flash comic

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 3:37 pm

I'm not sure Charls Shultz is a good example there. I mean, being that he reused same poses and never moved his camera... Of course, he redrew, not copy/paste, but he's definitely not the first artist to think of when we mention variousity of artistic expression.

Flash has that bad/good habit to straighten wonky lines; It's bet when you are a good inker because it ruins your natural hand-drawn line, but it's good if you're not-so-good inker with shaky hand. Frankly, I don't like it very much, I think that flash inking looks all alike and that people should use it only if there is a purpose for that to be a swf file (animation, interactive) or if their inking is really bad and they want decent results right now, here.
I generally don't want to discard any tool, I think that for everything, no matter how controverse, someone might eventually find a good purpose and use in which it makes sence. Illustrator, for instance, seems a good tool for vector graphics. There is a certain sterility in reuse or images and in that flat illustrator's line, but that sterility has it's charm and it fits some comics that feature a certain streak of impersonality. I dig that.
Flash goes halfway there. It keeps some elements from illustrator but tries to mimic hand inking. That, I don't like too much.

Risky · Post by **Risky** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 5:18 pm

Flash can be good for inking if you use it properly. It is very useful because you can clean up your lines after you lay them down without destroying other parts of the page (without whiteout and without an exacto knife). A good example of this would be alpha-shade and their tutorials. However, that technique does not work with puppets.

Mr. Caravaggio · Post by **Mr. Caravaggio** » Wed Dec 21, 2005 11:01 pm

Alpha Shade is a beautiful piece of work. He's even proven how well Flash works with PS to do his blurry backgrounds (though as of Flash8, there is a limited blur function built in).

Anyway, I hope I don't sound too much like a regurgitator in this post, but...

Rocknjosie wrote:I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or just trying to clarify. Either way, that's exactly my point, how many kids do you know that write third grade level essays then use word replace to add in a bunch of million dollar words. To be fair though, what I was really referncing was, I used to get the dictionary.com word a day email, and it was always headed by an advertisement, and one of the recurring ads was a program which writes a novel for you. I believe the tagline was something along the lines of JK Rowling is now the richest person in the UK, don't you want to cash in on that success. *Shivers*

If you're okay with a little sterility in your art that's fine, but I think Charles Shultz just spun in his grave a bit.

People can try to cut corners all they want, but in the end audiences of any medium are often smarter than we give them credit for. Most people can see talent when it's really there, and no machine, no matter how well programmed, can spark our artistic interests, they can only help ease their birth.

Also, Charles Schultz can suck it. May his soul rest in piece.

mcDuffies wrote:Flash has that bad/good habit to straighten wonky lines; It's bet when you are a good inker because it ruins your natural hand-drawn line, but it's good if you're not-so-good inker with shaky hand. Frankly, I don't like it very much, I think that flash inking looks all alike and that people should use it only if there is a purpose for that to be a swf file (animation, interactive) or if their inking is really bad and they want decent results right now, here.

If you have it, you have tried messing with the drawing preferences and brush smoothing option haven't you? It can help a little...

I don't want to seem like I take more pride in my work than I should, but here's an example of something I did tonight in an hour and 10 minutes in Flash. That may be a while to some of you, but for a guy like me who is very uncoordinated with his coloring and linework, this alone would have taken me half a day to do with paper / ink and then scanning. (This is the one-sheet for when I promote my comic, please don't take this as a nudge to check the comic. It's not ready, the site's not all set up right.)

And if it still looks too "sterile" for you, then I would argue that that's an aesthetic value, not one of the digital medium. Here's another picture I did, yesterday, trying to get a feel for a character for another comic.

That obviously isn't flash, it's painter 9, but to me, it's just as digital. I personally really enjoy the smoothed hair. If I had done this on paper the Stump I'd use to get that smoothing would eventually clog and give me irregular areas. And I'm not sure you could argue that the "irregularities" of an actual stump are part of the charm of a hand drawn piece because their existence wouldn't necessarily be the choice of the artist, they'd be a byproduct of the tool and therefore not something he or she should really get credit for. I've taken advantage of many happy accidents in my work before, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm proud of doing it.

Jigglyman · Post by **Jigglyman** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 9:32 pm

I started drawing a comic which uses semi-puppets. Basically, for the first strips I draw what is needed, such as backgrounds, characters, etc. Whenever a new background is needed or a new pose/character is needed for a strip I draw it as well. Every single pose/background/whatever goes into this huge Flash file, so I can reference everything I've drawn and pull it out for future strips.

The idea is that the strip gets easier to do as time goes by, and there's a large bank of poses to draw from so it still looks somewhat natural.

I call is the Jigglymethod and if you use this idea, mention this idea to a friend, or indeed use any words used to describe this idea in conversation, I will sue you for a total of one million billion dollars.

Sincerely · Post by **Sincerely** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 9:48 pm

Now I have to use it so that I can counter sue you for twelve million billion dollars for being an ass.

LibertyCabbage · Post by **LibertyCabbage** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 9:56 pm

this thread is incomplete without mentioning sifl & olly which was the greatest tv show ever

Anywherebuthere · Post by **Anywherebuthere** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 2:23 pm

HOKAY...

More "help" needed.

I want to do an interactive comic somtime around February.

Basically, what I want to do is scroll through a 4900 pixle "pannel" using a 700 pixle window.

Does that make sense?

Any ideas of how to pull that off? I know NOTHING of flash, or any other stuff that may wind up helping me with this.

Mr. Caravaggio · Post by **Mr. Caravaggio** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 4:34 pm

I think I know what you're talking about, I had an idea to do a voyer comic where many things would happen at once but you'd only see where your camera was pointing at any given time. I was going to try and hook v-cam up to a mouse control script, but I never did finish it and never wrote any code for it.

v-cam will help if you just want a scrolling camera.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascr ... tml?page=2

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 7:27 pm

Mr. Caravaggio wrote:I think I know what you're talking about, I had an idea to do a voyer comic where many things would happen at once but you'd only see where your camera was pointing at any given time. I was going to try and hook v-cam up to a mouse control script, but I never did finish it and never wrote any code for it.

So I wasn't the only one to get that idea. It's been hanging ćround my head for some time but it seems like too ambitious project for me to pull right now.
It should be easy to do it in flash: make an invisible button over the part of the picture you want and then write a simple action script for that button to move you at the other part of the image. It's the most simple action scrips, I think you can easily find it somewhere.
It can also be done by mapping the picture in Photoshop, I think.

LibertyCabbage · Post by **LibertyCabbage** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 7:34 pm

re: abh

you should be able to do that with a div tag ... not sure if it'll be right but it's worth trying.

Code: Select all

<div style=" width:700px; height:700px; overflow:auto;">
<table scrolling="yes">
<tr><td>
<img src="image url">
</td></tr></table></div>

you can put that in a text file and name it what you would normally name the comic and it should work.