The Board for Volume 3 – August 31, 2007

My friend mental loaned me Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat!” a while back. I liked it so much, I bought my own copy, and started to use one of the book’s tools — The Board — to start plotting out Volume 3. I used a rough outline for plotting out Volume 2, but [...]

BulletProof-X; or, Saving myself from myself

Who hasn’t b0rked their xorg.conf before? I know I have…plenty of times. Now, if you’re lucky enough to be running Ubuntu (not Kubuntu…yet…), you’ll be saved from having to go back into that embarrassing text mode. Bryce Harrington over at Canonical has a new bit of code called BulletProof-X. It’s pretty [...]

WordPress, WYSIWYG Editors, and JavaScript errors

I just ran across an interesting problem when trying to port some content over from the old Coswell Productions site.  When using the TinyMCE editor, trying to create a hyperlink triggered this JavaScript error:
Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property Window.tinyMCE
I tried switching to FCKEditor (which I actually prefer over TinyMCE anyway) and received [...]

Baltimore Comic-Con

I just got my table assignment for my local big comic show, Baltimore Comic-Con. I’ll be at table 53 in Artist’s Alley, and I’ll have the newest minicomic, the first chapter of the next A Moment of Clarity book “Candynomics.”. This is my first time at this show, so please stop by and [...]

ImageMagick: A simple, and kind of overkill, way to resize and pad an image

If your background color is white, this will do a good job of padding the resized image…even though the huge border is kind of overkill for the purpose:
convert <filename> -filter Lanczos -scale <size> -bordercolor white -border -gravity Center -crop <size>+0+0 <output_filename>

Comics and Time Management

Colleen Doran just started posting a series of articles on time management and how it relates to comic production and freelance work. Here’s the first three, and I’m sure there will be more:

http://adistantsoil.com/blog/?p=1484
http://adistantsoil.com/blog/?p=1485
http://adistantsoil.com/blog/?p=1486

(Hat tip:Jane)

AMoC Update – Page 40; also, ComicPress hacking!

I just put the finishing touches on page 40 of the next A Moment of Clarity graphic novel, "Candynomics." That means the book is now 1/5 done! Yeah! It’s going real well, and because of some new Inkscape features, the art is coming out much nicer in these recent pages. ‘Course [...]

The switch to WordPress

I’m in the process of migrating over to WordPress from hobix. Expect to see all of the old content on the original Coswell Productions site end up here.

Practical Inkscape for Comic Artists: The Right-Handed Illustration Keyboard Layout

Inkscape’s support for alternate keyboard layouts, while still pretty rough, can be used to the comic creator’s advantage. Customizing a keyboard layout to put the most often used commands underneath one hand means less time spent hunting for the right key to push to perform the command that’s needed. It can also mean eliminating the [...]