#The Process

[karlrincon]

Merry Xmas 🎄.

[the960writers]

the writing process by Chuck Wendig

[mseden-fries]

Someone asked me a question earlier, but it wouldn’t let me respond to it so I’ll try my best to sum up some of the things they asked me. they asked me about my comic making process. I should be honest I’m almost a complete amateur. I wanna say I’m self-taught, but that’s not to take away from all of the YouTube videos and tutorials that I’ve watched online. Somehow I just ended up putting them together and into what I have now.

To start off with I almost always try to write my script first. after the script, what’s most important to me is the expressions on the characters faces. I think more than anything that gives me the best direction to my writing. As you can see with my first image, sometimes it can be as simple as just drawing stick figures this just gives me a directional idea of how my paneling’s gonna look. I’d say on average. I do up to three drafts the first draft direction. The second draft is a better idea of that direction and the third draft is all the cleanup so it’s ready for line art 

I usually separate my characters by specific color. This is so when I go into color, it’s easier to see which characters need what.

You can call me a bit of a cheater, but I like to use closed lines when I draw my characters. that way I can use a reference layer to just fill in the colors instead of having to do it manually or using my magic wand tool. 

I also utilize the pallets on Procreate to pick their colors

When it comes to shading, I like to use multiplayer layers and erase out the lighting. I might use some ambient lighting here and there with a dark pinkish purple this is going to depend on where your scene is taking place, but since mine is an alleyway, my multiplayer layer is at 40 opacity. For the characters, I usually use my syrup brush to blend in some of the less harsh shades. When it comes to my backgrounds, I like to use my glowing brush to erase out the lighting.

I still myself have a hard time drawing backgrounds I struggle to find where to put my characters in place some people find it easier to draw the background first and then the characters and although I do agree, that’s easier to establish the shot, I need focus on my characters. So what I usually do is draw my characters in a box and then draw that box in a space and that space becomes my background.

 I play around a lot with the Procreate effects that they have I use a pen called, burst for dramatic feelings, like a burst of energy or a burst of emotions I might use a comic dotted layer for something more comedic or action based. 

When it comes to brushes, I use a pencil for the sketch, a gloaming for the shading and syrup for the outline. Those are the main pens I use and everything else is effects. 

My organization isn’t always the best either, but this is how I usually do it. Panels and bubbles are at top, including the special effects like for example if I were to write the word ‘shake’ If Helga was shaking or blush, if Arnold was blushing, this would be in the bubble layer.  under that would be panels under that would be characters and in that folder I would have line art, then lighting and shading then color and that follows the same formula for background. 

This is a general breakdown of what I do in my comic, and I couldn’t say at all, but I hope it gives you an idea of what I do. again I’m no professional and you should take all my advice with a grain of salt. My best advice is learned by doing I think if you looked at my first chapter and saw my latest chapter, you’ll see my improvement and my paneling in my expressions in my establishing shots and in my color shading. So if you wanna make a comic, just make it and learn as you go, your first one isn’t gonna be a banger more than likely but it’ll be the best learning experience, in my opinion. If you guys have any questions, I am an open book! Feel free to ask me anything.I stream on my TikTok when I make my comics so if you want to watch the process, you’re more than welcome to tune into that but I’m not gonna lie. It’s a bit tedious to watch 😂 I’m @eden_fries on most platforms.  

[spacebubblehomebase]

Drawing a speedster from a fandom you've never seen from me before! Dedicated to my friend who kept gushing about the movies and my lil bro who watch Sonic Prime with me. I may or may not practice this more cause I'm not yet satisfied with how I depict him in this style, but I have plans for my accounts. So we'll see if that's something I can do. -Bubbly💙

[mil-liminal]

I question everything always, so no need to worry about that, but I just wanted to say that I finished bingeing the podcast today, and I LOVE it and want more!

I’m so glad to hear it!! I’m hard at work trying to figure out how to write my most recent tale, so hopefully a new episode will be coming at you soon!

