Waffle

I was going to make this a voter incentive, but I'm going to show this to everyone instead as it explains some of the reasons why I'm spending so much time on the reruns:

(Click image for full view)

This is from the 40th page of the Corby Tribe serial that is currently running on the Drunk Duck mirror. So far, re-runs have involved only minor tweaks, but this one involves some major reworkings. I was never happy with that panel, and the original version as published on the site is actually much darker than shown here in a desperate attempt to hide Krakatoa's body. The pose gave me difficulties and still does, but I think the new version is much improved.

Most panels are not actually re-drawn, but the work still involves the following:

1. Gathering up the scans from a range of archives, some of which are broken
2. Re-scanning artwork whose scans are corrupt or cannot be located
3. Re-coloring artwork that needed to be re-scanned
4. For artwork that didn't need to be re-scanned, gather up the colored files done in GIMP in 2002, stripping off the art layer from them, flattening the resulting files to PNGs, opening these in Photoshops, enlarging them to the size of the original scans and pasting the enlarged versions back into the new masters, hoping that they will fit. If they don't fit, the GIMP versions are used as guides for recolouring
5. DTP work to create new final masters and exporting these back to Photoshop for web preparation. I cannoth do the web preparation in Scribus as the scaling algorithm it uses for export doesn't anti-alias properly - yet another strike against it.

I can only predict the time per page for the final three operations, and that alone comes out at 45 minutes per update, nevermind what comes before. So we're still at an hour per update, and that means that to get far enough ahead to cover for the two months I'll be away starting in two weeks, I have to expend 60 hours, which I don't have. This weekend I managed 12 updates, and then had to switch to managing financial stuff related to me leaving the studio 9 months ago, which took up the rest of Sunday afternoon. Work on tomorrow's Feral update hasn't even started, so there will not in fact be an update. Again.

The good news here is that as getting as far ahead as I want to be is practically impossible, I'm going to stop trying next week. Instead I will gather up the materials I need to continue doing the work during my next stay with Aggie in the United States and spend as much time as possible cranking out Feral updates in whatever spare time I can find. So hopefully the days of fortnightly updates will soon be over.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Work: ROCR discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.