one below - luckily it's still available from the clker.com website :

Announcement openclipart release version 0.19

Great day for the openclipart community !
The new openclipart library (release 0.19) is available to download (375MB)
that's about 12,000 high quality scalable vector graphics (SVG) files released into the public domain by over a 1000 artists


it's around 1GB after extraction (including png and svg files) - and the library is sorted by Artist's name - which is cool !


More information on this Announcement 19 - Open Clip Art Library Wiki

Inochi

It happens not very often, but that is always nice - when someone send me an email - saying "thanks, for your nice vector clip contribution posted on Openclipart, I will use this clipart for my book / project / logo - how would you like to be credited ?"

The last time it was this 3 flowers clipart - that a kind developer has merged with the word "Inochi" (which is the Japanese word for "life").

More information there Inochi 0.1.0

NB : All posts on Openclipart are Public domain - which mean that people using it doesn't even need to says anything to the "artist" - that's why I really appreciate those people who takes time to send a kind email such as this one.

FileManager using tags

Tagging, is it the future of the file manager specie ? I don't know ... But I know for sure that wasting time searching for a file is very frustrating - especially in the middle of a creation.

Of course using filenames with a limited number of characters was fine until the average HD size reached around 80GB. Now it's getting more and more tricky to organize a collection.

Let say you are trying to setup a collection of clip-arts :
usually you start with a simple structure like characters, sceneries, items.
But then you want to get in more details : face, signs, outline
and where do that fit ?

That's why (I guess) tagging is the best way to get organized (and that's probably the reason why openclipart.org is using tags too !).

And recently I found that dream tool ; it's named "tracker" - and after 3 days of testing I'm quite happy with it, because it is very intuitive, and offer a lot of flexibility in organizing a collections of pictures, textures, outline, portrait, black and white, cartoon, scenery etc ... The perfect companion for Inkscape.

Meta Tracker - tracker-project.org

Openclipart Xmas mix

Little experiment today with a few opencliparts related to Santa and Xmas

the picture on the left was generated
from 8 cliparts with the following command (using the great tool imagemagick)

montage -label %f -frame 5 -geometry +4+4 *.png xmas.jpg


Here's the link of the various clipart : [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

screencasters.heathenx.org introduces Microsodes

screencasters.heathenx.org introduces Microsodes (micro episodes):

Maybe you're already familiar with Screencasters.heathenx.org which goal is to provide a means, through a simple website, of allowing new users in the Inkscape community to watch some basic and intermediate tutorials.

I watched a couple of their videos and learned a lot.

And was very happy today because they just introduced a brand new section with "the quick and dirty mini episodes (aka: microsodes)" illustrating just the fundamentals of Inkscape or things we consider too short for an entire episode.

kudos !

Open Clip Art Library Skull , leprechaun, and red star

Open Clip Art : Computer and Padlock

Today i updated the blogspot's layout / header by adding a clipart from AJ
a neat desktop computer a bit cartoonish - and also found this pretty cool packlock



Very good work !

Open Clip Art Library Big Book

Another gem of the openclipart.com

Episode 069 - Airline Safety Card Style Illustrations

Episode 069 - Airline Safety Card Style Illustrations

via screencasters.heathenx.org/blog by rfquerin on 8/28/08

Episode 069 is now posted. In this one I create an Airline Safety Card style illustration from a photo. Phew.. that was a mouthful.

This one went suprisingly long, I tried to go quickly through the slightly tedious parts, but I think it went pretty well. Hope you enjoy it.