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!

Making comics on Linux

Making comics is fun, but requires a lot of skills :
you have to be very imaginative, write interesting stories, be well organized, be good at drawing, accept criticism, be able to publish frequently ...

You will also have to make a few choices on the software to use, photoshop still being a bit pricey - you might be interested in open-source software -  and nowadays they are as good as the leading one.

Assuming you already have a comics in mind, and have drawn a few pages already on paper.

The best route for you is to scan those pages, and import them in Gimp - then to ink them and color them.

By putting the sketch on layer1, the ink on layer3, and the colours in layer2  - you are pretty much set.

Beware though, not to mix layers - if you're using Gimp 2.6 - if you have Gimp 2.8 there is a new lock/unlock feature you might use to prevent editing the wrong layer.

Then when the art is done, you simply add a layer4 for text. Make sure the text is spell checked because Gimp doesn't have this ability.

Image credit : Battle for Wesnoth comics

Quick environment sketch with Gimp

Gimp 2.8 is about to be released soon (January 2012 ?!), and many people are waiting for the single window mode impatiently.

In the meantime, I've stumbled upon some nice Google+ posts involving some painting or photo-montage.

Painting environment composition is fun, and in a couple of hours, you can see result ... just experiment and try various brushes (the chaos and evolution set (by David Revoy) is recommended) ; one benefits of doing such exercise is learning to make good composition and harmonious sceneries, and how to set and use the light - because that's key.

These 2 videos might help :
YouTube - Quick environment sketch
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGYqZZwzp18 (from idrawgirls.com/tutorials/2011/10/20/how-to-paint-landscape-mountain-river/)

Picture credit : Phillip Koops / Peileppe

Installing mint-x "Julia" on an USB stick

I'm currently using Linux Mint Helena 8 on my laptop ; and since Linux Mint Julia 10 RC is now available , the idea grew to install Julia on a spare 4GB usb stick I had in my drawer.... Here's how it went :

• Downloaded the Linux Mint 10 32bit iso torrent file at 10h30
• Burned the cd 
• booted on the CD - this distros is absolutely gorgeous - so I tried various applications and finally decided it worth a shot.
• selected install from the Live CD
• selected destination as the /dev/sdb 3.8GB filesystem showed by the installer 
• around 70% I noticed an update grub event happened
• the installation was completed at 11h09

I rebooted - then press F10 and selected in the laptop bios a restart from USB Hard drive and ... 

I was very disappointed to have a black screen while the fan were blowing like crazy, I waited 5Mn ... it was no help.

Then I ejected the usb stick, planning to reboot on my old  Linux Mint Helena 8, but then something worse happened, there was a grub rescue error - also in text mode, requesting a missing filesystem.

I re-insterted the usb stick and reboot - and there it was a grub loader offering to boot either from 2.6.35 Julia on the /dev/sdb or to boot from Helena 2.6.31 on /dev/sda ... and it worked just fine.

The USB stick isn't flagged as bootable, and the grub loader was modified on the existing Linux Mint Helena - and I can't help but to wonder why ?! 

But nevertheless Linux Mint 10 "Julia" is absolutely gorgeous, the "brushed steel" is perfect, all the icons are like little gems (especially the firefox icon) - the overall experience is absolutely outstanding, I'm currently running it from my 4GB USB key - and still have about 1.1GB of free space available ...

LinuxMint Isadora 9 LiveCD bug ?!

Using a LinuxMint "Live CD" when you're not at home and have to use another PC is pretty cool. Because you're sure not to mess with the user's settings accidentally, and do not have to bother if the PC has viruses or if it's slow at startup because it loads drivers ... and that's why I'm always carrying such CD when I go on vacation.

But today I thought I was going crazy : booting this particular PC from the LinuxMint Live CD/DVD Isadora 9 with only 2 devices attached Microsoft comfort curve Keyboard and Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse ; something really weird happened -- randomly the "up" key signal was sent about every 2-5 seconds (and believe me that's very annoying ...)

I confirmed the issue with "xev" and made a quickfix using "xmodmap" by disabling the keycode 111 (Up key).

I wonder if I'm the only one who has experienced this bug ?

How to download bit-torrent files with Opera

The Opera browser never fails to amaze me - not only it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux - but you it has  embedded mail, and can be used to share files (with Opera Unite) but it is also able to download bit-torrent files.

Compared to the traditional download where the file source can only be downloaded from one server - bit-torrent files are sharing the stress of the download on all the clients that are currently downloading the file, making the process a lot more efficient and faster - see illustration for a better understanding (extract from wikipedia) :

Here's a step by step  of the process of downloading a bit-torrent DVD (Linuxmint "Isadora")

step 1 - click on the torrent link and press "Open"
step 2 - select destination and press "Yes"
step 3 - check downloading process

 

Originally posted on Alashazam: How to download a DVD torrent using Opera

How I made the switch to LinuxMint

How (and why) I switched to LinuxMint

My laptop with Debian/Lenny(stable) crashed again today - "X server" Failed with a weird error "xf86OpenConsole : Cannot open virtual console 8" :

It happened to me already a few times before - causing loss of all the work I was currently doing (opened documents etc ...).

Today I wasn't happy either when it happened and  didn't want to troubleshoot - and since I've been testing LinuxMint for some time ; I figured it was time to migrate from Debian/Lenny to LinuxMint/Helena

The trick was that I didn't know if I could do that with the data in place.
So first step was a complete backup of my /home folder on an external HD (just in case).
Then (as root) I renamed my home folder "/home/myMix" folder into "/home/myMix-Shared"

After that I was ready to boot on the LinuxMint liveCD (good surprise, even my wacom tablet was recognized)
then on the installation screen with the partition I selected "specify partitions manually (advanced)"

The partition dedicated for the system had to be formatted obviously
but the /home partition - I made sure that the format option stayed unticked

and then I launched the installation (keeping my fingers crossed)
My username under LinuxMint is still "myMix" (that's why I had to renamed my /home folder previously).

After the installation (around 30mn) I ejected the cd, rebooted and then logged on the LinuxMint
I had a look at the /home there was myMix and my the other folder but I had no permission to read or write, so I typed the following command :

cd /home
sudo chown -R myMix myMix-Shared 
sudo chgrp -R myMix myMix-Shared

And that was it!

No data were lost, and now I just had to move each of my previous folder in their new /home/myMix
until the "myMix-Shared" was empty.

Kudos to the LinuxMint team, their distros is gorgeous - now I can enjoy tab in Nautilus and Gimp 2.6 among other goodies (like compiz).