This week was spent on admin and comics. I’m still trying to get prices for printing. It’s looking reasonably good, except the photo books are larger than a digital press can do for their covers, so that’s going to be problematic.
I made what may turn out to be a reasonably big decision with regards to the final part of Surfing The Deathline. Originally slated to be a 66 page volume, I had a fresh look through it, and realised I could split it into 32 & 42 page episodes, taking the series to 5 parts. Since all books need to be a multiple of 4 pages, I had to add 3 and 2 content pages respectively to each book in order to get the pagecount to work. Below are the extra page roughs from what will be the new Surfing The Deathline 4:
What’s most important about these images is that they’re entirely digital – drawn in ProCreate from Tasmanian company Savage Interactive, using the Adonit Jot Touch stylus on the iPad. Sketching rough pages like this was a bit of a revelation – the ability to zoom, move, apply transforms and duplicate panels while drawing on the screen itself, brings an entirely different sensation for writing.
I also tried something I’ve not done before – tweeting each image with at-mentions of ProCreate and Adonit – both of whom at-mentioned me back with messages of support, so that’s an interesting experiment in social media.
Another change was to finally upgrade my Mac to run the current Mavericks version of Mac OS X. I held off till now, waiting until Apple added back the ability for iOS devices to sync contacts & calendar information locally, rather than having to send the data to the other side of the planet in order to move it 30cm.
That done, the new system seems to be pretty stable.
Another thing, I was approached by an iPad keyboard vendor to review their product. It’s pretty interesting bit of gear, so we’ll see how it goes.