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Too many bots – I need your help

Too Many Bots!
Too Many Bots!

I need your help. This morning I sat down and jammed out a bunch of different bot silhoettes as the first step in designing the first bot that shows up in Petra’s Call.

The bot is going to be about 8 feet tall, expect it to kick a lot of ass and take very few names along the way.

There are things in each design that I like, so before fleshing out a design, I have decided to put it to a vote. Choose your favorite design (or two) and vote in the comments below.

It would be awesome if you could give me your favorite elements of the design too, so that if you like the big chunky fingers, I don’t change them in next step.

ex: “Dude – E is awesome. He’s got a big knife for an arm! Slice and dice baby!” (or, you know… something like that…)

Voting ends on Friday Sept 4th. Thanks in advance – much appreciated!

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New Message Board up

Hi Everyone,

I wasn’t entirely happy with the old message board set up – mainly, I had to link to the message boards separately and in order to keep everything in sync, I needed to turn off comments on the actual blog posts.

Enter BB-Press. Now you can use one login to both comment and chat on the forums. Every blog post automatically gets a forum post, and anything you post on comments is synced up with the forum (and visa-versa) It’s actually very, very cool. (and only moderately difficult to set up)

I am sorry, but anyone who had an account with the old Ansible will have to create a new account – but, unless the Internet breaks, this should be the last major switcheroo.

If you want to check out the new message boards, click on Forums up at the top of the page, or go here.

Please let me know if you have any problems.

Thanks!
Shane

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Dropping down to updates every 2 weeks

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Petra’s Call is going to be dropping down to updates every 2 weeks.

Writing, drawing, coloring and ‘flashing up’ each episode takes me 15-20 hours, and even with waking up every morning at 5AM (weekends too!) I can barely get them done. Factor in travel for work and it’s a slippery slope. A 1 week schedule also doesn’t leave a lot of time for the experimentation side of Petra’s Call and NRD.

Hopefully this change will improve the quality of the art, better features (the long awaited and much requested ‘jump to episode’ feature) and more experimentations in the whole experience, but it means that Petra’s Adventures will only be broadcast every other week.

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Episode 7 Commentary: Backgrounds on the Quick and Dirty

I’ve been getting a lot of nice feedback on the backgrounds in Petra’s Call, so I wanted to do a tutorial on how I do them in Photoshop.

complete-image-with-Kodiak

A BIG part of my processes for Petra’s Call is speed. Every step needs to be fast. I have about 14 hours a week to write, draw, color and “Flash-up” each episode, which is roughly equal to 2-3 comic pages.

This is the process for doing the mountains, but the same principals apply for the trees, mid-ground and foreground and can also be applied to interiors.
Continue reading “Episode 7 Commentary: Backgrounds on the Quick and Dirty”