Who knew that pressing shift in photoshop makes you draw a straight line..? NOT me, that’s for sure! XD
Well, needless to say, a simple keystroke made it so I don’t have to freehand city-scapes (as much) and that I don’t have to rely solely on the pen tool. I’ve been experimenting a lot with the last few pages (new method to color palette, shading, and drawing cities) so I hope these changes are moving the comic in a better direction.
I actually think I spend way more time on backgrounds than I do on characters now, which is crazy when I think about how I used to avoid drawing them entirely.
-Holly.
Well, personally, I like the changes. The new colors serve your drawing very well. And it sort of makes sense that, as you get more proficient with drawing characters, you start putting relatively more time into the backgrounds…
Eagerly waiting for the next update!
the first panel here is genius! reminds me of The Fifth Element or Doctor Who’s New Earth or Caprica, a futuristic alien city with flying cars. really well done, holly!
holding down shift in many art programs, simple and complex, makes things straighter, or lined up. a lot of crop/resize tools keep the ratio when you’re holding down shift, even MS paint draws a square when you hold down shift on the rectangle tool.
Bug report: While the site looks good in Firefox, WinVistaUltimate, the layout is really FUBAR under IE9, Win7. You need to look at your CSS. The art however, is looking very nice
Hard to publish a comment….about a 30 second wait after selecting an entry for IE9/Vista32, I hope this is not a clever ruse by Drew to slow my posts
Read the manual !!! Silly artist, no wonder your wrist hurt trying to freehand straight lines. BTW thanks for the update, I like your evolving use of colors.
@Slamlander: To be honest, I have no real idea what’s wrong. I was thinking it was the double margin bug, but none of the fixes I’ve found seem to work for me. Internet explorer has been a real headache, especially seeing as I can’t really preview it properly (I’m on a mac).
My CSS also checks out as 100% valid at this website: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ so there doesn’t seem to be anything funky going on in the stylesheet.
I’m pulling my hair out trying to fix this, wordpress does not seem to respond well to any kind of customization… I know it’s a problem with the floats, but once again, no clue how to fix it. I’m going to try to fix it, but at this point, it looks as if I’ll have to scrap this layout and try again…
For the meantime, is it running well on other browsers? I can see for myself that everything looks fine in firefox, chrome, and safari.
@Holly & Slamlander:
Mine shows up perfect on Firefox/Win7HP…
I think I figured out what the problem is, basically I’m using an older version of comicpress, and it really does not seem to respond well to customization.
I managed to replicate this layout offline (on a local server) with the new version, which works perfectly on all browsers, but my comic pages don’t show up as posts… which is apparently a really common problem with the newest version of comicpress, and there is no real way to fix it (without losing my mind lol).
Luckily, I found a backup of my old wordpress layout, which works fine on all browsers, so I’m just going to work with that look, and try and make it all snazzy and new. Stay tuned, and be warned, this site is going to be doing some funky things today while I fix things up.
Thanks, the look and feel is okay now. I’d offer to help more but I have three servers down and a laptop making loud fan bearing noises. Yes. I self-host.
Looks awesome in Chrome on my Mac. (For you Mac haters, I prefer the Mac, but I use both Mac and PC, so PLEASE don’t get on me for that.) I don’t mean to say the old way wasn’t great, but I love the changes to your style as well, Holly. I’m excited to see where you’re gonna take this both in the story, and in your art.
And IMHO, it’s the background that give any picture that feeling of “reality” or being finished, so I think it’s a good thing you’re spending a bit more time making the backgrounds better.