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HOW ONEMATRIX* WAS CREATED When
I first heard of the Onezumi.com contest, I
thought it was interesting, cool even, and I was enjoying the webcomic.
But as a old-time pro, I felt the contest wasnt for me, but intended
for the young
Well, Damn. Somewhere out there I DEFINITELY heard the sound of a chain mail glove hit the floor. So I decided to give it a tilt. Having some evil flashbacks to the early years of My career where I heard a lot of "You suck". Shit, I KNOW I can draw. And I hadn't done a comix project in a while. Just needed a goofy Idea... Onezumi's kick-ass attitude made Me think of Trinity from the Matrix films, and decided to cast Harknell as The Smiths. I had to leave Munky out, I would have had to cast him as Neo, and that is SOOOOO horrifyingly WRONG. Top image is the first scribbles, and with three days to Katsucon, better crunch that epic down to one page. I mentally re-scripted it untill all the excess was trimmed away and the gag worked in a single page. Pulled out actual pencil and artpad and got down to it. The pencil sketch that emerged is at right. I set the piece to be 8" x 10-1/2" so the final art would fit neatly on a letter size sheet. This sketch was scanned and brought into PhotoShop. The Panels were set onto a layer, And the line art drawn, each panel on its own layer. The captions were set in text layers. As were each word ballon and sound FX. Photoshop is an awesome and essential designer and artists tool, allowing me to do overnight what would have taken three days using traditional materials. Also would just DIE from carpal tunnel without my Graphics Tablet. Using a Wacom Graphire, and hope to afford an Intuos again one of these days... REALLY must harrass some deadbeat clients. Brought in background photos from stock photo collections. Then painted in the character color in their own layers. To keep track, I grouped each panel's art in set. And the captions in another, and the FX in another. The Photoshop document lands at about 4.5 Megs - and that's at 72 dpi! For print you would need 300 dpi, over 40 megs. So an extra Hard Drive would NOT be wasted here! Photoshop os a marvelous tool for adding effexts and I did. And the type manipulation has become first class. Put in the text and FX for the "fight Panel" Exported the image to a JPEG file compressed to JUST above image breakup. So it would load fast and still look good. Built the little animation for the entry page in ImageReady. The first version didnt quite feel right. So I downloaded a couple of Onezumi comics for reference. Her hair is HARD, but wanted to get it righter, and get her eyes and expression for the gag, and brush up Harknells dialogue. So went back in and reworked her and altered some of the captions to get the gag right. As I mentioned before, one overnight and a half shift the next day to finish it up. Then build the HTML pages in DreamWeaver and loaded it up to the FRS server. The results were on the last page... If you want to know more about Me, Climb up to the main part of the site. Fantastic-Realities.com. But the short version is that I am a career creative professional. Art Director, Graphic and Web Designer, Illustrator, and Consultant. My hertiage is just this siide of MUTT, and I'm also about Martial Arts, Science Fiction, Paganisn and Native Spirituality and raising my Family. I also have a Live Journal Site. And
THAT'S how the old timers play! I had a lot of fun. Enjoy!
*P.S.
Yes, that's "Oh-NEH-may-trix",
like "Oh-NEH-zu-mi"! |
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Art
by Kurt E. Griffith, Fantastic
Realities Studio, Contact
the Artist |
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