Aloha! We’ve got an amazingly talented and motivated group of kids at rdcHQ this summer working as our Cobwebs Crew, and they are truly developing an interest in art and technology. We’d like to call attention to these special efforts.

Designing From Scratch

Build your own deBUG!

Debugger Nathan Malamud designed and programmed the incredible deBUG Bug Builder in Scratch using art by the Rural Design Collective. It is a highly creative piece of work with a lot of clever nuances – one has to play the game to experience them all. We learned just yesterday during our deBUG Day Meetup that his game is now featured in five galleries at the Scratch website including “Cool Games In The World”. We’re pretty proud of this accomplishment and happy that the kids have an opportunity to build on their budding interest in programming at #rdcHQ.

An introductory class on learning Scratch was offered at their forward-thinking school this summer. Special thanks to Levi Thompson and Open Clip Art Library for providing our signature insect art.

Next up in the Extra Credit lineup is a new Scratch Webisode called Banana Bandito – Part 1 which is yet another creation by Nate Malamud. A clever script and humorous graphics make this a story you want to follow. The main character, Banana Bandito, is the prototype for the Cobwebs characters and they do share a certain resemblance (we’ll be showcasing the art of the talented Evelyn Jennings in a separate post which drove the character development in the Cobwebs script).

Creating Cobwebs

Debugger Gabby McCutcheon is a shining star on the Cobwebs Crew, showing a talent for creating unique vector art in both Illustrator and Inkscape. She is recreating art from the Crew’s sketches as well as creating original illustrations purely in the digital format. She has a keen sense of texture and line. Special thanks to Kelsey Brokaw for color and art direction on the bird (species C. grontogo) — illustration shown at right.

The character and scene studies for Cobwebs are rolling in – our scene studies show a character out of the script (and the Crew’s vivid collective imagination) combined with a digitally enhanced photographic image from present reality. The resulting art is intriguing, beautiful and quite unique to Cobwebs.

Mad props to the Cobwebs Crew – Kelsey Brokaw, Evelyn Jennings, Colton Keeler, Nathan Malamud, Gabby McCutcheon and Devon Richard – they will be joining us for our end of the year art show, “beaux libre” on September 1.

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!

Busy, busy, busy at #rdcHQ We successfully converted 311 MathML equations using SVGMath. All of these equations are now coded in MathML which we use as the source for our conversion. We are currently in the process of checking our work against the original graphic. We also kicked off the DocGen portion of our program by batch-processing 200+ basic text content objects in Tesseract. The results are promising, and we are exploring ways we can train Tesseract for better results.

SVG Update: Autotrace (Outline Method)

Our SVG team successfully completed work on Labels and Flowcharts. We are also cleaning up work on our Map collection that we converted to SVG using the Autotrace function. We’re currently cleaning up symbols and typography … more updates soon … Stay Tuned!

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 …