I’m not sure that “thanks” is the right word, but it’ll do for now, so thanks to Chris Lohmann and Shantelle Furzeman for introducing me to the twisted little card game Mao!
A shout-out and a reminder:
- The Wicked Goblin, where this strip is set – co-owner and proprietor Mick Archer doesn’t like Mao that much!
- International Tabletop Day is on this Saturday, April the 5th! Local group Cairns Boardgamers has organised an event at the Goblin from ten until ten! If you’re in the area, please rock along!
Awesome Things I Can’t Wait To Try Again
I tried something different again with this strip. I bought myself two brush-tip pens – an Artline 200 0.4mm and 210 0.6mm – and inked it by hand. I was going to leave it at that once I scanned it in last night, but one thing that bothered me about the two XCOM strips was the final file sizes; the Slamdance one was a couple of hundred kilobytes, but the XCOM ones were over a megabyte each thanks to all the sketching.
On March 16th, an idea came to me: Use GIMP’s colour select tool to cut the inks out of the rest of the sketch and work with those alone. It took some fiddling with the threshold setting – I think I had it at around 35 (I usually take notes as I go but forgot to this time) – but the result came out at 312 kilobytes, so I’m happy with it overall!
Lessons Learned for Next Time
I reckon I’ll stick with pencils and brush pens for the sketching and inking stages – something as advanced as a tablet can definitely wait until either this strip or another sideline endeavour start earning me some money, and even then I can’t take a PC with a connected tablet anywhere!
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