I’ll have a table at SPX 2009 later this month, and I will have manga-sized versions of Lore, Vol. 1 for sale. However, I do not know if I’ll have new material ready for the convention. The past year kept me busy.

My “day job” is visual effects. I wrapped up working as a character rigger on Animal Armageddon in April. This summer I worked mostly on commercials. I created this skull-shaped, symmetrical water splash for this Tanqueray commercial:

I used RealFlow, LightWave 3D, and a ton of Python scripting to create the skull-splash.

I’ve had several graphics freeware packages recommended to me by friends. This is my attempt to list them all, but I think I forgot one or two.

3D FREEWARE

• Blender — an all-purpose 3D and compositing package
  Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Irix
• POV-Ray — a free render engine
  Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
• Wings 3D — a 3D modeler
  Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
• DAZ Studio — a Poser competitor
  Windows, Mac OS X
• Google Sketchup — another 3D modeler
  Windows, Mac OS X

2D FREEWARE

• Irfanview — an image browser
  Windows
• GIMP — an image editor
  Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
• Inkscape — a vector graphics editor
  Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
• Scribus — desktop publishing
  Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, OS/2 (!!!)
• Bullzip — a PDF printer
  Windows
• Project Dogwaffle 1.2 — a paint program
  Windows
• ImageMagick — a commandline image editor
  Windows, Mac OS X, Unix
• Pencil — a traditional 2D animation software package
  Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
• ArtRage 2.5 Starter Edition — another paint program
  Windows, Mac OS X
• HDR Shop v1 — free if used for non-commercial purposes
  Windows
• CinePaint — HDR image editor
  Mac OS X, Linux, BSD

At the San Diego Comic-Con last weekend, I learned about Wacom Privileges. If you own a Wacom tablet, and if you live in the United States or Canada, you can get nice discounts on different software packages.

For example, Wacom owners whose tablet shipped with a serial number for Adobe Photoshop Elements can upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS4 for 50%-off the upgrade price. That’s a killer deal.

However, some Wacom tablet owners may need to call Adobe Tech Support to successfully install the upgrade if the installer rejects their Photoshop Elements serial number.

Despite this potential hassle, Wacom still offers a great deal on Photoshop for artists who do not qualify for an academic discount.

The Gaylord Herald Times site has a Motor City Comic Con slideshow. I appear in the first twenty seconds of it.

More pictures below:

Kurt J. Kolka took the first two pictures and sent me a the link to the slideshow. Thanks, Kurt!

I now have two physical versions of Lore, Vol. 1 for people to buy — a 6.85×10.25″ standard-sized version and a 5×7.5″ manga-sized version.

Click the images below to visit the IndyPlanet store.

Standard-sized edition

Manga-sized edition

I love reading. As a kid, I spent hours at the library. Then I started earning money and collecting books of my own. Over the years, that added up to a lot of books — too many for an apartment.

I’m in the middle of pruning my overgrown book collection. So far, so good. The first books to get “voted off the island” were:

• Duplicate copies
• Japanese-language versions of books I had since bought in English-format
• Books available in electronic format, like the Sony Reader, PDF, or web
• Books available through the Burbank or Los Angeles libraries

I did not want to dump these troubles on my local library. I once read that if a library cannot use or sell a donated book, it throws the book away. I wanted to make sure my books found new homes and new readers.

Several books went to Powell’s Books in exchange for store credit. Powell’s Books paid for the cost of Media Mail shipping. All I had to do was provide the box in which to ship the books.

However, some books I could not sell to Powell’s. Either Powell’s did not want those specific titles, or a given book did not meet “Good” condition. I gave some books to Goodwill, but Goodwill only wants “child and adult novels.” Goodwill could accept my fiction books, but not my Japanese-language editions of Graphic-sha’s How to Draw Manga books.

Enter BookMooch, the online book-trading system. Books I could not sell to Powell’s or donate to Goodwill wound up on BookMooch. Three-quarters of the books I listed on BookMooch found homes almost immediately. I even found interested parties for the Japanese-language How to Draw Manga books, though no takers just yet for my Japanese-language 8Man manga.

