School’s out for a fortnight here at uni. Which as a PhD student who is tutoring means I get two weeks of unfettered PhD write-up time. I’m pretty worn out from the teaching and marking over the last couple of days, although it just might be lack of sleep catching up with me.

I’ve also noticed a few more trackings from Inkscape fans to the tutorial I made for Order of the Stick avatars. I’m guessing people need Inkscape tutorials. Once my PhD write-up is over I’ll write up some more (general purpose this time).

I need some practice with the new version however. And practice in general. I’m not that much of an artist really, and my cartooning really needs some brushing up.

I’ve started playing around with Inkscape 0.46 by just giving it a spin in creating a character using my old techniques:

1. Sketch out a draft with pencil on paper.

2. Resketch it using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape on a draft layer
3. Construct the figure out of basic shapes and curves (this is the long part)
4. Put in any special effects, shading, corrections and what-have-you.

This is a pretty early concept for the character “Eight” that part of one of two ideas for a webcomic that I’d like to launch later this year. I still haven’t made up my mind about the little details like colouration and accessories.

So far the process for creating this character isn’t working - not because of the final output, but because it take so freakin’ long to do. I don’t know if it’s because I’m out of practice in the whole Inkscaping, but it could just be I don’t have an efficient process. To test this, I’ll give making this character another go, but this time using a more traditional inking based approach - both digitially and on paper. I’m rubbish at paper inking and almost as rubbish at digital inking, but it’s something I should at least try to see how it turns out.

It’s the end of the week, and my voice is shot from taking tutorials and labs for the last three days. I’ve been living a life of a quiet research student for years, so my vocal chords aren’t up to the extra stress of hours of explaining things to students. I’m looking forward to a somewhat quiet weekend of typing.

I’ve been somewhat neglecting this site as of late (way too busy, sorry), and I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting traffic from some Inkscape sites for the tutorial I wrote for Order of the Stick avatars. I mainly wrote that for the Order of the Stick forums - I noticed they had a lot of people using Inkscape but were in need of a good tutorial, and the style of that art works really well as a tutorial. But I didn’t expect it to get any attention from elsewhere. It’s good to know that it’s of extended benefit to the community at large. I’m hoping to write more tutorials once I get enough time to do so (it takes far longer than you think to write one of those things!). If you’ve stumbled on my blog from one of those sites, welcome! And I hope you enjoy the tutorial!

I’m also hoping to clean this site up a bit some day soon - it needs a new face lift and a new poll. Unfortunately I’ve got a huge amount of stuff to do right now, so I can never guarantee I’ll actually get to do something until after I submit. I’m looking forward to having less deadline pressure and more time to devote to projects like these - I’m sure I’m due a week or four off after I submit.

I’ve been leaving this journal idle for a bit too long. Even though I’m spending most of my time writing up my dissertation, I do spend some time doing other things. Lately I’ve been looking at the use of colour with an eye as to how I can apply it to my artwork.

I’ve never been that brilliant in the use of colour, so I thought it was something to look at as I play around with drawing comics in Inkscape. My feeling is that it would be wise to deliberately limit myself to a palette, so I don’t have to choose from a theoretically infinitely fine colour space. Plus it can help aid the classic palette look that was prevalent in games prior to SVGA.

Choosing a good palette is tricky. I haven’t seen that much on the internet on methods of choosing the best palette for your style of work. To start with, it depends a bit on what colour model you are using: RGB, CMYK or HSL. RGB is the most common used in computer graphics, as it directly maps to the colours used to generate the pixels on your screen. CMYK is used by printers, and is traditionally used by comic artists. Finally, HSL (and its cousin HSV) is nicely based on hue, which is important in ensuring you have a good set of colours that match.

To start with, I looked a bit at the old comic book formats. Those were limited in their palettes for technical cost saving methods; they only had screens for inking for 25%, 50% and 100% for their coloured cyan, magenta and yellow inks. This gives you a very limited palette, which I’ve mirrored with a version in Inkscape as shown here:

However, I’m not limited to using inks. So I made a simple Python script to help me play around with different palette choices (and learn a bit more Python as well). I threw together a simple script that can output a GIMP format palette, which is also the format used by Inkscape. Here’s a copy of the script if you’re interested: it’s a bit scrappy as I threw it together as I was thinking of ideas, but it’s got some useful things in there, such as RGB to HSL conversion (and vice versa).

