This week in Cobwebs Lab, the crew created the first vector sketch of Evelyn Jenning’s latest character, “Claíre Libre.” The artist describes the character as “a former french servant of Sabré who wants revenge after two centuries. Unfortunately, the day she planned revenge was the day all monsters were forced into a magical box. Luckily, Claire could transform into a house cat. She went from family to family for 200 years until she ran into Charles and developed a soft spot for him. She also has a pet ghost-cat named Pierré.”

The crew also created a few new Cobwebs Cards for the Holiday Art Walk at Point.B Studio this weekend — Thank you, Cobwebs Crew for making it a special event with your talent, art and music!

New Cobwebs Characters “Claire Libré” by Evelyn Jennings and “Scales” by Ben Garratt

At this point, they have completed graphics for the Quail Farm Chapter and the Video Game Scene which is now ready for animation. They are beginning work in Toon Boom Studio which is proving to be a boon for production. The graphics that they create in Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator are completely editable in Toon Boom which makes it much easier to manipulate key objects of the illustration to create animations. This next segment of the series will feature more sophisticated animations due to the increased control our animators have over the source graphics. We plan to publish in the next couple of weeks and then begin the next scene — The Young House.

Stay tuned!

From the #rdcHQ Extra Credit Dept.: We can’t say enough about the talent of some of the younger members at #rdcHQ this year. And although this release is a bit late considering the holiday has come and gone, we would like to take a moment to feature Nathan Malamud’s amazing “Tom T. Turkey Big Box Of Fun 0.1″ (a.k.a. “Thanksgiving Leftovers from Scratch”)

Nathan Malamud’s Tom T. Turkey Big Box Of Fun 0.1

There is a lot to behold in this sophisticated Scratch project – the application has upgraded versions of the original Tom T. Turkey Construction Kit and a new board game feature based on Thanksgiving history that is equal parts fact and fiction. The game is full of fun BananaBandito-style graphics and Tom.T.Turkey humor. Well done!

We also have another special creation to announce by one of our Cobwebs Crew members this weekend – Stay Tuned!

Greetings! We have been busy on our new project brainstorming the Port Orford Community Stewardship Area and we are pleased to announce the first poster in a set of two featuring the stunning photography of Scott Peden of “Life on a Redwood Post” fame and collaborative poster art by The Rural Design Collective.

Download a PDF version of our Champion Tree poster! [2.5 MB]

We are very excited about this event – you can read more about it in this recent article in The Oregonian — Ancient redwoods, giant sequoias to be ‘archived’ on Oregon coast. We’ll have more news about our work with our beta version of POCSA over the coming weeks, plus news of a second event this December.

Stay tuned! ….

Life on a Redwood Post – Creating Color Palettes

Hola! A color palette for the current insect orders is now available thanks to Becca Malamud. Using the color picker in GIMP, she defined all of the hues, and uploaded it to Dropbox so other team members can import it to maintain color consistency. The video below illustrates how to import a color palette under Edit → Colors.

We’re dividing up the rest of the templates for design and production – next in the queue, Spittlebugs, Psuedoscorpions and Spiders! (Not necessarily in that order ) We also made considerable progress on our Field Notes page which is a key component of the design – more news on that soon.

The Spittlebug – otherwise known as the “Pug Bug” at #rdcHQ. Photograph by Scott Peden.