Kat is going to go mad if I don’t put up the first episode of the comic, so here’s the blog post for it. I can’t include it in the page below, even as a thumbnail since we are only releasing the original XCF version from this site. The rationale for this, and explanation of the surrounding issues, are in the original blog post about the comic. Also mentioned there is the decision about the license for our work, the practicalities of which I have spent a great deal of time thinking about. The GPL has requirements for including rather lengthy texts in or with the work, which I don’t think is appropriate for a work which is solely an image. As a result, I am treating all the episodes of the comic as one large work, a part of which is a page which contains all the necessary text. In official announcement style, then:
The “title page” or “contents page” of the comic is here, which contains the copyright notice, disclaimer, license, and interpretation of the license. It also contains links to the individual episodes (as they become available) and hashes of the files.
Read on if you want to know the tools and processes we used, which should be mostly free of spoilers. In general, the blog post about episode n will contain information about how episode n was created, and an analysis of the content and meaning of episode n-1. For the first episode, however, there is no previous episode to explain.
In terms of tools, Kat’s drawing implements were a standard pencil, rubber and black pen, and we used reasonably good quality white A4 paper. Actually not all of the A4 sheet was used for the picture, and the boxes were not measured particularly. Kat then scanned the paper using an HP scanner connected to the family machine, running Windows XP, and emailed the JPEG file to me. I then used the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) in Debian GNU/Linux to alter the image.
As for the actual method used to edit the JPEG, here is a rough idea of the process I used (which was based largely on a not-entirely-applicable Photoshop tutorial I read):
- Crop the picture to give it a uniform white border
- Clean up the picture, removing unnecessary lines
- Add details missing like wall / floor horizon
- Re-space some of the letters
- Select the blue alpha channel
- Channel to selection
- Create a new, just black layer
- Cut from that layer using the selection
- Paste the black outline onto a new transparent layer on top
- White background layer
- (This method leaves a rather bleached look to the lines because the blue channel is only a third of the intensity of the black line)
- Use a thin brush to paint up to (and into) the black line on a layer between the white and black layers
- Just have to colour a closed region, then fill
- Add a details layer for things that would interfere with the base colour
- Add fire effect using spray can in three different colours
- Build up yellow, orange highlights, red super highlights
Stay tuned or Atom-subscribed for the next episode, and the background information for this episode. How do you turn your online comic into an Internet sensation?