Bit by bit, my book collection’s becoming more reasonable. I still have some ways to go, but I’m getting there.

Last year folks asked if I might offer a digest-sized version of the Lore trade paperback. If all goes well, I should have 5×7.5″ versions in time for the 2009 Motor City Comic Con. Its cover will look like this:

I will keep the 6.85×10.25″ trade paperback available alongside the smaller edition. I’m curious to see which one readers prefer at conventions.

In 2006, I bought a Motion Computing LE1600 TabletPC for drawing comics. I switched from ink and Bristol board to drawing in Manga Studio EX. Matt Feazell shot some footage of me using the system at SPX 2006:

Since then I have been asked many questions about this setup, especially as the price of used LE1600 tablets continues to fall. Here’s some thoughts for those who buy LE1600 systems:

• Don’t store the Motion Computing stylus in the built-in holster until the computer has fully cooled. Otherwise, the rubber grip could expand, loosen and fall off the pen body. Motion Computing fixed this issue in early 2007, but a used LE1600 might ship with the older stylus.
• Install TabTipTamer for super-fast response when drawing.
• Consider purchasing and installing a WriteShield for a paperlike drawing surface.
• If the USB ports ever start “failing,” disable power management on the USB hubs in Windows XP.
• Once or twice a month, the screen blanks out, displaying only solid white or black. To deal with this inconvenience, I have the power switch assigned to “Hibernate” mode in the Motion Dashboard. Whenever the screen blanks out, I pull the LE1600 power switch and wait for the computer to store its present state to the hard drive and turn off the power. I then count to three and pull the power switch again to turn on the computer and bring it out of “Hibernate” mode. The computer picks up where it left off, with no work lost.
• Make sure the Wacom Penabled driver is installed so that non-TabletPC applications can “see” the pressure sensitivity.
• A Targus Podium Coolpad protects your lap and props up the LE1600 at a comfy angle. Of all the LE1600 accessories I own, I get the most questions about the Coolpad.

At the time of this writing, I’ve drawn three comics, various sketches and a trade paperback cover on my LE1600. It’s a great little machine.

Ka-Blam offers top-flight print-on-demand services for comics and trade paperbacks. I am pleased with their print quality on my Lore trade paperbacks — great contrast with rich black ink on bright white paper, good cover stock, vibrant color printing, and great binding.

The perceived resolution also looks much, much higher than the true 300dpi of the images. At a reading distance, each page looks like a 600 or 1200dpi print, even though the images are only 300dpi.

This higher perceived resolution is made possible by two things: antialiasing and Ka-Blam’s ability to print insanely fine grayscale tones.

I’ll explain the easier one first. Page 4 of the Ka-Blam sampler (a sample page from Sara Turner’s The Search for Lennox) and the very first “puzzle piece” page of Lore, Vol. 1 demonstrate Ka-Blam’s supremely fine grayscale tones. Ka-Blam may request 300dpi originals, but they use a machine capable of far higher resolutions than 300dpi, and they lavish this high resolution on the grayscale tones.

In short, each pixel element on a 300dpi image is made up of even finer dots when printed through Ka-Blam.

So, an artist can get greater perceived resolution out of a Ka-Blam print if he uses antialiasing, a technique normally reserved for graphics displayed on low-resolution displays like televisions and computer screens:

The Sphinx on the left uses no antialiasing. Only black and white pixels define the image. The “staircase” look of the diagonal lines is called “aliasing.” The Sphinx on the right uses antialiasing. Black, white, and 254 levels of gray pixels inbetween define this image. The gray pixels smooth the appearance of the image.

Normally, high-resolution aliased images are used in print. This is because the printer uses only black ink on white paper, so images are best defined with only black and white pixels. A gray pixel would get translated into black-and-white pixels, and at high resolutions, the printer normally runs out of pixels. This risks making a high-resolution antialiased image look “fuzzy” when printed.

