Putting It All together

Hey there Guys!

Yes, I’m actually following up with a new entry in less than 6 months!

Anyhoo, don’t want to waste anyone’s time with useless gabbing so let’s get crackin’ shall we?

First of all: Notice I’ve added a widget that will allow people to keep track with my Tweets-though, I must be honest that lately, I don’t hit Twitter more than once, or twice a day lately-As I was telling a friend the other day: I tend to get very isolated when I’m in work mode.

Updating Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc, every day or so can be rather time consuming and I find that after spending a few hours (or more, those sites are very addictive), I just don’t have as much time for work as I need-Especially when you consider I have an Autistic son who takes an exceptional amount of looking after.

And yet, these sites are necessary, as that’s the best way to allow people to know about who I am and what I do.

That being said, I can appreciate that no one wants to spend an entire day (or, at least, a sizable chunk of it), chasing around the web, trying to keep updated on my doings, etc,. Which is why I’ve added mt Twitter feed here. And why I’ve got a thingy here that allows me to let folks at Twitter and Facebook know when I’ve done a new post here. And, when I update the Lens Cap site, it’ll have those links as well.

Which will make things easier for you, but, I’ll still have to post/update all those places just the same.

Moving on…

I have learned a new trick: How to take a screenshot.

For those of you not familiar with that term, I’m just basically taking a snapshot of whatever is on my screen at a particular moment-those of you who’ve sat through your share of technical seminars, webinars, presentations, etc, have seen them: They’re used often as instructional aids-Or, a great way to share naughty pics from those late-night Skinimax films you just happened to manage to download to your hard drive.

They’re not hard to do: On a Desktop PC, just hit that key in the upper right hand cluster that reads “print screen”, then just open Photoshop (Or Paint.net which is what I use) and hit “paste” and whatever is on your screen will pop up. then you can just save the whole thing as a .png or .jpg file and there you go.

These, are screenshots I took just a few days ago: I use Word”07″ which allows me to edit not only whatever artwork I’ve inserted, as well as narrative text blocks, and yes, “speech balloons” .The doing of all this I have found is very simple if you utilize one really sweet feature “Insert Shape”. I tend to use a basic rectangle shape which I can then do things like insert a picture/text. I find that inserting a shape works because with Word, you can more easily layer the shapes as well as change their sizes/positions and, if you find as I did that the book would work better if it was in black and white instead of color (the grayscale images actually turned out to be more atmospheric), you need to only right click on the picture, click “change picture” and insert the updated pic without disturbing anything else-Like those pesky speech balloons.

Oh, and those speech balloons in Word are called “Call Outs” which can be found in the “shapes” menu-If you’re looking to do your own book, I use “Comic Sans”  font for dialogue which I set at around 10 and use the “bold” setting. Once you set the balloon in place, click “edit text” and type in your dialogue and adjust the size of the balloon as needed. A word of note here: Put some consideration when doing your artwork that you’ll need room for those speech balloons to fit into or you’ll find yourself covering your artwork.

And, consider that these things are just as important for setting the style and tone of your book as are your artwork, dialogue, etc,.

I set the page background to “black” as I felt it added to the overall drama of the book.

Now you have a basic idea of what my process entails regarding the practical applications-the where you set each pic etc, is for me, an artistic choice and I don’t believe that is something that I feel I’m qualified to teach. I can suggest that you read other comics/graphic novels and watch a lot of films. Study the way color, lighting, movement is used in not only the ones you like, but the ones you don’t like (so you’ll know what not to do) and then do what feels right to you.

And that, is the most important lesson here: It’s great to be influenced by others, but don’t let yourself get so caught up in what others are doing wherein you lose your voice.

Anyhoo, that’s it for now as I’ve just completed layouts for the latest crop of finished artwork and need to get cracking on the rest of the book.

See Ya’s later.

E :0)