[dogpawsswapgod]

my new thing is writing very erotic CaitVi scenes where nothing sexual is happening it all. it's surprisingly easy, esp if one or both of them are mildly or severely injured.

like, check this out

see? easy.

[beesbeesbeesbeesbees-somanybees]

Quilt update: finished these big panels over the New Year break for a wedding quilt that I’m making for friends, below is the finished quilt top and the sexy sexy purple-brown cotton that is the back. I’ve laid this out and pin-basted the quilt sandwich but I’m a little intimidated to get started quilting (it’s the biggest thing I’ve made by an order of magnitude), so I’m waiting for my new proper quilting hoop to arrive in the mail.

[bomberqueen17]

how the writing is going

Ok so. LOL. About the only thing I am effectively achieving this week *is* writing, and even that is not really..... I don't have a draft. But I have a whole bunch of sample snippets I've written to try and feel my way through the worldbuilding and discover the sorts of things the characters are likely to be preoccupied with, which is often how I figure out what a plot should be.

The next thing I thought about after dolphins was modes of transport besides sailing ships.

So this is a fairly high-tech society, but they do not have fossil fuels, and they don't have a large-scale power grid. I decided that for aesthetics, but as I'm unpicking my plot, I'm realizing that it makes sense. See, the main driver for all my plot devices is that there's a lot of sun activity-- sunspots, coronal mass ejections, magnetic field anomalies, that sort of shit. A power grid could not survive on a large scale. So all power generation is done in small, local installations-- some very local indeed, panels on rooftops, little waterwheels, tiny wind turbines. Industrial-scale power is generated in hydro plants and used right at the site for hydro-powered manufacturing-- much of it direct hydro-power, not converted to electricity. Just direct drive waterwheel shit. Because the sun can throw whatever shit it wants at the planet and your waterwheel won't notice or care.

That said. Communication over long ranges does pose a significant challenge. You're going to need line-of-sight semaphores and shit, which I had not worldbuilt in the earlier versions but absolutely could add in.

There should be trains, and I haven't really pondered those yet because I need to know more about my geography. Please, god, don't make me draw a map, but I'm gonna have to. Oh well.

But the other thing I thought of and got really excited about was

DIRIGIBLES

It's feasible with technology we currently have, and this is a thing that some large companies are pursuing, to make very large, hydrogen-filled, entirely solar-powered dirigibles for long-distance cargo transportation, faster than ships, the same speed as trucks/trains but more direct, slower than airplanes but INFINITELY lower carbon footprint. And hydrogen is outlawed by the FAA as a lifting gas, not because of the Hindenberg (which had many contributing factors) but because of a Congressional hearing which was presented by the helium lobby in the 20s. Hmmmmm.

A fascinating detail is that you could make a solar-powered lighter-than-air craft operate day and night seamlessly by having a power generation process where some of the day's collected solar energy directly powers the thing, and some of it goes toward... I forget the details but it powers a chemical reaction that, come nightfall, is simply set to reverse itself, which will then release most of the energy that it took to power the reaction in the first place, which you can now use to power your aircraft. Which is not a thing I knew about and I now have to research how that would work because, fascinating.

Anyway. In Fantasy World, there are totally dirigibles, and they're also probably operated by the Navy, and the water-ship sailors fucking hate them, LOL. This will be a wildly entertaining dynamic and I am rubbing my little paws together.

Also.

While feeling sort of brain-dead and stupid, I got a sheet of paper, went through a bunch of lists of historic names and lists of like, suggested baby names from various ethnicities, and I just made lists on this sheet of paper of men's names, women's names, arguably gender-neutral names, and then a huge pile of surnames, and then I sat down with a bullet-pointed list cribbed from the website of the museum of the USS Constitution of all the personnel that would be on a 44-gun frigate ca. 1812, and I first pondered each of the jobs, added some, took some away, came up with my own numbers of how many guys I needed, and then I just sat there and combined the first and last names in aesthetically pleasing ways to generate characters, lightly crossing out ones I'd used. (and sometimes googling them to make sure they're not somebody famous or something, which i always recommend with fictional character creation, especially if you're as oblivious as I am.)

