Paper

I've always had this weird creative roadblock related to paper size and art format.

I love seeing comics that use the American standard 8.5x11 format well. It's the size of paper we were most likely to have lying around the house, so it's got a nice stripped-down vibe to it. A no-frills, can-do kind of paper. Don't gimme no gimmicks, I ain't fancy, just get a sheet of paper and start drawing!

But also... a standard pack of white 8.5x11 paper is really shitty to do any finished art on. A standard sheet is about 75 GSM (25 or 27 Lbs). That's just typing paper. Very thin and fragile. A few too many erases and you've got shredded paper. Plus it takes ink like a whining child.

My preference is for something like a 270 GSM (100 Lbs) bristol board, smooth. I can live with cardstock, which is 225 GSM (80 Lbs), but it tends to be less smooth. I am a smooth paper guy, probably because I've always been mostly into pen/brush and ink, not so much into the graphite or paints.

One of my favorite papers is Borden & Riley Paris Paper for Pens, an ultra-smooth, ultra-bright white paper. It's not thick like bristol, but is durable and dense. It's designed to take ink very crisply, without any bleeding. And it does the job. But if you work wet, you might not like this paper. It'll buckle with heavy applications of wet media. If you're using a lot of pens, like Microns or brush pens, it's the bee's knees.

Standard comic compared to 8.5x11

So anyway... I am a bit obsessed with format. I need to know before I go into a comic book project exactly how I'm going to print it. Because that shit matters. If I just start drawing on an 11x14 pad, for example, and I take advantage of the whole page, then I've established a comic book format of the American standard magazine size. It'll convert to an 8.5x11 book or perhaps a European comic format, like Heavy Metal or Tin Tin.

But American comic books are typically 6.625 x 10.25... they are taller and skinnier than 8.5x11. Your 11x14 comic page, when shrunk down to fit a standard comic book, will have a huge area of white space above and below the comic... much more than you probably intended. To combat that, if you are going to print in standard size, you need to have larger margins on the sides. Use as much of the page as possible on the top and bottom, but you need to squeeze up your sides to fit that comic format. When working on 11x14, for example, you might go with a live area of 8.4x13.

Ok... see I'm down in the weeds here. I just wanted to express my thoughts about paper size and format.

Right at the moment I'm staring at a pack of 11x17 smooth bristol. Very nice. And 11x17 is a fairly standard size to work on for classic comic book making. At least that's what I've been told many times. I have used it and it's great, but it's bigger than I'm used to and it takes longer to finish a page. When I work on comics I like to feel the vibe quickly and move fast, cranking out pages as much as I can because I know that iron is going to cool down and be less workable. I try to strike while it is hot.

Then I start thinking about paper and... oh boy.

Hey, FYI... most of the pages of Pan-Gea were drawn on that Borden & Riley paper I mentioned above. I bought pads of 11x14, then cut them in half! So each page of Pan-Gea actually only measures 7x11. They fit very neatly into that standard American comic book format. But they are drawn basically 1:1 ratio... and most comics guys will tell you that you need to draw larger than your printed final version. The shrinking of the art to fit the format helps clean up your lines and makes everything look tighter.

And it's true. But also, it's a bit of bullshit. It's only good advice if that is the effect you are going for. This is an art form, not a science. If you want to draw comics on little post it note and BLOW THEM UP to fit a comic page, that's your bag, man. Do your thing. Could look rad. I don't know.

Comics is a wide open medium for creating. You should do what you feel like doing.

This post... is an example of turning on the nozzle too high and trying to fill a small Dixie cup. You're welcome.

GOZR Rising (slowly)

As I said previously, I've been on a GOZR kick. This means I've been working on pages for the second book: GOZR Rising! As with the original, I'm keeping it organic. I make notes and list table contents in a spreadsheet where applicable, but mostly I'm drawing it on the canvas as it enters my head. Because in my head is where the gooz live. And, I'm told, they also live at some gaming tables. A fact that gives me comfort in the long, dark nights.

No schedule on this. It'll come as it does and eventually I'll have a book I can put out there and smile about while you all scratch your heads and say "Why the hell would anyone do a game THIS WAY??".

Layout Noodle

I come from a small press comics background, a DIY ethos. "Back in the day" we would draw our comics and then photocopy them, paste them (with glue) onto "flats", then photocopy the flats and collate and staple them into zines. It was a 100% manual process. I still have old yellowed flats in boxes in storage for comics I published in the mid 90s. (I need to do some house cleaning)

Fast forward to the digital age. In the 2000s I mostly published my stuff online. I did some print zines, such as Random Order Comics & Games, and I attended the Small Press and Comics Expo (SPACE) a few times to sell them. But I was mostly online, not in print.

In the early 2000s I experimented with digital layout. I played with Word, InDesign, and Dreamweaver. I used an early version of InDesign to layout my game The Questing Beast.

