Nintendo DS Sketch Pad

I have to give honorable mention to Jens Andersson (in Sweden?). For his excellent programming for the Nintendo DS. His application reminds me of the drawing hand screensaver software which I also like. Here are two of my sketches on the go. DS conclusively beats PSP because of this.

4 Words: Pressure sensitive drawing pad
Colors! is a simplistic digital application for Nintendo DS based on modern painting-techniques developed for drawing tablets in programs like Photoshop. By taking advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS touch-screen it becomes a perfect portable digital sketch-book.

Current features
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Hard and soft circular brush
Pressure-sensitivity can affect opacity and brush-size
512×384 image resolution with 2 stage zoom

Donald problems in work page 3 panel 1

The move from sketchbook to artboard did not go well. Even simple things became harder so I am focusing on one panel for the moment. Looking back at the script - the car is all wrong and what was intended to be a final pencil did not look as good (composition) as the thumbnail that I started with. To top it all off, Donald looked a lot like Daffy. I was doing fine Donald drawings (with audience) without reference - but the panel 1 Donald... just ugg. But before hitting these problems I went to the font size problem using my math brain.

The Comic book dimensions are 6 ¾ x 10 inches. From there I determined that 300 pixels per inch figures a panel of 2025 (half 2025 is 1012 1/2) pixels by 3000.
So each panel (assuming 8 panels per page) can be worked on in a single image of a little over 1000 pixels

I was able to get a pretty good match with a 11 point comic book like font (hair larger than sample page) at 300 pixels per inch. (I used a scan of a Donald Duck like comic for comparison).

For people using prepped artboard the dimensions are: 10x15 drawing area on drawing board with bleed of ½ inch all around (1 ¼ bleed on the bottom margin)

Math brain off.

Merry Christmas

I hope that everyone enjoyed "Talk Like a Time Traveler Day". I am now going back to a Donald Duck project that interests me.

A great 11 page script was written by Jeff Hamill about Donald and nephews in Hawaii. Jeff met with me and explained how a Donald Duck comic is created and provided me with some good resources if I wanted to play Disney artist. Jeff is a very good writer and deserves to have his stories published, and buckets of money dropped his way by movies, tv, and European distributors for his great stuff.

I hit a perfectionist-block almost immediately, so today's post is a sample of some of what I consider hideous (some say it looks fine... I don't), and I will post soon some of my efforts to finish some pages worth showing.

The current strategy: draw may variations - overcome bad starts with many retries. It seems to me to be a legitimate way to attack a block. We shall test this today.

3 comics posted

3 Talk Like a Time Traveler comics are up, so it looks like I will have the 4th up tomorrow. I am looking forward to the December series. My next move will be to get font permission, let the koala know that I know of his time travel abilities, and make a splash with buzzcomics and topwebcomics.
Go and have a look: talklikeadventure.smackjeeves.com

Talk Like a Time Traveler

I plan to post a few comics, then (as requested) let the "Action Man" font creator know that I am using his font and send him a link to my comic. Hopefully he will approve and I won't have to seek out another fontographer at dafont.com.

The hook for people voting for my comic on December 8th will be that all of the good unused time traveler ideas will be included in the vote incentive. All this presumes that I can get a following and make a splash. Should be fun.

On another note a copy cat effort entitled "Pretend to be a Time Traveler" has been detected. Apparently a Koala has begun an effort last August with ideas identical to mine except for thinking that dystopia and dress up are good ideas. I am for talk only. Costumes are fine for the Koala, but I am all about talking like a time traveler.

I can only assume that the Koala has access to a time machine, has gone forward to December 8th and then returned to last August to make it appear that December 8th was all his idea. Very clever.

Walking around video games with a camera

I have been walking around the Valve Halflife games and the Roller Coaster Tycoon games with my trusty 35mm camera picking up backgrounds and images that could make a high-intensity update webcomic possible.

I know that Gordon Frohman's comic uses Halflife shots, so I know that this concept has been done very well by others.

For Talk Like a Time Traveller Day these two could be talking about time travel. and this background from RCT 3 might be usable.

Talk Like Adventure

Part of the plans to put up and promote a webcomic are to achieve goal of getting many popularity votes on December 8th. I further aim to prove that even a bad webcomic takes a great deal of work. My poster child for this effort is an old acme ufo defence character seen here: