So, the cat’s out of the bag, as it were. Over at Comicon.com Richard Bruton has the scoop and much of the lowdown on what it is.
Null Space is a new weekly webcomic beginning on Friday the 6th of October, featuring a veritable feast of big name writers from scifi/fantasy – for many of whom this will be their first credit as a comics writer!
Each story will be self contained, set in its own world and be a delicate little gem of a one pager. This is my tribute to the Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Black Mirror and Inside no 9. I love an anthology.
The project started because I wanted to do another weekly thing, and I just happened to know a few scifi writers and so I propositioned them and suddenly I had a bunch of scripts. What was especially interesting to me was working with people who hadn’t done comics before. I figured this would be my one way to get them to write something for free!
To date, I’ve fourteen scripts in hand, of which I’ve already drawn ten. That’ll take us in to the new year, and depending on how things go, we might get beyond that. We’ll see.
Owing to the number of writers involved, it’s likely this project will only ever be web based. You know, like the old days, and as such you should point your bookmarks at https://www.pauljholden.com/series/null-space.
See you Friday for AdrianTchaikovsky’s delightful “Spider-Killer”.
I was at the Cork Comic Expo this weekend. Invited by Cork’s favourite son Will Sliney (I’ve known WIll a long time, and it’s been slightly baffling and yet not entirely surprising to see him rise to be a major celeb in Cork and Ireland and when his TV shows get bigger, eventually the world – you’ll see) (And the guys from The Big Bang)
It was lovely to see Declan Shalvey, Stephen Mooney and Nick Roche (as well as the guys from Rogue Comics and Limit Break and lots of other people whose names I will mangle so I will say it was nice to see you all).
Cork’s a fun event, it happens in a major shopping centre, so lots of people just walking through with no idea who you are – with the possible exception of Will, everyone knows Will.
A fair few people picking up Numbercruncher (over 10 years old, but still new to many people). I wish I had Dept of Monsterology still with me, I think that would’ve done well. Those that picked up books then slightly surprised to find I had anything to do with it (I think they just thought I was a stall selling books)
Good show, stayed with my brother and his family (they’ve been based in cork for years) but man Belfast to Cork was a struggle of a drive.
Hoping to find a contact for Dublin City Con, cus I’d like to do some more local cons. New York is out for me this year, but may be next year.
I don’t often just do a full piece for myself, but I’m off to cork this weekend and thought I’d do a very limited run of prints of a Judge Dredd piece.
The inspiration came from watching the walking dead and that scene in Skull Island where Tom Hiddleston is swatting weird monsters out of the sky with a machete through a green smoke (it’s an awesome awesome film if you haven’t seen it)
Drawn on paper and coloured in Clip Studio (using a whole load of tricks I’ve picked up from “Colour With Kurt” Kurt Michael Russell has a whole bunch of great videos (as well as a paid-for full tutorial) and i’ve been studying those things furiously. Still a long way to go, but I’m gonna try and colour more of my work.
Was talking to a writer friend the other day and they asked “if you were to come up with a doctor who game, what would the mechanic be” and honestly it popped in to my head fully formed, so here it is:
You’re trapped in the Tardis, it is malfunctioning and you have to both repair it and solve the mystery. You do so by walking round the tardis rooms and figuring out what you need, but, when you leave a room it becomes locked in a time loop. Meaning, if you re-enter the room, you encounter yourself from your previous play through of that room. You can’t change that time-locked version of you, but you CAN touch them/move them/time lock them for that moment (and if you reneter the room again, now there are two other versions of you stuck in that loop, and same rules apply – no theoreitcally upper limit…). So, for example, you enter a room, there’s a high shelf you need something there, you can’t reach. So you stand beside it for a minute, you leave and you renter, now you see yourself standing in the corner, you go over, timelock your old self (SONIC SCREWDRIVER TO RESCUE!) climb up on yourself and get the thing, then leave with it.
Anyway, that’s my fun tardis time trap mechanic, do with it what you will (but pay me a lot of money) thank you, bye!
I’ve refined my use of Clip Studio so much over the years (starting with Manga Studio 3(!) from 2006 – so coming up on twenty years) that sometimes when a new feature hits I don’t even bother with it, as I’m already optimised up the wazoo.
Anyway, a couple of versions ago, Clip Studio introduced a “Quick Access” panel – basically a pop up window that can have your most commonly used tools in one location (rather than scattered around all over the place).
I’ve been studying a bit on colouring in clip studio, and discovered that this quick access panel might answer a few distinct problems I have with workflow, and I’ve played with it and sort of love it. It’s especially useful if you have limited screen real estate. The quick access panel can use tools, menu items, actions or pretty much anything you want. I’ve set mine up for four distinct modes :
Pencilling, Inking, Flatting, Colouring and Lettering.
If you combine that with the ability to duplicate tools and add your own icons, you can have a powerful set of tools for specific modes. Here’s my pencilling set up (I won’t go in to too much detail, though I will answer comments if you have any!)
I’ve also mapped the quick access pop up to a key (Numeric zero on my keyboard or one of the quick buttons on the huion) which makes it really useful when you’ve a small screen with a small set of commonly used tools you want to pop up and down on the screen.
The Pencilling Quick Access
This has tools for Managing a new project, including an action to create page of thumbnails (custom icon on an action)
Tools for pencilling and tools for editing the panel layouts (all things I do at the pencilling stage)
Inking Quick Access
This is probably the simplest and action could be even simplified more. The numbers beside the tools here are part of the names – I coded the number keys along the keyboard with the various common tools I use and then renamed the tools to include the keyboard number so I wouldn’t forget. (Which a handy thing I nearly wish it was a built in feature)
Flatting Tools
Actually, I suspect they’re all simpler than the pencil quick access simply because it’s got most of the starting utilities I use for beginning a new project. One note on colour, I used to use the colour wheel for colour picking, but these days I’ve taken to using the colour slider, which gives you a Hue Saturation and Value sliders for changing the selected colour and takes the guess work out of which colour should I pick next.
Colouring Quick Access
No wait, this is complex! I have thousands of brushes, but lately, I’ve been focused on Kyle’s Builder Brush (Kyle of Photoshop brush fame, released this for free ages ago) and Daub Pigmentio Dual 02 – both add texture/noise to the colours as I paint them. Lots of great texture in the art.
Also a selection of actions to create different kinds of layers, saves me having to tap a new layer and adjust it afterwards.
And finally…
Lettering Quick Access
Text Edit is basically the object edit tool set up to only allow it to edit text. I’ve duplicated and created a bunch of text tools with the fonts I like, if I had time I’d make icons for all of them with the font in it (but I’m lazy)
And that’s it.
Comments are open, so if you wanna ask me about any of this, please do. (If you ask here rather than on the socials, I can answer where which means everyone gets the answer)