The current model I’m leaning towards is one based in HSL, centered around the twelve basic hues. These are the hues you get if you go around the colour wheel by thirty degrees: you’ll hit all the primary, secondary and tertiary hues on your way around. I’ve started referring them in shorthand form by single letter symbols:

Most of those hues have their official name, although I had to take a few liberties with the ones that had a clash of initial. “Rose” had to take P for pink, which isn’t that much of stretch. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of a letter I was that happy with for “Chartreuse”, so I thought I might as well call it Lime. Lime is technically either halfway between Chartreuse and Yellow, or if you’re a web specialist it’s actually full green (why I’m just not sure). But if Crayola can call a tangerine crayon “Chartreuse” then I think calling chartreuse lime is a reasonable stretch.

The current palettes I’m looking at have the twelve hues with varying levels of saturation and light:

I’ve also been working on a shorthand code for each of those variations as well. A full hue will just get its letter, but variations in light will get a range of numbers from 1 - 9 either before or after the letter (for darker and lighter respectively). Saturation levels are indicated by lowercase letters at the end, from a to s. Shades of grey are given the letter code “N” (for neutral hue) with numbers for lightness shades, and white and black are labeled “W” and “K” (for key, like in CMYK) It’s a bit subjective as a scheme, but which ones aren’t?

What I’m not sure about is which grades of light and shade I should put into my basic palette. I’m leaning towards having five grades of light and four grades of saturation, as well as the grey shades, as that is approximately 256 colours (a nice round number that works well with palettes). But I’m wondering if that’s a bit too much. I guess I need to use the palette more to find out.

As the comments to my last post have shown, I have been less than successful in weaning myself off the more useless parts of the Internet. It’s hard to muster the willpower when you have a computer on most of the time. But I’ll give it another shot over the weekend, where I can justify not having frequenct email contact to the rest of the world.

I’ve been spending most of my spare time trying to brainstorm ideas for a webcomic, but I’ve been in a creative drought (not a good starting sign). I’ve been trawling through my memories of my life experience to look for good concepts, but that’s been pretty depressing. My memories seem to split into the categories of the mundane or the unbelievable. Mundane would be much of my recent life; most of the day on a computer, working on hobbies at home, sometimes hanging out with friends; normal, everyday life stuff.

The unbelievable ones are even more depressing, because it’s hard to tie them all together. Plus many of them have been done so often they are now cliches, which is totally unfair. There’s a couple of years of my life which needs surpisingly little embellishment to turn into the story of how between working for a dysfunctional game company I helped a ninja, a Japanese exchange student and an eccentric tech-head who lived in his own hi-tech fortress to build a team of cute robots to take on the world - but it no longer seems that original. Stupid internet memes!

I think I’ll put this aside for a little bit; I really want to start a webcomic this year, but it’s hard to make the creative juices flow when you think too hard about it. I also really need to get back into Flash, so I’ll try to whip up that shooter game I was working on before my laptop needed repairs and limit myself to the weekend to complete it. Canberra has effectively a three day weekend with Tuesday off (and I don’t think many people will be working that hard on Monday), so I can feel a bit more relaxed.

In which I use the Internet and GarageBand as half-hearted excuses on my slow progress in learning Adobe products

I bought a new toy yesterday - an M-Audio KeyStation 49e, a USB MIDI keyboard (the kind you play music on, not the kind you type with). I already have a more fully featured 76 key Casio WK-3000 keyboard which I love, but I never got around to getting the MIDI interface to hook it up to a computer. While I’ve been considering getting such an interface for a while, I decided it was probably better to get a smaller keyboard that can fit on a desk and can easily be carted around, hence the KeyStation 49e. It doesn’t have much range and the keys aren’t weighted, but I was after a small size and am used to synth style keyboards anyway.

My recent desire to play around with music stemmed from procrastination in learning Illustrator and Flash - what I was meant to be doing in my spare time last week. While I have been slowly teaching myself the basic tools, distractions were legion and my resolve was weak.

More on If Music Be the Food of Procrastination…

This week, apart from being unable to a particular Queen song out of my head (He’ll save ev’ry one of us!), I’ve been slowly acquainting myself to the basic tools of Illustrator and Flash. I’m still at the absolute basics, working through a few online tutorials.

