Greetings from #rdcHQ! We had our second Fall meetup of the season yesterday to work on “Life on a Redwood Post” and we are excited to announce that we have a new mentee on this track, Becca Malamud Ozer. Becca is joining us remotely from California and she is bringing considerable technological and creative skills to our “Bug Book”. She studied at Laney College and the California College of the Arts and is accomplished in the culinary arts as well. She is currently devoting her creative time to the noble task of converting text to e-text for students with disabilities. We welcome her to the Rural Design Collective! RDC Veteran Oceana Rain Fields is continuing work on this track from her outpost in Oregon.

Bookmark “Life on a Redwood Post” – buy a book today and help us liberate an archive of insects!

Our preparations during our Fall Track to date have primarily focused on building our collaborative work environment on Dropbox. Using Dropbox we are able to effectively upload photos, organize icons and share page layouts between our remote team members, including Scott Peden who will be joining us further down the road in the development of the book. He has many new photographs for the next edition!

Our “Life on a Redwood Post” collaborative workspace on Dropbox

During the Summer Track, we built the first of our field guide templates in Scribus. We still have several types of master pages to build before we will be ready to prepare the next edition of the book in Spring 2013. Aside from a typical field guide page, we have the backmatter (acknowledgements, glossary, map), frontmatter (dedication, table of contents, taxonomy), field notes and our section pages. Once we complete the templates for these pages, we will be ready to assemble the final book in Scribus for publication. There is a lot of work to do this Fall and Winter and we are ready to go — by the end of this track we all fully expect to be experts on insects and open source page layout programs! … Stay tuned!

Expertly identifying insect icons on Dropbox with Oceana Rain Fields and Becca Malamud Ozer.

This week, we began diving into Diagrams III after completing work in Blends – a lot of complex work lies ahead in this set and we’ll be repurposing as much of our existing work as possible while remaining true to the original art. For instance, there are a lot of similar drawings based on work the Rural Design Collective completed in 2011 – The CCR image is shown on the left, and the prior art is shown on the right:

In addition to the shading, there are subtle differences in the line that we will need to address when we create the new vector graphic. Another example:

There are several graphics like this in Diagrams III, as well as completely new illustrations involving complex perspective. We’ll be testing our skills as we enter the homestretch at #rdcHQ!

This week at #rdcHQ - the Cobwebs Crew continued work on the character art, and are bringing the various scenes together visually by matching the characters up with the key background frames:

They also began working with their backgrounds and characters in Pencil to create simple animation loops. Shown below is a brief snippet from our introduction featuring a cast of Ums in the forest:

The collective noun for our group of imaginary creatures came from this curious list (also referenced by “Life on a Redwood Post”) —

Speaking of the “The Bug Book,” we successfully completed work on our first Scribus template! More news next #deBUG Day!

Life on a Redwood Post – Designing in Scribus

Greetings from #rdcHQ! This week, we created our first video tutorial for “Life on a Redwood Post” which will be moving into our first ever Fall Track this year. Oceana Rain Fields is joining us remotely via Skype, and we are getting ready by installing Scribus and all necessary supporting files (fonts, graphics, etc … ) so we can create our first page template.

Nathan Malamud is taking time out of his busy Cobwebs summer schedule to edit a series of focused video mini-tutorials about working in Scribus using raw screen recordings from the desktops of the designers. The first in the “Designing in Scribus” series shows the various steps necessary to create a custom color in the program:

Cobwebs – Adventures In Background Art

The Cobwebs Crew has been hard at work on their background art for the series. Photographs of most of the key scenes have been taken, and are being used as reference material for vector illustrations. The Crew has been experimenting with Adobe Photoshop filters to make the visual suit the mood of the scene in the story.

Pull the center green handle to the left and right to see the special effects by the Cobwebs Crew —

We were really impressed by the creativity of several of these images, such as “Bill’s Room / Sabre Comes” by Cobwebber Devon Richard —

Cobwebs will also be moving into the Fall Track this year … More soon …