Consider this a sequel, of sorts, to a sketch I did a while back. Another quickie; this time I even vectorised the sketch lines, and did it all in inkscape. Gives the blacks a nice rough, cheap old comic print look to them, which I like.
Argh, I have no idea what to do tomorrow, I have a whole calendar to illustrate in less than a week, and I just remembered that November starts tomorrow and I should start writing!
Happy Halloween, everybody.
V
Well, folks, less than 24 hours to go before Comic Konga! begins! I hope you’re excited and if you’re participating, I hope you’ve got a bunch of ideas (or better yet, finished comics) already! Truth be told I haven’t begun work on my finished comics yet. I do have a few of the ideas chalked out and I know what tomorrow’s comic will be… now I just have to do it!
In case you feel so inclined to announce your Comic Konga! participation on your blogs, I’ve provided a couple of versions of the logo for you to use:
The one on the left is a transparent background PNG, 240×240. On the right is a GIF of the same dimensions with a white background. Feel free to right click and ‘Save as…’ (or your browser’s equivalent) and put it up in your site’s sidebar or into your Comic Konga! posts. Feel free to resample or resize it to fit your blog (I kept it large so that it would shrink down well).
Comic Konga! Logo (Plain SVG version)
If you like, I’ve provided a plain SVG version of the logo. You can use Inkscape to view it, but I think even other programs like new versions of Adobe Illustrator support this vector file standard. With the vector version you can export the image at higher (or lower) resolutions, or even put the logo into the comics themselves.
In case there were any doubts, you can begin to post your comics whenever Monday is in your timezone. Just putup one every day until Friday. I’ll also be collecting links to all the participants’s daily entries the next day(so Monday’s comic will be collected on Tuesday afternoon GMT), and of course there will be a final list of links after Comic Konga concludes on Friday, 02 November.
I encourage all of you to check out the other entries; to comment on, link to and pick your favourites. Mostly, don’t be disheartedned if you haven’t begun… there’s still a while to go and a great comic doesn’t need to worked on forever.
Good luck!
Like most truly great ideas, this comic started off as idle chit-chat over the phone. A few months ago a friend and I were talking about the people who park on the sidewalk at the mall even though there’s plenty of parking nearby, and that, given the option, they would take their Range Rovers inside the mall itself and drive around the aisles of the Hypermarket. We talked about the rising number of five-to-ten year olds we see being carted around in prams (or strollers as some call them), and how we were never considered so delicate by our parents and had to walk around just like them (to no ill effects, I might add). My gears started turning, of course, considering the future of Human Laziness, and thus the idea of giant robot baby carriers for adults was born.
We’ve already seen people come up with personal transport; the Segway is probably the most famous and visible — indeed, one mall here in Dubai uses them to transport security guards (the same mall also has a golf-cart shuttle service to take people along its length). Recently at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, a couple of personal transport concepts (from Suzuki and Toyota) rekindled my robot transport idea, and figured it would make a good comic.
I didn’t really decide on a page count for this, figuring that perhaps like last time it would only take two pages. Indeed, had I stuck solely to the robots it may have been, but I think the other stuff about the consequences of Human Laziness are worth the extra page. I wondered if it might come out to two-and-half pages or some odd amount, but luck was on my side and it comes in at three pages even (of 8 panels each).
This time when pencilling the comic I put in more shading in the pencils themselves, but it’s still rough. I coloured it in inkscape but integrated those colours with the pencils in the GIMP (instead of vector-tracing the pencils or inking them seperately). I did it on the new laptop, mostly to see how the colours translate across monitors. On my net computer’s wonky monitor it looks very dark and some of the text isn’t well defined. It looked fine on the laptop which, I assume, is closer to most people’s experience, but if any of it doesn’t look right to you please tell via a comment below.
There are a couple more comic ideas floating around my head of a similar nature (i.e. with ‘me’ narrating) but I don’t know when that will be done. It depends on how fired up I am about them or if, like with this one, something shows up (the Tokyo Auto Show concepts) to remind me of it.
V
After months of slacking off, I finally got round to doing something I should have done way back in March: I’ve redesigned the site’s look!
When I switched over to Drupal I used the Minnelli template, a default template that comes with the program. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very nice and functional template, but being a graphic designer and using a standard template on my own site is a bit… well, shameful.
It took me a few hours yesterday to come up with a design that’s been more or less stewing in my brain for ages. It took the better part of the last 24… well, 32 hours for me and Samir — well, mostly Samir — to convert it from a graphic in Inkscape to a working HTML and CSS template.
This is the first time I’ve worked with the guts of Drupal, and it’s been an illuminating experience. In my previous CMS, Pivot, a lot of the functions were handled in the backend’s configuration, which meant that the template was more of a ‘wallpaper’ and it would take me about a day after it was ready to get all the right settings done in Pivot admin to make it look like what I wanted. Drupal is far less, um, guided and that is really it’s strength. You can pretty-much do anything with this CMS if you know enough PHP programming (I do not). You can probably run an entire small country using Drupal.
