soothsayer's PIXTON project

Click on the smaller gold square, then, just like with a PDF, click and hold the page to move it up or down.


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Not to boost your ego any more than normal, but you did some fantastic work with what little there is to work with in Pixton! Awesome use of gradients and props! Kudos, and keep them coming!

Oh, why thank you for those kind words... I figure the first few "issues" I do will be part of a learning curve (not that there's much learning required). The next one should appear a bit better!

Here is Page Two to my story...

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The First Falls, page two...

This past weekend I have learned that the blocks and problems associated with our work computer are gone, and as such, have been making a grand PIXTON project... grand in that I figured out I could add frames (thus not limiting myself to the 12 panel layout) and putting in a greater amount of detail, both of which are eseential to tell a story.

In the next post I will post this work. Keep in mind that it is a work in progress. Frames will be added, detail will be added, things will change. It would be nice if we could do a step-by-step, so that we all can see the thinking process, the evolution of things... but due to the edit feature, any changes made will just be automatically included. There won't be a visual procession, but rather, ahh hell, you know what I mean!

In essence, everytime I make an edit, there won't be a new post!

With that said, I will include a post edit to describe what I did and why.

Move page as you would a PDF... click and hold. There are some visible panels at the bottom. By all means, give some feedback!

Now, I know that there are gaps in between panels. My brain can't do things in a single direction, it jumps from scene to scene. I'm doing it this way so I can see what my mind is doing, and that way I can take the time to add the filler.

Don't know if anyone's been paying attention or not, but I've added a few more basic panels. Figure I'll do that for a while, add things bit by bit... as I've stated before, I only have parts A, C, E, F, and H; it's the parts in between that I need to work on. So, I'm slowly puttin gin what I have, go back and tweak the earlier stuff, and somewhere along the lines maybe fill in the blanks.

Instead of trying to cram everything into a few panels, I'm going for the storyboard type layout. What do I care if I use a bunch of panels to express one thing? If I am building my story as I see it, and since I am seeing it as a movie, then by god I shall make it up as such!

Final note: Unless it is essential that I put it in, I am going to leave all the words for last.

Not to interrupt your pixton project, but I came across an interesting idea the other day that I thought I would share for the future of your comic making...maybe. What I mean is: it would free you from the limitations of pixton in a major way, but requires learning new stuff, which might be off-putting right now. Anyway, the software is 'Inkscape.' Open source vector graphics package. Now, I realize what you know about "under the hood computer graphics" could just about fill up Tinkerbell's thimble , but I would say this is something to consider.

You've done bitmap graphics to death...pixels...dots. Zoom in, make a dot black, zoom out and see how it looks. Save the picture, zoom in and it's all dots. Vector is like the "where's the dots?" of 2D graphics. If you have a crisp 1 pixel line, and zoom in, it becomes a 10 pixel line, but stays crisp...no matter if you zoom in or out, it stays crisp, and the graphic elements adjust size accordingly. It's amazing high-quality stuff, but there's trickery to it. Firstly and foremostly, you don't draw lines, you instead create and edit curves. Bezier. Make a line with 2 points, then you can use control handles to bend the line to suit your shape. Gets to be a pain, but finished projects can look just that much better because you can export to bitmap from these high quality vector images. I will admit my dealing with Inkscape has been minimal so far, but the other day I found a site with some web comics done in Inkscape. NOT the best quality work, but what caught my eye was their workflow pipeline. Copy/paste:

How we do it

To make each Death to Kalia comic, we have a very easy process to follow. Essentially it boils down to the following sequence.

1. Copy/paste each character and prop item from their individual Inkscape svg files
2. Resize and move different characters, character body parts, and props to match the envisioned comic.
3. Add body parts like eyes and mouths by copy/pasting from another svg.
4. Add speech bubbles and speech text.
5. Frame the comic in a black rectangle and cut out the panel areas.
6. Add a background color or fade
7. Export the comic!


It occurred to me that this is very South Park or how I always spout off about 3D, in that once you make the object/scene/item once, you've always got it available. So their process just screams ease and awesomeness! Especially considering the parts they're talking about are vector objects. For example, a mouth can be shaped with the four (or more) control handles on a circle, and once the SVG is saved, whenever you open it or copy/paste that mouth to another scene, you can change the expression just by dragging the same handles! Select all the control points in a head, rotate, and your head is looking up...like pixton, but as much or as little detail as YOU want to add. DEFINITELY something for you to think about!!! If you wanted to try working with it, and wanted some help, I could get you started. I've done a little 'bitmap character to vector object' toying around, and it's not that hard to make it look decent. Imagine working like in pixton, but YOUR characters done YOUR way with YOUR art styles!

And now, just because these guys gave me the idea, I will share the link to their site... link to their site. (oh...this is NOT a download link )