When I got back into RPG publishing in 2014 or so, I partnered with my friend Matt Hildebrand who has handled almost all of my layouts since then. I don't know what magic Matt uses but I don't question it. From the Umerican Survival Guide to Wormskin to virtually everything Goodman Games publishes, Matt's layout skills are on display everywhere.

The exception was with a few projects such as Black Pudding. That zine is laid out "traditionally" in the sense that I'm literally shoving raster images all over a canvas. I'm just doing it digitally rather than with photocopies. The layout process is manual. And fun.

Currently I'm in the mood to learn how to use modern layout tools again. I own Affinity Publisher and I've been playing around with it, getting my toes wet. I did an 8 page layout that is so damn ugly I won't show it to my worst enemies. I will burn it with fire. But it was instrumental in teaching me how to get started and some things to avoid... like stroke lines on inserted text boxes. Ugh.

Stay tuned for more of this riveting material. Next up I want to articulate my thoughts on the current trend of super high quality slick DIY RPG books vs. low key simple DIY RPG books.

Examine the Body I: Fade Out

Which is not to be confused with loot the corpse.

I've been looking back on old art. Specifically from 2008 because I just picked that year at random. Well sort of... I got my first graphics tablet in 2008 so it was a transitional year for my artistic life. And I fell into many of the traps and pitfalls that artists fall into when doing digital art. I made lots of mistakes.

I might post a few examples of where I think I went wrong and where I think I made something cool. These won't be highly technical because that's just not me. They might be a little self-deprecating, because that is just me.

2008 hottie elf with bad coloring job.

Drawing an Adventure for Black Pudding

I'm working on issue #6 of Black Pudding. In this issue, I'm doing an adventure based on a totally badass map created by Evlyn Moreau. Like the one I did in issue #2 from a map by Karl Stjernberg, I'm slamming this together on-the-fly. I like working this way. I like just shoving things around my canvas and seeing what fits. I can compose both visually and thematically and technically all at once. I can then go back and refine, moving things as needed, linking up adventure elements in ways that feel organic. It's such a creative and fun process. I'm thankful to have such good material to work from as Evlyn has provided!

Here's a WIP of the adventure, which is tentatively titled "Underground Down Below". You can see the gray border that lets me know the safe area where stuff should go so it doesn't get cut off in print. I have an overlay of lines to help align things, as needed. I'm still toying with certain elements, such as whether or not to include the key numbers next to the description since they are buried in some of the map snippets. Also, those random tables are just screenshots from the spreadsheet I have open where I'm creating them. Once I decide on the tables' contents I'll export them to a high res PDF, then import that into Photoshop and paste the 300 ppi tables into the adventure itself. I'm like a kid with toys!

Krita vs. PS

She approached the elder ibberlings cautiously...

A bit of doodling in Krita. I enjoy drawing with Krita quite a bit more than Photoshop, however there are certain shortcuts and features in my old PS7 that I miss dreadfully.

Krita doesn't have good macros (yet). One of the macros I wrote for PS7 simply expands a selection, fills it with the foreground color, then deselects it. This is a time saver when doing big black fills and prevents those annoying ghostly white lines showing the edges of your fill area (the expansion of the selection takes care of this).

There's really one giant, huge benefit to drawing in Krita over PS7. I can draw at any scale and the lines are nice and smooth. In PS7 I have to zoom in very close to get the lines smooth. If I draw from a distance, the lines are jagged and wobbly like I have a problem controlling my hand. But that isn't the case with Krita. And I really like that.

Black Pudding #6... and more

Now that I'm in the latter half of my Xmas vacation I finally got around to working on something. Specifically, I'm diggin hard into Black Pudding #6. Specifically, at this moment, the Meatshields segment.

This segment is always super fun for me. I never plan it, I just let shit emerge. I grab sketches and bits of art here and there, strip characters out, reuse, remix, and just let the chips fall where they may. I'm proud of this super goofy bullshit and I hope it shows.

Example... I just gave chewing weed and a spitune to a busty paladin. Because I can and I did. And it's a glorious feeling to be creatively unfettered. I'm not trying to win any awards or impress any particular people with this project. Black Pudding is just my zine. It is exactly the kind of shit that I would do if given the chance to just do some shit. Which is exactly what I'm doing.

Not that I don't care about quality or doing awesome things. I absolutely do want this book to be cool and impressive. Just as importantly, I want it to be useful. Because as much as I believe RPGs are an art form, I also fully acknowledge they are a hobby pastime... a game. And there are practical concerns at the gaming table. I try to give you a bit of a random shotgun blast of fun stuff you can pluck out and use as desired. Much of it does fit into a greater setting-specific context, for me, but I try not to stuff the pages with too much of that.

Later, at some point, I may collect, revise, and remix a lot of this content into a setting book or standalone game. But right now I'm happy to keep letting the muses guide me down random paths of old school roleplaying goodness.