Howling Black in color

Cleanups

The eraser is my friend.

Finalized

This is the finalized strip. It earned me a neat dragon trophy and a little certificate and a poetry book. It does still need working over, though. I rushed it.

Yes, I rushed it after doing sketches for a month. I pulled an all-nighter inking and tracing and scanning to get it out of sketch phase.

I also gave myself a blister walking to the cafe.

Principessa

Another victim in my battle to draw wimmins.

I've never really tried to draw a dress before, but this came out alright.

I was bored and colored her in later tonight. I hate color.

Gay Pride

Compare:



In the year intervening, I've read some books on design, printing and typography, learned about digital image formats, and downloaded a decent image manipulation program (the GIMP).

This made 2008 much faster going to create.

2007 was done using MSPaint for the letters and arrangement, and Irfanview for the color. I sectioned the photo off with white stripes, then copied each section of the photo into Irfan, and individually shifted the color to my liking. Then I pasted the sections back into the original image.

For 2008, I used GIMP and actual, honest-to-God layers to do the colors and text all in one program.

Well, actually, I did the black text in Paint because I was having a clumsy time of it with GIMP's text tool.

I upped the contrast and posterized the underlying photograph so it would look more distinct when the image gets printed. Unfortunately, this gave me trouble with the text. I may wind up lightening the image once I get word back from boss.

The font, by the way, is Headline HPLS...I found it in a package of fonts meant for creating LARPing documents for an H.P. Lovecraft game. I like it because it's narrow, easy to read at a distance, and more graceful than some other fonts meant for distance-reading, like Impact. I think it might be a bastardized version of Haettenschweiler.