Unlike most people, as a old school techie I warm to complex and highly tinker-friendly things like this. In order to get the words ‘read more’ and ‘2 comments’ to work right and reposition them in the right place, we’ve had to put in a dozen or so lines of PHP code, most of which sounded like Greek at first, but have now started to make some kind of sense.
The final result is a design that is 99.99% exactly like the Inkscape mockup I made yesterday — usually in the conversion things don’t always look quite the same — and it’s certainly the tightest, most finished layout I’ve done so far.
I like it — I like it a lot, actually — and it’s a lot more functional than the older one. Post categories, for instance, have been moved up to under the title of each post, and no longer jostle for space with the ‘read more’ and ‘comments links like they used to (Amit, you should find it easier to read. When a post was under several categories that area would get really messed up).
Please note that since I’m not an idiot I don’t use Internet Explorer, and this design may not show up correctly in IE. It has been tested in Firefox and is rendered correctly in Mozilla browsers. I know that in IE6 the Journal graphic on top doesn’t show up well; it may be better in a newer version, but I figure that jumping through hoops (and trust me when I say it’s like pulling teeth) to get something to work there is only encouraging Microsoft to continue to make crappy non-compliant browsers.
So there.
There are now two sidebars while still retaining the same width on the main content, so now you don’t have to scroll halfway down the page to see the recent comments (but you all subscribe to the Comments RSS feed anyway, don’t you? Hmm?). I feel it’s a better use of the space, and it allows me to have more important things like that picture of me giving you a big, loving smooch on every page.
*mwah*
Believe it or not, this is only the third custom template I’ve ever done for one of my own sites. I’ve actually used more templates by others than my own! Some of you may recognise these:
This design was on the old iLevel page, my first non-blogger blog. It came in around 6 months into my using that site which ran Greymatter. I did this design on vacation in India on a 166Mhz Pentium 1 laptop with a wonky power cord, uploaded over a 56K connection. It was my first experience with CSS and was great! I still love this layout and may end up reworking it as a standalone free template for other people to download and use someday. You can even read all the old content from that time in the ilevel.prohosting section of the journal (there are some nice photos there. If you’ll recall, iLevel was almost exclusively a photoblog).
This was the template I used on my last free host, and indeed it was the template that the site was running until March 2007. I was using Pivot as the CMS for a year or so — and used a slightly personalised version of the popular Kubrick template — before designing this one (hmm, spotting a trend here). While I like it I’m not really in love with it anymore; it doesn’t quite reflect the site. Again, it might return someday as its own thing.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t just use some of those old looks (I don’t think they’ve gotten old or outdated) it’s because the site as it is now would not be best suited by those templates. The look of a webpage is a very important thing, and it should complement the content and the personality of the author in order for the site to grow. allVishal.com is not iLevel, nor is it the site that it was a year ago. Sure, the journal (that used to be the blog) has all the old content for archival purposes, and it will continue to have photos and sketches and strange musings, but a website is more than just a blog for me, and I want to explore all of those possibilities. This new layout will be a better canvas on which to do that.
I’m actually one of those old crones who remembers a time before blogs, when we just had websites, and believe it or not those were wonderful things in their own right. I love the blog medium, but to solely focus on it and forget everything else the internet and the HTML page is capable of is like abandoning books because magazines and newspapers have been invented (I stole this analogy from my brother, amongst several other things).
Anyway, I hope you like this new layout (tell me if there are any bugs!) and now that I’ve decided on a visual look I can get to work on the rest of the site’s content!
V
The other day I finally bothered to buy an optical mouse again. The old one had gone wonky and had been replaced, for a few months, with a ball one. While installing it I suddenly realised that the little graphics tablet attached to my work computer — hidden beneath a pile of well-intentioned clutter — was indeed working. Samir had fixed whatever byzantine driver issues were afflicting it, and in typical Samir fashion had now forgotten quite how he did it and when it had happened (btw, have you checked out his spiffy new blog and site?). With another hour to go before The Simpsons, I decided to give it and the new mouse a whirl.
Firing up the GIMP I loaded up a random picture from my vast collection of junk and played around with various unfamiliar filters and script-fu widgets. One I did have some familiarity with but hadn’t used in years is called iWarp, and is sort of like the liquify tool in Photoshop, or like that old turn-of-the-century tech show favourite, Kai’s Power Goo. It allows you to grow, shrink, warp and shift around various parts of the image, and it’s therefore very useful in creating anime-style characters. That’s what I did to the celebrity picture that formed the base of this. The result looks almost nothing like the original.
From there I took it into Inkscape and used the bitmap tracer to turn it into vector art, then fiddled around with the colours, added in details and shapes to make it more graphic and less like a traced picture. Finally, a background and a random caption (from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, of course). The oversized text in the background is done with a stylus using Inkscape’s calligraphy tool. The word balloon is a standard union boolean of an ellipse and a triangle.
Overall, only twenty minutes of work, which by my standards is a blink of an eye (you all know how many months I can spend abandoning… um, finishing work).
I should do these quickies more often. Hope you like it (and I hope you actually clicked on the image to see the whole, wallpaper-sized thing 😛
V
