ZooDotCom

Post: Blathering Blatherskite!

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:08:46 -0600

(click for full view.)

When we were young, my brother and I loved Disney's DuckTales. I think we watched every episode. I really liked some of the later characters like GizmoDuck here. But I think Bubba Duck saw them jumping the shark a bit.

Comic: Sacrilege

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Comic: DarthAPO

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Post: Hallowe'en

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:37:51 -0500

Turns out Fry Guys aren't made of fries.

Have a scary holiday!

Comic: Color Me Annoyed

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Comic: Charlie Shot First

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Post: Tweet to Win a Signed Print

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:36:06 -0500

Update: The contest is over. Congrats to @qaz20! My thanks goes out to everyone who played.

My shirt “Galactic Junkyard” is available, TODAY ONLY, from RIPT! It’s only $10, so it’d make a great gift too! (In addition to the one you’ll be getting for yourself, of course.)

To help promote it, I’m running a single day twitter contest. If you click the button below, you’ll be automatically entered to win a signed print of the entire current storyline!

Tomorrow, Saturday Oct 17th, a winner will be chosen at random from those who participated and announced on @zoodotcom’s twitter page.

Good luck, and thanks!

Click here to tweet the following and enter!

“Buy @zoodotcom’s t-shirt ‘Galactic Junkyard’ for $10, today only at http://riptapparel.com”

Comic: Costume Etiquette

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Post: Galactic Junkyard Shirt, This Friday Only!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:21:45 -0500

My shirt design “Galactic Junkyard” goes on sale at RIPT this Friday!

It’s only available on Friday (Oct 16th), so don’t miss it! Plus, it’s only 10 bucks (plus shipping) so it’d make an excellent gift!

Also, I wrote an article where I outlined my working process for designing that very shirt, you can read it here.

Post: Website Updates

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:29:41 -0500

You may or may not have noticed already, but I've made a few updates to the website. There's finally support for storylines!

Also, you can tweet/bookmark/share strips or blog posts really easily now using the service icons (just at the top of this post there, see it?) And I encourage you to do so! I appreciate it very much, believe me.

The archives are now grouped per storyline instead of showing every strip. And as an experimental feature, I've added support for viewing an entire storyline at once, like this. You'll have to let me know what you think. If it's popular, I'll add better navigation (next story, last story, etc).

I'm also thinking of selling prints of entire storylines too. Not too sure how that would work yet.

And don't forget, you can donate or buy a sketch to show your support for ZooDotCom. Thanks!

Comic: Nerd Festivus

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Post: Dwergi Sketch

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:20:30 -0500

In a recent strip, I had a little cameo of a Dwergi (yes, from Van Helsing ~~fame~~ infamy).

I did this sketch when I was deciding how I wanted to draw 'em.

Comic: Pink Around the Gills

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Comic: Spic 'n Span

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Comic: It's a Dirty Job

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Comic: For the Greater Good

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Post: The Peaceful Moonkin

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:21:12 -0500

I let August go by without a blog post of any kind! That's just wrong. Yes, I updated the strip. But ~~you~~ I expect more!

I'm always drawing, and try to do warm up and/or daily sketches... So from now on I'll be sharing at least one of those a week with you, here on the site as a blog post.

I'll kick things off with a warm up sketch (and coloring experiment) from yesterday.

"The Peaceful Moonkin"

Comic: Lair of Lies

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Comic: Caveat Emptor

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Post: Dude

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:29:28 -0500

It's rather sad, but I've been using Manga Studio EX 4 since it first came out -- and I've only just now discovered the Color Blend Brush! It's pretty cool. I can just flat the colors, as usual, and add some spot colors for highlights/shadows, then blend away. Here are some progress shots:

Post: Happy Labor Day

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:03:49 -0500

To my American brethren (Or anyone else who celebrated the holiday today), I wish you Happy Labor Day!

Due to the holiday (due to my taking it off, that is), there's no strip today. However, to tide you over, feel free to read a few short stories by your's truly:

Cheers!

Comic: DarkAPO

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Comic: The Prognosis

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Comic: Life Is Art

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Post: The Landing Has Eagled

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:54:21 -0500

Forty years and one day ago (puh-lease, anybody could have posted on the actual anniversary), Apollo 11 landed on the moon. And immediately thereafter Starbuck starting hitting on the moon rocks. No wait. In the seventies, Starbuck was hitting on coffee. Wait, that's not right either. Starbucks started serving coffee. Or something.

History really wasn't my best subject.

Post: ZdC Now on Facebook

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:15:53 -0500

Do you have a Facebook account? Oh, of course, sorry. You a fan of ZdC? I should hope so! Then add yourself as a fan at the Facebook ZooDotCom page.

ZooDotCom on Facebook

Post: T-Shirt Design Process

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:34:29 -0500

I’ve received some questions about my design process, from a technical perspective. So I thought I’d write it up for you to peruse.

