What mean Strange Biros

I was looking at Instagram, (which I haven't posted to since 2021) to keep up with what my friends at Uni of Brighton (I like to see what Philippa Lyon is up to ) and noticed my account still pointed at an old url.

So I changed it to https://strangebiros.blogspot.com/ rather than www.strangebiros.co.uk  which I had as a domain for years, till I realised I didn't give a fig if people actually read any of this guff or not.

Then I started thinking about where Strange Biros came from. 

It was a small press comic launched at the 1991 UK Comic Art Convention by me and my friend Paul Putner.

Indie comics were having a revival then, and we made a comic, printed off a batch and drove to the convention in London in a vintage Mercedes, Paul dressed as Judge Death, Adrian dressed as a purple man from 2000AD.

That Merc is probably worth a million pounds now, then it wasn't.

They dressed up to take part in what would eventually evolve into a cosplay competition, but they didn't get round to that bit, and just looked a bit weird all day.

We had an interesting time, attended the 2000AD session, and the artists alley, and left the stash of 'Strange Biros' comics with a bloke from the Small Press collective... and never heard from him again.

At the time we started an application to the Prince's Youth Business Trust to ramp up the production, but Paul became a smash hit actor starring in Run for Your Wife in London's West End, and I got married.

I'll see if I can dig out a copy of issue #1 and post some pictures here.

seeking sharks

 Following on from the Fake Sharks, or possibly before, can't remember I did a bunch of sharks in the Rocketboom Bears book... Nazi Space sharks;
https://books.apple.com/ca/book/rocketboom-bears/id1406133567

 It's there in apple books, but I thought there was a pdf version somewhere.

 

Fake Sharks of the English Coast

I think there used to be a page on here linking to this book what I wrote.

But I couldn't find it so posting a link to the Apple Books listing https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/fake-sharks-of-the-english-coast/id1450717002?mt=11 and the version that seems to be on a blogs.brighton cdn... so presumably at some point I stuck a copy on one of the blogs. https://bpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.brighton.ac.uk/dist/b/6253/files/2019/11/Fake_Sharks_of_the_English_Coast_Arial.pdf I was looking for it because Dom was thinking about what to stick on his animation channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CooolDom and reading it made me laugh possibly for the first time in weeks. Thought it maybe worth sharing, as we could all use a laugh right now. I just checked instagram and it looks like I started this as an inktober project : https://www.instagram.com/p/BoYn7klgoF3/

RPGMaker MV making tiny tiny people

 I’ve been trying to draw pixel people. Using aesprite on my Mac, and Pixaki on my iPad.

First effort is here

RPGMaker MV Wychwolf titles

 Background is a bit too busy really for a title page... but it gives me a structure on which I can build.

RPGMaker MV and Wychwolf

 Over a decade ago I drew a weekly webcomic with Adam called Wychwolf. It was a story about paranormal investigators in West Sussex in war time England, with werewolves, atomic hearts, invisible airships and crypts of pyramid tombs. The strip ran until Adam went to uni, and ran out of enthusiasm and words, making guest appearances in 24Hour Comic day stories.

I've been playing with various game engines and it seemed like the wychwolf world might lend itself to an RPG using RPGMaker MV.

I dug out the first few pages of the wychwolf story. 

Back then I drew the story on paper, scanned it with a flatbed scanner, as greyscale (I think) tidied and coloured the images in photoshop elements and published to a wordpress blog running the comic press theme.

The images were tiny, 750x553px and under 150kb.

I thought I'd see how different the pages might look today with my current way of working, drawing directly on an ipad with pencil in Autodesk Sketchbook.

The linework is almost identical, but the colours are flatter, none of the excessive dodge and burn tool use that it appears I loved back then... and the process is faster? Of course originally I had to work out what to draw based on Adam's scripts, and then alter it to try and squeeze in all the Alan Moore length speech bubbles... but I think it's faster, or I'm faster.

So I'm working on a bunch of backgrounds and characters to drop into RPGMaker MV. The tool itself is almost entirely database driven, no coding needed, the animations and transitions, stats and combat are all built in. I just need to add some visuals and a story...  which I've got.

The interstitial images I can grab from the old comic, and redraw. 

The only tricky bit is going to be the sprite sheets.

But that will be a nice project to work on in front of the fire, there's no rush.

30 drawing apps in 30 days day 2 - Pro create

Procreate has a big fan base, and this time round I think I can see why.
With the apple pencil it's a very flexible and intuitive app.
There's a huge range of image size options including 4K.
The undo icons are obvious, the pinch and zoom is standard, the colour picker and handy palette is easy, but the place it stands out is the number of brushes. In fact there are probably too many of them.

I spent a while trying to get something I felt comfortable with and the feel is very convincing. At one point I experienced the unnerving feeling of trying to paint on greasy paper... startlingly real.

Unfortunately I'm quite boring in my brush and pen choice, I tend to set one up and stick with it. When I used to be an illustrator I did nearly everything with a 0.5mm Rotring isograph.

Anyway, apparently I bought this over 5 years ago, and have been getting updates for it ever since. Current price is £9.99 which is a bargain for what it does, and it's won the Editors award whatever that means.

Will I use it again? Probably not for another 5 years.