I took on board alot of his advice, but didn’t exactly go down this road. i pressed on to colouring page 2:

I used the “black-spotting” technique in the acrobatics sequence and the last panel, and began to play with some particle effects, but I wasn’t completely satisfied. It didn’t make me go “WOW”. So i tinkered with it again:

The final panel there is the benchmark, now. As Steve put it in his email:

Thanks so much, Steve for your advice. For those who don’t know, Steve is rebooting Moon Town. Check out some of the spectacular art which he’s producing, showcasing the new look.

The feedback has been critical in achieving these results. I am continuing to colour, as my own deadline is February 6th. The overall book is coming together, too. Derrick Utz is creating all the necessary pages to give the book an integrated feel. We’ve still got to work out the order of the stories, and get the bio art to all the artists to fill in their details, and we have a brilliant idea to solve the problem of the missing 8th artist which I’m sure you’ll like, but I’d be curious to hear your feedback on our plan.

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_ep19.mp3)

The deadline for the book is approaching. I’ve set up a dropbox and am liaising closely with the other artists. We are still one artist short! If you have a story, and think you can get me 4-8 pages by February 10th, please email me: flawedprefect (at) gmail (dot) com.

Createspace has changed it’s policies. The “Pro” package is no more. higher royalties are now part of the free memebership package. Check it out if you’re interested!

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_ep18.mp3)

Cover designs have been finalised. From the initial model:

I rendered an image directly out of Blender and created a first draft of the cover:

This sparked something in Mark Harmon’s mind to create the following:

Liking both, but preferring the first, I decided to do two versions: one wide, one closer up on the ship:

I put it to the vote on twitter, over at the illopond thread, and on G+ and the overwhelming response was the first one. So cover has been decided!

Inks are coming along too. Here is page 2:

I’ll be using this page to work out the color palette as well.

I’m planning out some tutorials for the coming months. They’ll focus mainly on blender for illustration (so modelling, texturing, and nodal compositing) but I have at least one more up my sleeve for Sketchbook Pro for those of you still keen to try it.

More next week!

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_ep17.mp3)

In this tutorial. I take you from the official website, how to install and customise the layout, and finally how to find things in two separate menus. I shall be covering more specific topics in future.

For those of you who like to know some technical details, I screen-captured this using Quicktime on Mac OsX Lion. I edited it in FCP as usual. While the standard def version plays automatically, I urge you to click on the HD button on the player and go full screen. The HD file is only 178MB (for over 1/2 hour! Pretty neat). I keep the SD version to work within the boundaries of the RSS feed and iTunes.

Hope this gets you eager to try it out! Any comments, queries, etc welcome in the comments below.

Here are a couple of color concepts I did in SBP:

I’m still trying to figure out what I need to do in terms of a cover. I would be happy to take suggestions from you guys – you’re certainly able to give them! To start you off, here is a sketch done by Captain Dutz (who is working on his own story for the “In Spaaaace!” Anthology:

I like where this is headed. I am open to any other suggestions, of course!

Until next year, have a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hannukah, Festivus, Saturnalia, Newtonmas… And I can’t wait to be back in very early 2012!

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_ep16.mp3)

As a refresher, pages 1 thru 4 are as follows:

Page 4 has two hero shots completed:

Pages 6 and 7 are still in sketch phase:

Here is a quick sketch of the two central actions for page 7:

And finally, page 8:

This means I have two sets I still need to complete concepting, but I have a fair idea of how they will appear. Perhaps the most difficult may be the power coils.

Scripting text has been something I’ve done sparingly, but I’ve decided on a few key lines. Dialogue should always come last, and this is one of those rare times when it actually has.

Hopefully, this will give you an overview of the story as it stands. The outlining process seems to be the hardest, but from here on in, I can use these panels as a basis for the proper layouts, sketches inks and colors. I think the next step is to come up with a color palette. That’s something I’ve not done with any degree of discipline before, so I am looking forward to learning!

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_ep15.mp3)

I’ve made a few story changes to make pages 6 and 7 work better, so I have to concept some of the scenes before I commit to thumbnails.

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_ep14.mp3)

If you’re curious, and know your way around Blender, here is a sneak peek of what I’ll be putting a tutorial together for (click to view full size):

More about that in the new year! For now, I am racing ahead with the thumbnails. Here is a rough of page 8:

No, don’t turn your iPad/laptop upside down, they’re hanging from the wire. I’ll probably be tweaking this so it won’t be as confusing. I’ve sketched pages 6 and 7, but I’m still not happy with the flow. I’ll talk more about that in the next episode.

Thanks for reading/listening!

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_ep13.mp3)

Here are a handful of sketches which will be worked into the pages:

all these shots will make pages 4. They’ve been thought about quite extensively, to tell maximum story in minimum page real-estate.

I’m working up some 3D models over the next few days, as well as creating the templates for the pages so far thumbnailed, so many plates are being spun while I talk production in the car on my weekly commutes.

Big shout out to Jose Gonzalez for helping me trouble-shoot my video problem from earlier this week. Cheers, buddy! He mentioned he had a 2G iPod touch which didn’t play the video. I think I figured out the problem, and so these videos should now be compatible with those sorts of devices.

Also a huge thankyou to Marshall of Plexhop - he recently received his hard copy of Pandeia issue 1# from indieplanet.com Also was enlightening to hear his experience purchasing online from indieplanet! Thanks Marshall. Hope you enjoy.

Finally, a few links:

Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy post on Kepler 22b’s discovery.

How they discover extra-solar planets via the transit method.

a really neat bit of software for your iPad/iPhone/iPod touch which helps out astronomers

Download audio file (TPD_P2G_ep12.mp3)

It took me a while to get right, and there a loads of things I’ve learned just from looking back over this. This is more a demo than a tutorial, so I’d be happy to answer any questions via comments. I have plans to do a more detailed tutorial on SBP in the new year which shows how to share a file over the cloud with the iPad.

UPDATE: Apologies for having to take this down. My old compression settings went to silicon heaven along with my old mac. in the meantime, apple changed much in the way of how they handle media compression. I re-edited the video, and shaved 5 minutes off its total time. It’s now re-compressed using MPEG Streamclip (still my fave little bit of compression software). I have a few bugs to iron out in my screen capturing also – this was a part of this issue as well. Thanks to Lars who notified me about the glitches. Shout out to Jose Gonzalez for “Beta testing” some of my compressions. Good to know you guys have got my back!