Update: This shirt is going on sale this Friday, Oct 16th. It's only available for the one day, and it only cost $10!! Read more...

I’ve received some questions about my design process, from a technical perspective. So I thought I’d write it up for you to peruse.

It all starts with a sketch. In this case, on a graph notepad I have. This is less common these days, I’ve gotten comfortable enough with my Wacom I usually sketch digitally.

(Click to enlarge)

I drew some of my favorite space fighter designs from memory. It was obvious from the sketch I had only had a vague idea of the Gunstar (The Last Starfighter) and Star Fury (Babylon 5) designs. But with Google image search, reference images are only a few clicks away.

From here I open up my trusty Manga Studio EX and get to work.

Manga Studio doesn’t support the size I need — 16x20 inches @ 300 DPI — so I cheat a little and create a document that’s 8x10 inches @ 600 DPI.

(Click to enlarge)

I start with “pencils” that rough out the layout of the ships and other elements.

(Click to enlarge)

Once I get that where I like it, I’ll progress to the “inks.” I always use a vector layer for inks, so that I can easily resize the layer, if need be.

For this design, I knew I wanted the asteroids be inked in a dark grey color, so I created a separate Vector layer for them and changed in the ink color on that layer to grey.

(Click to enlarge)

Now it’s time to color it! The real challenge with shirt designs are the limited color palettes. Depending on the printer, it’s in the neighborhood of 4-8 colors. Shirt.Woot only supports 6 colors. Which doesn’t include the shirt color, of course.

I’ll start out by creating a separate 1 bit layer for each color. (See the example image on the right.)

Sometimes I wind up with multiple layers using the same color (like Dark Gray for this image) which is fine. At this point it’s whatever it takes to look right while staying under 6 colors. For this design I’m not using halftones so the layers are pretty cut-n-dry.

Speaking of which, Manga Studio excels at creating halftones. I’ve never seen it’s equal. Basically you create an 8 bit layer and draw in grayscale and it’ll render it as halftone on the fly. Plus, the tone is non-destructive. Meaning you can edit the halftone settings at any time. It’s really quite impressive. But I’m not using any in this design so I won’t go into anymore detail.

However, later on I will create a separate post that goes into more detail on Manga Studio’s halftoning features.

At this point, I’m pretty much done in Manga Studio. It’s time to export it out as a flattened PNG.

(Click to enlarge)

You’ll notice the colors aren’t quite final yet. We’ll get to that in a moment. First, I want you to look at this closeup of the exported image. It’s at 200%:

You’ll notice that the image has very sharp edges, or aliased edges. Normally you’d want anti-aliased edges for images to be shown on screen. But in this case, since it’s gonna be printed, the aliased lines are much preferred.

As the final product, I want a PSD (Photoshop) image that has each unique color on it’s own layer (spot colors). So I’ll open the image in Adobe Photoshop. Resize the image to 16x20 inches @ 300 DPI — Remembering to uncheck the “Resize Image” option.

To make creating the spot color layers easier I created an action. Seen here:

(Click to download this action)

When I run the action, the “Select > Color Range…” dialog will appear. Making sure it’s set to a “Fuzziness” factor of 0, I click on the image to select the color I want, uh, spotted and the action takes care of the rest. It selects all the pixels with that color, creates a new layer, and fills the selection with the specified color, then deselects the image.

I do that for each color, create a layer for the shirt color, save the image and I’m done.

If I need to tweak the colors (or change to Pantones), I’ll ensure each layer has “Locked transparent pixels” and just fill each layer with whatever color I choose from the color swatch palette and note it in the layer name.

And I have my final image ready to be sent in and (hopefully) printed:

(Click to enlarge)

I went through this at breakneck speed. If you have any questions, suggestions, or need a clarification, please feel free to leave a comment!

Post: Were I a Part of Skynet...

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:32:54 -0500

My name might stand for:

Sounds about right to me. What's your cyborg name ?

Post: Misc Marker Sketches

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:12:42 -0500

These are a couple of characters from an idea for a new strip (which is not coming anytime soon).

Although speaking of new strips, remember that strip idea I mentioned a long time ago? I’m gonna have some big news about it this fall.

Post: It Tastes Like SPAM!

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:32:17 -0500

Sorry if I’ve been spamming you with t-shirt designs lately… Just a new found joy of a mine. (Speaking of which, check this out.)

Ahem

Anyway. I’m going to be getting back to posting sketches here a couple of times a week, so be on the lookout for that!

However, as long as I have you here… I may as well mention my new service.

As opposed to adding a donation button and throwing myself upon your mercy (“Please sir, may I have another?”), I’d much rather give you something (besides a fun webcomic) for your hard earned dollar bills. So, following the lead of others, I’ve added a “Buy a Sketch!” section to the site. Now you too can have a custom drawn sketch of your choosing (within reason) for as little as $3! You can find all the nitty-gritty details here.