Ever hear the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig” ? Well, it’s harder than it looks.
The usual formatting, scaling, tweaking, and cleanup… plus a continuity fix for the beer label. Don’t know how I missed that on first edition assembly… at least now (thanks to Transitional Voices) I have an appropriate beer label to smack into place.
The “Chapter One” announcement is a new thing, to go with the new layouts – I figure it’ll be helpful to the reader to have a visual indicator, as the target form-factor (the much muttered-about “hardcopy”) won’t have the chapter covers to split things up.
Unlike the incursion/signal splash, this one’s been cropped at the same target size as regular pages for reasons of font size consistency. Here’s what the full version looks like:
First Edition Metadata
OPD: 2004.12.26 @ 18:19
20070722 – Reworded and overhauled. Much, much sexier than the old version.
See?
===================================================
Zero gravity spit take- CLEANUP ON AISLE NINE.
Less than three weeks of downtime. 20 days from the end of Chapter Three, 18 if you go from the initial drafts of the cover and the first three pages. The cover went through a couple of revisions, the introduction got worked, reworked, redone, etc. more than anything I’ve worked on to date (frustrating, that), and then the previous page and the backdrop for this one were extensively overhauled to make everything match.
I’m glad that’s over. :P
If you’re just tuning in, you have and haven’t missed a few pages- you have in that there are four pages of Signal already done, and you haven’t in that there’s no line art and they’re all aesthetic and tone. Looks great in hardcopy.
I’ve been bitten by the splash composition. Something fierce.
There’ll be a lot of transitions like this in Chapter Zero- hopefully now that I have the basic look down, I won’t spend as much time tweaking the rest of them when the time comes.
Polaski is drinking Arsenal Light out of a squeeze bottle- it’s a “microgravity microbrew”- high viscosity, low carbs, designed specifically for zero-G. And he’s wearing magnetic boots (somewhat obviously).
In other news… I’m not happy with the first panel- but after nearly a month of redoing the preceeding three pages several times, I’m of no mind to rework it, downsample it, optimize it, hard-sync it, back it up, etc. again. No sir. Rather than waste time on that, I will in all likelihood plunge forward and hopefully get something done and up early in the week.
