Chapt VII: Choices (Part 16)

by Jande on January 30, 2013 at 12:01 AM

“Meanwhile…”

As Aedre’s parents fight each other bitterly in their car, we return to the cabin in the Mill Gorge, where another kind of confrontation is occurring.  Aedre, seemingly befriended by the owner of the shack, is sensing some weirdness in the situation after having been ambushed by a frog when she’d decided after much agitated cogitation not to return. And what’s this? Does the Shack Man look a little taken aback? A little guilty, perhaps?

~~~

Review

Process

Cursors! Flailed Again!

Being back to working regularly in Photoshop, cleaning up the scanned art and making decisions about panel size and placement, balancing each panel’s composition against the over all composition of the strip, etc., has been a joy this week.  That is, right up to the moment when my cursor changed into a cross hair and I had no idea how that had happened or how to fix it –even though this happens to me once or twice a year!  The crazy part is that after about an hour of trying everything to make it give me back my normal cursor, during which I must admit to becoming a vociferous curser myself, I remember that I can get it back by restarting the whole computer. *sigh*

Of course, while that machine is restarting I get on my other machine and complain about it to Twitter-At-Large and invariably Tom of Tall Tales Radio reminds me that this is caused by having turned on the Caps Lock key.  The CL key toggles between your usual cursor (which ever one you normally prefer. my preference is for the the one that shows the actual size (footprint) of the brush I’m using) and the crosshair cursor for fine tuning in some kinds of graphic art.

All I can think of is what a stupid place to put that toggle! Then I remember that the program was originally created for photographers, not cartoonists, painters, or graphic novel creators. If someone could be nice and add in a way to change the keybinding for that I would be eternally grateful for as long as my poor memory retained the favour. I believe I’ve looked everywhere, but to no avail.

In the meantime, I’ve stuck a note to my corkboard just behind and slightly above the Cintiq: “CAPSLOCK=CURSOR CROSSHAIR!” And if I remember to look at it  in six months or a year from now, when it happens again… ;`)

Smoothing It Out

I’m pretty excited about this next batch of strips –the ones I’m pencilling, scanning, and cleaning up right now in preparation for inking ( my favourite part) and shading. I’m working on all of them in one batch so that I can ink them all to the end of the chapter and then shade them all. This instead of doing only one strip at a time, I hope will help things look more smoothly consistent.

The timing for this will be much tighter than I originally anticipated, since I took about two weeks more off during the holiday than I’d originally planned for. Hopefully, though, there will be no gap between the publication of the strips already in the queue and that of the newly minted ones.

Other News

A new Seasonal Caption Contest coming up, though this time I can’t promise original art, only a digital piece, as a reward for the winner. I’m afraid I’ll need all the working time I can get in order to keep Aedre’s Story flowing. So I’ll email the winner their prize instead of having to brave the snowstorms to get the original art to a post office.

Thanks for reading Aedre’s Firefly and for your encouraging comments! <3