Hey ThoughtScape Comics gang!
Just one month until we launch! The goal: ThoughtScape Comics #2 and #3 (and #1 if you’re new) into your hands or onto your hard drives in 2023!
Quick Bytes!
1. Kickstarter follower count, again
We’re approaching 130 followers on the TSC Kickstarter pre-launch page! If you haven’t yet headed over and clicked the NOTIFY button, go smash that thing and help us reach that number ASAP. If you have already clicked the button, consider encouraging your friends and followers to go do it as well.
2. Are you a creator launching a sci-fi or horror Kickstarter in January?
Hit me up if you’re interested in doing any co-promotion.
3. A NEW TEASER TRAILER!
This one was a lot of fun to put together. Check it out, and if you dig it, consider sharing it with your sci-fi and comic loving friends.
4. More cool sci-fi comics coming to Kickstarter!
Go hit the Notify button on Unlimited Udo, a very cool-looking sci-fi one-shot coming soon from Adriano Ariganello!
5. Follow ThoughtScape Comics on all the platforms
ThoughtScape is everywhere. Well, not everywhere, because with the Twitter madness the last couple weeks it’s a struggle to keep up with all the emerging channels. But here’s the list of where you can find us (see last week’s newsletter for the breakdown of how updates will work during the campaign.)
Tumblr: tumblr.com/thoughtscapecomics
Facebook: facebook.com/thoughtscapecomics/
Instagram: instagram.com/thoughtscape_comics/ and instagram.com/mattmlpdx/
Twitter: twitter.com/thoughtscapecom and twitter.com/mattmlpdx
Discord (link will expire, feel free to ping me in the comments for a fresh invite): https://discord.com/invite/QvWU2Aab
And speaking of Discord…
6. TSC Kickstarter campaign page preview coming soon to the Discord server!
Want a sneak peek at the ThoughtScape Comics #1-#3 Kickstarter campaign page? Hop on Discord and you’ll soon see a link to check it out.
Add-On Reward Spotlight: Commissions from Dave Law!
We’ve got some killer add-on rewards planned for the upcoming TSC campaign, including COMMISSIONS FROM DAVE! I’m so glad to be able to offer these and help up to ten folks get some original Dave artwork into their lives! Here are the details…
You’ll be able to select and add this ADD-ON REWARD to your pledge after selecting your initial pledge level (provided you select a physical reward tier)… if there are any slots left, of course.
Making ThoughtScape: Lettering (Part Two)
So, last time I talked about my first two lettering jobs on A Spy Without A Face and The Griever, and how on my next outing I wanted to get a little more loose with things. Enter Playing Opossum, my collaboration with wonderful artist (and MICE grant winner) Desolina Fletcher. Just in case somehow your eyeballs haven’t yet seen it, here’s Desolina’s amazing cover image for the story.
This whole story turned out wonderfully, very much in the “A Peanuts Nightmare”-vibe Desolina and I discussed at the outset of the project, and exceeding even my super-high hopes based on the many wonderful images like these below that had convinced me to reach out to her in the first place (see more on Desolina’s website)…
As you can see, the art in Playing Opossum will a very different feel from Spy or Griever, and I felt like the lettering should speak to that.
Getting down to work, I knew I wasn’t stoked with the tools that I had used before. Pretty much just a trackpad and Illustrator for Spy, and the old Huion tablet plus Illustrator for The Griever. My wife and I had, though, recently gifted our teenager an iPad, and I realized there was probably a way to do at least a chunk of the lettering work, most importantly the balloons, working/drawing directly on the art using that.
Lucky for me, a recent-ish Illustrator-for-the-iPad update had resolved a key lettering issue: being able to add non-Adobe fonts to Creative Cloud so they can be accessed on the iPad. So, now, I thought, I was ready to “borrow” my child’s iPad and take this lettering plan/setup for a test drive.
But it turned out that I was getting a bit ahead of myself. As with most things Adobe, it’s never exactly simple or easy to get up and running (though thankfully unlike many things Adobe, this wasn’t crazy expensive, as you’re able to use your existing CC account for the iPad app… sort of surprising they didn’t think this was another place to gouge their lifelong customers).
First, there was connecting the accounts, no big deal. Second, everything you want to work with needs to be saved to Creative Cloud. That includes the .ai files I was actually going to do the work in, the source art files placed in those .ai files, the fonts, etc.
So, I saved the final art for each page to the cloud, placed those freshly saved versions into an .ai file, dropped in a bunch of my dialog (already in the selected font, Spinner Rack Pro from Blambot), loaded that font into Creative Cloud, and then went to pull things up on the iPad.
I could open and see everything, and started to work on drawing some shapes and then… it quickly became impossible to manage all the layers, and the art images were failing to load and/or to look good/high-resolution, and something was not right… because, like a dummy, I’d done all this in a single .ai file and it was just too much for the app to handle or for me to easily navigate. Groan.
I got back on my desktop and broke the 14-page story into four chunks, and instead of using multiple layers for each of the pages and their elements, I just put each page on a separate artboard. So now I’ve got all art on a layer, all balloons on a layer, and all text on a layer, across four artboards. Much more manageable this way, as one of the harder things for me to get used to, it seems, is dealing with layer visibility, toggling etc. in the AI’s iPad UI.
Anyway, this all worked much better, and the art images were looking full resolution, and I got to work…
How’s it going? Way more rewarding and fluid than using the external, visually disconnected tablet, and way easier to trace the masters for learning purposes. Note that in this shot I’ve got a mix of the basic ovals I made on my desktop machine along with some of the much less perfect, hand-drawn balloons I drew and am ultimately aiming for. Side note: literally tracing Peanuts word balloon tails is a trip. It’s incredibly instructive to dissect a visual style that you’ve been looking at since you were about two years old: What Shultz cares about doing consistently, what he doesn’t… super interesting stuff.
Alright, that’s enough for now. Next time, a finished page of Playing Opossum!
Until next time!
Matt