Them cats

I have read quite a bit of web comics lately. A couple nice ones are Lackadaisy and Bittersweet Candy Bowl. Lackadaisy is a superbly drawn comic about a speakeasy called Lackadaisy and the folks running that place in 1920's during the prohibition. Bittersweet Candy Bowl in turn is a comic about high school teenagers who have in between them a bunch of one-way – and sometimes two-way – love relationships, and drama ensues.

These two don't have much in common, except that in both the main characters are cats. The Lackadaisy world is run by cats only, whereas BCB world is run by both cats and dogs and has bunch of other talking animals as well.

Nevertheless, the idea I had was: what if the folks from these two worlds came across each other? Never mind that they are from quite different eras or that the other cats walk around mostly naked and the others tend to be fully and stylishly dressed.

This would happen. Sooner or later.

The boy cat in comfy blue scarf is Mike from Bittersweet Candy Bowl. The lady cat in lovely orange dress is the ever chipper Ivy Pepper from Lackadaisy. The tools used are, as usual, ProMarker colored markers and Fine Liner black pens on marker-proof paper, all from Letraset.

Neon Markers

The folks at Letraset were kind enough to send me a sample pack of their new Neon Markers. I tried them out and I feel they are quality items, though maybe limited to some special purposes.

Basically, the Neon Markers are artistic markers with fluorescent inks. The construction will be very familiar to anyone who has used ProMarkers from Letraset. Only discernible difference is that ProMarkers have small bullet tip on one end and larger chisel tip on the other, whereas Neon Markers have a bullet tip on both ends, one small and other larger.

The idea of fluorescent colours is that the colour appears impossibly bright, as if it was reflecting more light than there is. In fact, the colour is taking in light of a high frequency, such as ultraviolet light, and emitting it on lower frequency, such as yellow light.

The fact that Neon Marker colours react to ultraviolet light makes them especially attractive to situations where there's plenty of such light present. These colours will literally shine in places illuminated with little ordinary light and several blacklight bulbs.

Many of you may have already noticed that this fluorescent property is nothing new: in fact the common highlighter pens contain similar ink. I tried some highlighter pens I have and compared them to these Neon Markers. The colours hues are really similar to each other, but the colours of Neon Markers are clearly more saturated and vibrant than the colours of highlighters.

Here are the Neon Marker colours with some similar colours from the ProMarker range.

The Neon Marker colours in this picture are not too distinctive from what you can achieve with normal marker colours, except for luminous yellow and maybe for radiant orange. In the real life the differences were more visible, but the limited capabilities of the camera and computer monitors dull out the colours. So, if your target is to make something that will be shown on computer screen, the Neon Markers are so-so. Photocopying or ordinary four-colour printing will likely bump into same issue.

Here are the same colours when illuminated with a small ultraviolet torch.

 In ultraviolet light the Neon Markers really come to life, except for volt blue. That one just seems to have very little fluorescent properties and is almost the same colour as sky blue from ProMarker range. My camera seems to have somewhat freaked out with the colours in the picture illuminated with ultraviolet light, but you can still see the main point: the Neon Marker colours shine while other colours seem to become dull and dark in comparison to them.

So, to recap: these markers are so-so when the result is reproduced on computer screen. They are a lot better when people can see the original drawing you made. And when the original drawing is displayed under ultraviolet light aka. blacklight, that's when these markers work the best.

Making buttons with Inkscape

During my university studies I've made several buttons for TKO-äly, the organization for computer science students at Helsinki University. Here I'll describe my method for creating these buttons. The usual process is that I first sketch the button on paper, then draw the main image on paper or with Inkscape. Finally I composite the image with background and place several complete images on a single A4 sheet for printing, both using Inkscape. The printed images are then cut out from the paper sheet and made into buttons using a hand-operated button tool.

This post will be rather image-heavy, so it'll continue after the jump.

Never Trust a Smiling Succubus?

So, she approaches you, with bright smile and cute-but-curvy looks. Talks sweet nothings to your ear. Why should there be anything to worry about? Horns? What horns?



Markers and black pen on paper. Inspiration from one of the greatest webcomics out there, Sinfest. That comic's been running for eight years straight and still going strong.

Fun with markers 2: Freefall

A couple days ago I bumped into a great webcomic Freefall. One thing that caught my interest was how well the artist is able to express the characters' moods, reactions etc. in small scale and with just a couple lines. I decided to try and imitate that style.

So, here's Florence Ambrose, a Bowmans Wolf and a technician, from Freefall:


While I'm not quite happy with the colours (I need more brown shades!) I think that came out quite well.

For those who've been following this webcomic, finding the strip with Florence posing like that shouldn't be a hitch.

Also, I noticed that there are some interesting colours in my palette:

Blender, Orange and Apricot. Too bad, there's no colour Peach in my palette nor in ProMarker colour range.

Fun with markers

Almost two weeks ago I was looking to buy more colour pencils, as my old set of 12 pencils didn't include any skin tones. Well, I found me a nice 24 piece set, which still doesn't contain many skin tones and actually I already had half of those colours. I would probably been better off finding a retailer with loose pencils and buying a couple skin tones.

Well nevertheless, colour pencils weren't what I was going to blog about. Markers are. At the same trip, I noticed some sets of markers next to the colour pencils. There were sets in different styles: bright colours, grays, skin tones... Wait, that's what I wanted, wasn't it? Well, I ended up buying a comic art set with one skin tone, brown, blue, red and black so I could test them out.

I tested those five markers out and I totally liked them. They're rather fast to work with and they produce strong and brilliant colours. But, five colours is rather limiting. So, after weekend I went and bought some more and now I'm a happy owner of some twenty Letraset ProMarkers. Nothing too much, but as even those cost a bit much for my budget, they'll have to do for now.

But, let's cut the long story short, here's a picture I drew with those markers:Well, ok. I did use a bit more than markers: black ink pen for the lines and colour pencil to smooth out the background somewhat.

One thing I can't seem to figure out, is how to draw areas of flat colour. Look at the floor in previous image, for example. While using special paper meant for marker drawing alleviates this problem somewhat, it's still really easy to get visible stripes.