Tuesday, November 29, 2005

meh

No SPeCks. Sorry… maybe Thursday?

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Sneak


Next Wednesday. Hopefully.


Before December. Hopefully.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Crawl


Scurry on for more.

SPeCks has started to chew at my mind quite a bit lately. Most notably: the CafePress store. Turns out someone purchased a t-shirt. Very neat. I wish I could justify the expense of "owning" a premium shop, but right now, I am just sticking with the basic store. Of course, that means, only one version of one item for now (aka: one mug option, one clock option, one cap option, etc). Ultimately, when I fill up the store and actually generate more than $5 a month, I will move to the premium side.

In other, related news, I have begun work on testing my options for an animated version of SPeCks — done as a .GIF animation. The first test opened this post. I have an above average amount of excitement into this path for SPeCks. However, I want to continue to populate the non-animated version of the comic. Currently, it is faster to produce and I want to grow and mature the SPeCks universe more before trying to take on (in a full-time capacity) something of an animated series. For now, I see the "animated series" as little one offs, or one-liners, starring our little web-crawling friends.

I am working on producing a 2006 calendar for SPeCks that will be available on the CafePress store, but a lot of stuff has me tired in the evenings, so I can't really promise anything. Baby steps… or a crawl, rather.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Animated

One thing that I have always enjoyed, and have mentioned in previous posts, is working with animated GIFs. There are no better examples than the warehouse animations created by and for IconFactory's homepage. How interesting...

I took a deeper plunge into this medium of art (and sequential art, for that matter) with the creation of the FFXI mini episode. To be clear, and for all the asshats out there, every aspect of that animated GIF was either recreated and/or completely created by myself - the background was derived from an animated avatar "created" by someone else, I merely used it as the template for my animation.

Recently, I have also been involved with making animated web banners again. So there are some new techniques for frame-by-frame animation that I am discovering and/or learning. I use Adobe ImageReady for the animating and Adobe Photoshop for the "layout" of the animations. When I can figure out a good method of posting tutorials in this blog, I will do so.

I have ideas on converting SPeCks into an animated comic using GIFs as the method of delivery. In order for that to happen, I suppose I should really hunker down and come up with a plan to have SPeCks "episodes" come out on a consistent basis.