Archive | July, 2011

[colours] Chalcara, pointing

Posted on July 28, 2011 in On Traces of Chaos, Yay, art!

Chalcara, pointing

You can find the inked version here. This one’s lifted straight from the comic page itself, only thing that’s missing is the dialogue.

And in completly unrelated news; Traces of Chaos has finally updated!

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Vernor’s Law of Writing

Posted on July 28, 2011 in Resources & Tutorials, Thoughts & Musings

All scenes need to accomplish at least two (and preferably all three) of the following:

  1. Providing background information for our readers
  2. Developing character
  3. Advancing plot

If the scene does not accomplish at least two tasks, change it or, preferable, cut it. Tighten the story, don’t meander, don’t dilute your writings.

Plot on its own is just a list of things that have been done. Background info alone might make a wikipedia entry, but not story. And few readers have patience for the kind of navelgazing that’s developing characters without any news on plot or background.

A scene that does too little dilutes all writing.

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Lady Sabre & the curious design decision

Posted on July 25, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

Lady Sabre

Lady Sabre © Nervous Habit, Inc. & Rick Burchett

So…

Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the ineffable Aether.

It’s a sparkling new webcomic. It’s so new, it’s archieves consists of a whopping five pages. The title’s a mouthful (and hard to abbreviate, too), but the pages so far are very promising: Solid visual narrative, real nice lineart and the colouring, while not inspiring, is good enough and better than anything I could produce.

Well, no surprise there: It’s actually made by comic professionals1. As long as those two keep interest, this comic will go places. It’ll easily be able to play with the likes of Girl Genius and similiar adventure stories and I’m glad to have found it this early.

But why in three devil’s names did they decide to put the comic scripts on the webpage itself?!

It’s not even a transcript like in the Schlock Mercenary archives, no, no, no. Transcripts are useful. They allow dialogue search, aid visual impaired readers and allow the comic’s content to be indexed for add bots if you so wish. If you have the time and inclination to handle them2, then by all means go for them; transcripts are grand!

But Lady Sabre shows the solid, straight, this-is-what-the-artist-draws-from comic script (excluding all the late stage design decisions mind you) in a prominent place right under the comic. The placement is important: It’s one thing to show the script in the forum for the curious onlookers, or a bit hidden so that it’s clearly marked as extra, an addition to the comic. But it isn’t and that’s a problem. Right now it’s not even marked as a script. I mistook it for author commentary at first.

You can argue if the script should be there or not, but that’s a a matter of personal taste3. But eitherway, right now it’s displayed too promimently. It takes more visiual estate than the comic itself! In any given layout, people tend to associate size and prominence with importance and so on page 3 the author had to explain that the comic’s continuity takes precendence over what’s standing in the script – something that could’ve prevented easily by a different webdesign decision, like marking the script clearly as extra or hiding it behing a popout menu.

But the current situation is kinda like a stage magician showing how it’s tricks are done in the show; or an epic movie interrupting it’s scenes in order to show how the sets are built. Like fantastic novel being interspersed with its first draft so that the reader can compare.

Lady Sabre

art characters © Nervous Habit, Inc. & Rick Burchett


Now the comic has too much going for it that my gripe with the direct script will slow it down noticeably. And now that they started showing the scripts, there would be an outrage if they suddenly were to vanish.

But in the end, this design decision does take a bit magic out of the comic itself. Instead of standing on its own, it’s leaning on the transcript.

So Annoying. Because otherwise both the webpage and the comic are great.

…

That reminds me, I need to fix trarr.net‘s index page…

Footnotes:

  1. Which, frankly, makes the fully dressed heroine a bit surprising, but I am not gonna gripe about THAT. I’m way to busy squealing in joy. Fully dressed heroine! EEEEEEEEE! ↩
  2. I don’t. Even outsourced transcripts have to be supervised. ↩
  3. I’m in the “no” camp. I do not even allow comments, so that there’s no distraction from the story. The creators of Lady Sabre clearly do not share my oppinion there. ↩
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Sketchbook #11

Posted on July 24, 2011 in Yay, art!

Designs for a new (Non-Trarr) character that’ll appear in ToC chapter #2. I really like some of them, although I prolly will go with a mix between my favourites.

Which one do you like best?

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Describing Colours: Hue, Saturation and Value

Posted on July 22, 2011 in Resources & Tutorials, Thoughts & Musings

From an artistic point of view, there are three basics properties of all colours: hue, chroma and value.

Those three are all we need to compare any two or more colours to each other, to decide which colours are harmoneous and which not and to understand the relationships between them and how those relationships influence the impact of our work.

There are far more sophisticated and specialized ways to handle colour, each with their own applications. Neither are hue, saturation and value enough to describe ALL the properties of colours1 – but for an artist that just starts out working in it, this is just enough.

 

Hue:

Describing Colours - Hue
Hue is the colour of the colour itself.
Confusing? Well, not really. Hue decides if you have a red, green, a bluish red or a blue-green and well, all the other many hues the human eye can see. When people talk about colour they often mean hue, simply because it’s the defining attribute of a colour.

 

Saturation (Chroma):

Describing Colours - SaturationSaturation and Chroma are two different concepts, but they’re so closely related that these two terms are often used interchangably. Both concepts describe how pure/vivid/colourful a colour is, even if the physics behind them differ slightly. For art usually one or the other is enough.

In the picture above, only the saturation of the colour changes, hue and value stay the same. Makes quite a difference, doesn’t it?

Anyways. Greys have zero saturation2, whereas the pure colours have the highest saturation possible. Ergo, the closer to grey a colour is, the less chroma it has. It’s important to keep in mind that the chroma and/or saturation of a colour has nothing to do with how bright or dark it is, because at least I tend to associate low saturation colours with dark values. But Pastels for example are bright but have low saturation.

 

Value:

Describing Colours - Value
Value simply describes how bright a colour is.

White has the highest value possible, black the lowest. This is the value: The lights and darks of your picture, ignoring saturation and hue of your colours. A greyscale photograph just captures the values of the photographed object, but not saturation and hue.

Value is sometimes really hard to see, since differences in hue and chroma can obscure a sameness in value. Take a look at the middle stripe of the image – it has the same value than the grey stripes, but it’s saturation shifts from no saturation at the black end to maximum saturation in the middle back to no saturation in the white end.

I have a real tough time eyeballing the value of any given colour. Kinda annoying, because getting the values right is often what makes or breaks a painting. But if you work digital like I usually do, turning the picture into a grayscale helps to see if the values makes sense.

A few final words

The relationship between hue, saturation and value can be quite a complex. It’s easy to accidentially change the value of a colour by trying to change the hue or to screw up the saturation while trying to brighten or darken a colour. And the only way to figure out what causes what is experience – or maybe a good teacher.

Working in colour is full of bootstrap (or “learning experiences”) like that and I’m not even half as good as I’d like to be.

Ah well, I’ll learn. Maybe this will help you, too.

Footnotes:

  1. Because in order to define all physical properties you need to start by differing between coloured light, coloured surfaces and how the human eye percives them. The sheer ammount of qualities you can/need to track gets confusing very fast. ↩
  2. Or zero chroma. That’s why greys are called achromatic and sometimes not counted as proper colours, my old art teacher was VERY insistent on that distinction. And in case it’s not clear, pure black and pure white do belong to the family of greys, too. ↩
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