However, Ka-Blam’s printers work at resolutions so much higher than 300dpi that, contrary to conventional printing wisdom, an antialiased image can look better. When confronted with a gray pixel on a 300dpi image, a Ka-Blam machine does not run out of resolution to define the gray pixel. The resulting tone will look fuzzy when examined closely with a magnifying glass, but it will still look smoother than a 300dpi image that uses only black and white pixels.

So…an antialiased image can work best for Ka-Blam reproduction. At SPX last weekend, most people could tell the difference between an aliased and antialiased 300dpi image on a Ka-Blam printer. Some could not. For those who want to create antialiased images of their work, though, the following tutorial is for you.

STEP 1: Start with a high-resolution original.

I’m not going to discuss scanning techniques here. That’s a whole tutorial in and of itself. Just start with a 600dpi or 1200dpi original that prints perfectly on a 600dpi or 1200dpi laser printer.

STEP 2: Convert the image to “Grayscale” in an image editor

An antialiased image needs grayscale pixels. If you start with a 1-bit “Bitmap” image that’s defined only with black and white pixels, some image editing programs will not be able to antialias the image when they reduce the size. If the image is already in “Grayscale” or “RGB” mode, this step is not necessary.

This step is also not necessary if you use the Irfanview freeware program to resize your images to 300dpi. IrfanView converts bitmap images to grayscale and resamples the image while scaling in one step. An image editor like Photoshop, however, requires that the user first convert a bitmap image to grayscale for antialiasing while scaling. In Adobe Photoshop, you’ll find it under “Image->Mode->Grayscale.”

STEP 3: Resize the image

Again — if you’re using IrfanView, skip step 2.

1. In IrfanView, go to “Image->Resize/Resample.”
2. Activate “Preserve aspect ratio” and set the DPI to 300.
3. Under “Size method,” choose “Resample (better quality)” and leave it at its default “Lanczos” filter.
4. Then define the size. If you’re starting from a 600dpi image, set the new size to 50%. If you’re starting from a 1200dpi image, set the new size to 25%. You’ll find the size definition under “Set new size as percentage of original.”
5. In the upper-left hand corner, confirm that the “New size” is smaller than the “Current size.” If not, you might have to enter the percentage value again.
6. Then hit “OK” to create a 300dpi, antialiased version of your original image.
7. Go to “File->Save As” to save this image out under a different filename. That way, you can return to your higher-resolution original in case anything goes wrong.

In Photoshop, follow Step 2 and convert your image to “Grayscale” mode. Then…

1. Open up “Image->Image Size”
2. Make sure “Resample Image” is activated, and leave it at its default of “Bicubic.”
3. In the “Resolution” box, type in “300.”
4. Click “OK” to create a 300dpi antialiased version of the high-resolution original.
5. Use “File->Save As” to save out this 300dpi version under a different filename from the original.

Both Photoshop and Irfanview give you a choice of antialiasing filters. In Photoshop, the “Bicubic” filter works fine for antialiasing comics art. In Irfanview, I have not seen much difference between the filters when reducing the size of black-and-white artwork, so I leave it at its default of “Lanczos.” Now that you know the above steps, consider experimenting to see what filters you like best.

NOTE for Manga Studio users

Folks using Manga Studio for their comics don’t need the above steps to generate antialiased 300dpi images for Ka-Blam. If they’re drawing at 600 or 1200dpi in Manga Studio, all they need to do is export the results at 300dpi in “RGB” mode for antialiased 300dpi images of their work. Lore, Vol. 1 was exported at 300dpi in “RGB” mode out of a 1200dpi Manga Studio EX 3.0 project.

Happy Antialiasing!

Robots, Vampires and Catholic High School!

Dragona Lore Smith tries to keep his secret. He also tries to keep his friends.

As he makes one small mistake after another, his world starts to unravel.

Folks looking for the first eight issues of Lore in one tidy electronic package can now purchase one from DriveThruComics in watermarked PDF format. This 193-page digital edition presents Lore at 150dpi — nearly twice the resolution of the free web comic.

Those interested can instantly download the 37.88 MB file for just $5.99.