Back!

Good news is that I had my last exam yesterday and now I have finished all my requirements for my graduate diploma.
I am a little rusty on the drawing front, it may take a few weeks of consistent practice for it to feel normal again. This really emphasizes the importance of drawing every day to me.
You can expect to see some new comics next week.

Kindle or iPhone

I am still interested in formatting comics for portable digital devices. Two of the main avenues that I can see are the iPhone and the Kindle. For some reason I am more attracted to the Kindle, despite the controversy surrounding them and DRM issues. Perhaps it is because it has a larger screen than the iPod and uses the ePaper technology that is actually similar to paper than a computer screen.

This has had new found relevance now that Amazon has released an international version of the Kindle which you can get sent to Australia and download content to in Australia, and now hoave the larger Kindle DX.

I found this article that discusses difficulty getting comic material to look good on the Kindle, but something tells me they are talking about detailed large scale colour comics, and I wonder how smaller scale and simpler black and white art of the independent and self published work would go. Surely work saved as a hi-res bitmap PDF would look crisp.

Say what you like about digital versus print, it does not change that new possibilities to distribute your work are there and increasing daily. Put another way, you can still collect vinyl and own an iPod. There are lots of comics I would love to read but not necessarily own in hardcopy.

The other thing that I find exciting about eReaders is the ability to charge for content (It sounds crass but financial compensation helps keep the comics coming out)
Try charging for content on the web and you will see your readers turn in the other direction. I think this is due to that looking at content on the web is like looking through a spyglass. You pay to look through this spyglass by buying a computer and paying for an internet connection but you are not necessarily retaining content, and even if you did there no real way to easily sort and reread it. Where as when you have an iPod or Kindle the content actually gets download to your device, you retain it and can reread it at your own convenience.

There is one guy that sells an eBook (actually two) on how to format for the kindle. Although I am sure you could figure out the details without buying his book, as he appears to be someone that has done his research and condensed it into an eBook.

If I can come up with a straightforward solution on how to format for Kindle (or other eBook readers for that matter) I will post it here in the coming weeks. In the meantime what are your thoughts? Perhaps it is too early to really invest in todays eReaders, you read about some people who are waiting for eInk to be made in colour or with touch screen capabilties.

So here are some technical specs of the Kindle
Screen size: 6" (15 cm) diagonal E Ink® electronic paper display, 600 x 800 pixel resolution
Screen resolution: 167 ppi,
Greyscale range: 16-level gray scale.
File types: Kindle (AZW), TXT, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; PDF, HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion.

Synesthesia

I watched a video on synesthesia the other day (care of bOINGbOING) I have seen another documentary on it years ago which was longer and more informative. The synesthesia described in this video though seemed to be a lot simpler than the previous documentary I watched. This recent video said that you have synesthesia when you associate letters or numbers with colours, which I just thought was normal. I have particularity strong associations with the days of the week which I thought I would share here,

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

These are approximations of the colours I associate with certain days. I could probably fine tune it if I was to use the colour picker in Photoshop.

A must watch

Yellow Cake from Nick Cross on Vimeo.

Preview of my next comic

Here is a sample page from the comic I hope to put out by the end of this year. I have been working with Mark Selan or Sureshot comics in editing the overall story. Early on in the story of the comic some elements just did not flow right. I was happy with how they were drawn for the most part although a lot of the text had to be rewritten to flow better.

I devised a solution for editing the work without having to redraw the whole thing again. I decided to use the method of printing the artwork in blue line (I erased the content of panels I was redrawing completely before printing) and then re-lettering where needed. I took out some redundant panels and tried to add new panels that gave more flow to the storyline. I could not help myself redraw my head in some of the panels as my style had changed slightly and I wanted the character to remain more consistent.

Not fun

This has been happening to me more than I would like lately. I put it down to not drawing enough and not having enough down time.

I have been studying web 2.0 in depth this past week, now I feel all self conscious blogging, how does this blog thing work again?

Albury Art instalation

This past weekend I was invited to the Albury Art gallery to paint an installation for a portrait exhibition they are having.

We all drove up on Saturday morning. We had a few stops on the way and almost run out of petrol on the Hume highway at one point. We made it there in the late afternoon just in time to have a quick look at the space to get mentally prepared for the next day. I also had some time to sit down on the main street of Albury and sketch some of the locals that afternoon. I t was fairly quiet as the Australian football grand final was on at the same time. I had originally drawn a picture of an imaginary strange family for the gallery wall but changed my mind at the last minute and decided to use the sketches of people from Albury.

Here is a snippet of the sketch I did for the wall painting.

I started early on Sunday morning. It took around an hour to get set up, but the painting overall took around five hours. People came in and out of the gallery while I was painting the piece and I got more than one comment about it being naughty to draw on the wall.

I do not have any photos of the finished piece as yet, but I will post them when I do get them.
If you are going to be in Albury swing past and check it out.

HATCHED 07 National Graduate Show, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, photo by Eva Fernandez.

I just received images from an exhibition in 2007 that I had work in. For those of you keeping score at home this is the exhibition that was referred to in the last 7 Pages digest. I even had the drawing of how the installation would look in the comic. It only recently ocurred to me to ask for these images after I had to give an artist talk and I found I did not have many images of exhibitions, workshops and such.