I was unable to resist also coming up with some backstories-- siblings, little work histories, criminal pasts, notable traits, that sort of thing-- for many of the characters.

I did not make up names for every individual person on this ship, which I decided should have a crew of about 150-180, but I made up some names for every position, and considered age and gender as well for all of them.

I will not use many of the characters I've created this way, I'm sure, but the ones with interrelationships will totally somehow get used, and this way as I'm writing if I need a character I can find them already made, and if that person has a defined role, I already know which one and won't lose track of them.

This also got me to consider why people wind up in the jobs they do in this society, what drives them to seek out certain things, and that gave me a lot of background as to what's going on onshore.

I should try to find a list of a dirigible's crew and think about them, too, and build out the train people and routes and whatnot.

I also bought a used older edition on Thriftbooks of The Annapolis Book Of Seamanship and have been reading that with... more interest than I expected actually. I have the 1983 edition and it has a really moving little plea to let the women on your ship also learn to sail because it is foolish to relegate them to the kitchen when if only they were taught how it works, they could save you all in an emergency. LOL I wonder if that's worded differently in the updated new version or not.

[mechanicalchickens]

you're out of touch! I'm out of time!

[vintage-tigre]

[the960writers]

By Lorna Bailey

Being an author is no joke, and being an indie author is really no joke. Yes, you have a lot of control over your business, and this can be so rewarding, but it also means that you are responsible for everything in your business. From marketing, to ISBNs, to bookkeeping, and ugh—paying those dreaded taxes. It can become overwhelming very quickly.

You didn’t get into this business to figure out Instagram's constantly shifting algorithm or to become a world class marketer. You got into this business to do one thing—write good books! 

[...]

Fear not, my author friends, for there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There is a three-pronged approach that promises to revolutionize the way you do business. This is the secret sauce that I’ve seen many successful authors build empires with. It’s what keeps their business running and their time freed up to write books that they love. 

Implementing Systems & Processes

[sanktalinn]

The process - Kafka

[deepdreamnights]

Spaceknights:

Skera the Scanner and Vola the Trapper

Scanner and Trapper got the closest to my Tokusatsu-Spaceknight dreams in relation to my Live-Action ROM Spaceknight video project.

All the SpaceKnights are at least a bit toyetic, and you can see Marvel trying to throw Parker Bros a bone that they never snatched with everyone from Firefall onward. Scanner and Trapper are two of my favorites.

Full tutorializing under the fold.

Overpainting was the most effective way to get the designs to where I wanted them, and this is going to be the main breakdown of that (later posts about other knights will likely focus on other aspects).

I used Midjourney's edit feature to do this. The first step is getting the image high-enough res to work with. MJ's edit feature can be used as a very effective image upscaler, and that's the first step.

It's also useful for removing word balloons and other obstructions that the AI will later misinterpret and getting a view of an entire character if parts are cropped off. You will need to often extract backgrounds manually, especially with comic art where AI background removal tools usually fail.

Once the image is upscaled you're going to get better results using the overpainting/retexture feature. Which you're going to have to use a lot because anytime you're using overpainting to shift a character in art style, its going to involve compositing.

No single version of Vola or Sekra had all the right parts, so photoshopped the bits I liked together before re-loading it into MJ's editor for some touchups. Sometimes you have to make a mockup and use that as a character reference or fully retexture over it.

You'll notice that I removed Vola's net. Accessories, if on the character model, will always be on the character when used with Vidu's system, and often glitch because of it. You can always put them back in with a second image reference or with a specific reference that still has them.

Once you have the reference image, you can use the character. Though if you want to use them a lot, you'll want a full model sheet with multiple views.

More to come.

[mil-liminal]

A super crunchy sketch to assure you there’s a new up coming Tuesday and I can’t wait

[theuntouchableredmoon]