Archive for January, 2010
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. I want to talk about the notion of a book on a shelf in a game store (and relatedly, in a book store), as well as how that ties into the math of pricepoints in RPG publishing.
This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden Files RPG. (Yes, we’re splitting it into two books. No, I don’t want to talk about that here. I’m talking about it enough other places already.) Our press release doesn’t talk about distribution; it says we’ll have it on sale through Indie Press Revolution (and therefore through retailers who get books from IPR), and we’ll have it on sale through our own web store.
Now, that’s not the whole picture, but it’s most of it. (We have a good relationship with UK-based distributor Esdevium, and we’ll likely continue to work that relationship for getting products over to the other side of the Atlantic.) The question, then, is why is that most of the picture? (i.e., why aren’t we diving at distributors aplenty and trying to get signed up?)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Daniel Solis' Blog
I think I've settled on a color palette for the rest of the illustrations. Fewer blacks, but include one "hot" spot of intense red to contrast wherever the blacks are. Everything else is auburn and orange, with sepia throughout. Once again, you can see the process in the video below.
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. Today, I bunt. I’ve got layout on my mind, in the sense that I need to get back to doing that, rather than blogging.
But it occurs to me that by this point, if you’re following this blog you know why you’re coming here.
Why is that? And what should I be writing about to keep your particular itch scratched?
Posted by Daniel Solis' Blog
It's been a while since I posted a screencast, so here's one of my process coloring one of Liz Hooper's black and white illustrations. (In HD Widescreen!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ-76YVcTsE
So, I'm taking her black and white pencil illustrations and adding sepia tones to create atmospheric perspective.
For each plane of perspective, I use quickmask and a soft brush to outline each subject.
Then I use that selection to make a layer mask around that subject, so only the subject is visible.
Then I use a screened color overlay on that layer so that the blacks turn into my desired sepia tones.
Repeat for each plane of perspective, making sure that the closer subjects are darker and higher contrast while the farther subjects are lighter and lower contrast.
Once the colors are in place, I add an offwhite paper texture on top of everything and Multiply that, to give everything a warm tone. I carefully mask out sections that should be lighter, though.
After that, I screen a grayscale watercolor texture to the paper texture, so the whites are knocked out of the paper, creating a cloudy washy feel. I add several of these watercolor textures to the clouds to they are brighter than the sky in the background.
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. IPR numbers are in!
Here’s the skinny.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Daniel Solis' Blog
A first coloring pass at another one of Liz's big illustrations. Got just one more to do after this one, then I'll do a second pass on the rest of the batch using some of the advice y'all gave me in the last art post.
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. My wife got me Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 4 for my birthday, and of course I’ve already read through the whole thing. I love this comic, though I say that as someone who doesn’t really have a regular comic reading habit. (Mainly I read stuff in collections, often gifted or borrowed from a friend. This has the upside of getting lots of story in big coherent swaths, but it also has the effect of mainlining the entire season of a TV show in two days. You’re simultaneously full up of the good stuff, and empty because there isn’t a similar volume waiting for you on day three.)
Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.) At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter. And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.
But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table. So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. So, over at DriveThruRPG, they’ve set up a “donate $20 to Haiti” thing. That’s cool in and of itself. But that’s not where it stops. Because publishers have donated products which you get when you donate. Their total value? $1,481.31.
So that’s somewhere around a “get these products for 99% off!” deal.
You should perhaps take all of us publishers up on that. You’ll get Spirit of the Season from Evil Hat, and a bunch of other products too (several of which I did some or all of the layout on, I’m happy to say). It’s one of those “you’re insane NOT to spend $20 on this” sort of things, even if you aren’t in the least bit humanitarian in your mindset.
There are so many products on this thing that the bundle’s attempt to alphabetically list them all craps out somewhere late in the letter C.
That’s C, for crazy.
Since the listing craps out, I thought I’d grab the full list of what I got after I made my purchase for the curious. Holy crap! Beast Hunters! Kerberos Club! Damnation Decade! Three Sixteen! It’s just ridiculous. Buy it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. So, my birthday was this past week, on Wednesday, the first day since I’ve rebooted my blogging that I’ve missed out on the Monday/Wednesday/Friday regularishly scheduled posting thing (to be followed by a Friday absence as well, but that’s almost beside the point).
It wasn’t, though, because I wanted to give myself a day or two off. It was because I was paralyzed to speak; I sat there, contemplating my soft underbelly, and thought about whether or not I was comfortable presenting it to the world. And I just wasn’t.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Daniel Solis' Blog
More here
I'm going through Liz Hooper's grayscale illustrations and adding some color to create more atmospheric perspective. Lower contrast is farther away, higher contrast is closer. I just don't know if it looks muddy now. Hmm... Work continues.
|
Subscribe to RSS