Greetings from #rdcHQ! This week, we welcome a new member to the Cobwebs Crew, Ben Garratt. Ben arrived totally prepared with sketches of ideas for a new character in Cobwebs — tentatively entitled “The Waterling.” Like Um, the Waterling is a flying/floating creature, however it is propelled by two wings and is composed primarily of water. Ben created his first mockup entirely on the computer using Inkscape:

The Waterling by Ben Garratt / Production assistance by Devon Richard

Cloning Basics

Waterling was created using a couple of clever techniques that build upon last week’s cloning exercise. In this particular illustration, the calligraphic pen tool was used to create irregularly shaped lines (most Cobwebs illustrations use what is known as the Bezier Pen tool in order to achieve cleaner lines). A pattern was then created based on a short stroke of the pen and cloned using the “Spray Objects” tool in the Inkscape toolbar. This tool is based on the real world action of using a paint spray can.

As shown in the example below, the “Spray Objects” tool records the last pen action (be it Bezier pen , Freehand pencil , or Calligraphic strokes ).

Waterling’s wings were also created using a simple cloning method as shown below:

Like many of the characters, the “Waterling” will go through revisions as it is incorporated into Cobwebs – The Animated Series and reviewed by the rest of the team – but it is an excellent first draft and a great idea for a character! Ben also created a cool jack-o-lantern using the same Inkscape techniques outlined above. We thought it looked quite festive, so we are posting it here in anticipation of Halloween next week! Enjoy!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! In this weekend’s #deBUG Meetup, we shifted focus from a single page and began thinking about the design of the overall book, beginning with building a custom color palette for Scribus (our open source page layout program) based on the colors currently used in “Life on a Redwood Post.”

We chose GIMP (an open source image editing program) to collect the RGB values of each color on our taxonomy page. The Color Picker (Tools → Color Picker) is a useful tool to select or sample the values within an image. It is a common tool in image editing programs, sometimes referred to as the “eyedropper” tool. When used in conjunction with the Toolbox (Windows → Toolbox), it is very easy to determine the values of a color in any image.

Once all of the colors are determined in GIMP, they are transferred into Scribus to build a custom color palette for use in the book. We covered this method earlier this summer when we set up our first page template –

Once the color palette is built, the custom hues will be accessible within Scribus to apply to elements on the page, such as text and images. Our completed sample page for Midges is shown below.

Stay tuned!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! This week the Cobwebs Crew created a few more illustrations for Scene One and learned a couple of basic techniques. Cloning elements of an object is frequently used in both digital illustration and animation, and several of the drawings created by the crew this week were composed in this manner (we discussed this technique when we viewed “Lil’ Red” at a previous meetup). In order to construct some of the buildings in the city scene, elements of other buildings are repeated to give a uniform visual look and feel as shown here:

Young House by Colton Keeler and the cloned Young Condo fully equipped with a supersonic satellite dish perfect for rural areas!

The same technique was used to create this fence – understanding this technique helps young illustrators learn to look for opportunities to use it when creating art -

Quail coop and fence by Gabby McCutcheon (illustration in progress)

Cloning can also be used to good effect by repeating elements and slightly modifying the color or transforming the shape so that the object looks similar but not the same. This technique is evident in the illustration below coupled with an abstract hint of perspective which we will cover in more depth at our next meetup.

Quail Farm by Nate Malamud – Best Viewed Large

Cloned elements can be used to create a simple and charming animation as in the following example -

A simple animation exercise using CSS3 and cloned elements – Click to View

We will be covering this and bringing our scene together in the meetups ahead … Stay tuned!

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.