After some consideration I’ve decided to dub September “Learning Adobe Month” and put my game engine on the slow burner for a while in order to be able to devote more time to getting to speed with Illustrator and Flash. This is partly because I’m just keen to dive in and learn these tools, however it’s also because I’m going to spend a lot of my time this month programming prototypes in C++ for research purposed and I’d like to spend my spare time doing something a bit more visual to give my mind a break. Plus if Flash turns out to be great as a prototyping tool it makes sense to structure my own engine in a similar fashion to make porting easier.

More on Flash! Aaa-aah

Looking for Adobe books

I’ve decided it’s probably best to find good books for both Illustrator and Flash, since I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by them at the moment. My Inkscape drawing technique doesn’t seem to port to Illustrator very well at all. My usual strategy of drawing a rough sketch version then overlaying it with a highly vectorised shape that I hand mould into the right proportions doesn’t seem to work very well in Illustrator, as I haven’t found a functional equivalent to the node tool for manipulating shapes at the most fundamental level. I’m sure it can be done, as Illustrator artists make art like that all the time, but I haven’t yet figured out the best strategy for doing that yet. Hence my desire to hunt down some good instruction manuals to help speed up the learning process.

Unfortunately my local bookstores don’t seem to have many of the newer CS3 books yet, so I’ll have to wait for Amazon to ship some to me. I guess I’ll using online tutorials for now. I’m a bit perplexed with where to begin with Flash, so I’ll probably be taking baby steps for a while. It’s like being a total beginner all over again.

As an aside, I’m starting to be overwhelmed by the number of projects I’ve got running at the moment. Apart from my postgrad study (which is taking up a lot of my time and will continue to for many months more) there’s Adobe products to learn, cartooning practice, work on Ice Slider and the game library, the MAGIC contest, and more work on this website. Something’s going to have to give. I’ll have to review what I’m currently doing and see what needs to be on hold. I don’t think any of these projects will be axed, but some may need to be put on ice while I work on other things.

Leaving the PC upgrade race

While I was in the shopping centre I briefly checked out the local game store, and I noticed the prominently displayed Bioshock boxes. I had a chance to check out the requirements on the box, and my PC sadly is not up to scratch. My processor isn’t fast enough, and my Radeon 9700 Pro doesn’t quite meet the specs. My usual practice is to wait until there’s a couple of games my computer can’t run before thinking of upgrading, but to be honest, I’m not sure I really care that more about the PC upgrade race. While I’d like to play Bioshock (I loved System Shock 2), I’m no longer keen on upgrading a computer purely to play games.

With computer technology so cheap these days, I find that my budget Windows PC does everything I need it do, save play the latest games. Even game development is fine; with my focus on 2D I honestly don’t need to play with the latest and greatest shader technology, and I frankly find all that a distraction from the fundamentals.

And these days I’m using my MacBook Pro for more and more of my work, including game development. I’m finding Mac OS X to be a more productive work environment than Windows, although that’s most likely due to the jillions of ways to distract myself with WinXP than any fundamental difference between the OS.

When it comes to games, these days I’m finding myself playing either console games on the Wii, classics from the 90s, or small indie games. I’m finding it hard to devote a huge amount of time to learn and play a traditional cutting edge PC game.

Thus I’m not really that keen on buying a new PC with a fancy-pants graphics card. My next computer purchase is likely to be something like a Mac Mini when Leopard comes out, so I can have a Mac desktiop working environment too (although I do want to keep a copy of Windows around; I haven’t yet found a proper Mac replacement for ModPlug Tracker yet!).

And for games, the Xbox 360 is looking better and better. Maybe in a year or two I’ll get one and be able to play the console variants of all those PC games that ask for high spec systems.

But for now, I’ll do without Bioshock. It’s not like I have the time to get addicted to a game anyway. Well, except for Super Mario 64 - accursed Wii emulation allowing me to play all those console classics I missed!

Progress has been a bit slow, I’m afraid. This week was a bit of a wash-out; I fell in a bit of a heap. I may be a day late on my weekly header image drawing practice, since I’m still thrashing out the preliminary sketches without much success.

After considering some of the comments I’ve had on forum posts on what I should update, I think its probably time to get my own copy of Adobe’s art tools. From what I’ve researched on Adobe’s FAQ page it looks like Adobe are cool with their education software being used eventually for commercial purchases, so it looks like it’s a decent investment while I still qualify for education pricing. The A$800 dollars charged for the education version of the suite is not cheap by any means, but it’s not too bad a price to have a full suite to learn with if I can continue to use it for paid work later on.

More on Going software shopping