Wilbur Box
Here’s my latest comic: https://inhumaneresourcescomic.com/#/panel/271.
I’ll try to make this quick. I’ve got a stomach bug.
I used a weird technique to do draw these shaded figures that I call “shadow carving”. I have a really sloppy under layer with colors that looks like this:
And then I have a solid black block I put on top of it. Then I use a layer mask to peel away bits of the top block to reveal some of this. It’s not Degas, but I liked the subtlety of the shading.
The lighting is a little weird for the setting. I justify it by saying the viewpoint is pointing at the brightest part of the warehouse while Ada and Julius are standing in the darkest part of the warehouse, so the apeture (or the viewer’s iris) is contracting, casting them into shadow.
So I built this thing that I called a “gimp tool” last week, but I think I shall dub a “Wilbur Box” (Wilbur is a cartoon dog and Gimp’s mascot). It looks like this:
It’s an Arduino thing in an Altoids tin (Newman’s Own Ginger actually – I prefer the smooth metal of the tin). I put a nootropic design DJ Shield on the Arduino so I wouldn’t have to monkey around with electronics much. It sticks on my graphics tablet, and it’s supposed to stop me from going back and forth from my tablet to the keyboard. Currently, the controls do this:
- Top Dial Brush size
- Middle Dial Zoom
- Bottom Dial Undo-redo
- Top Middle Button Swap foreground-background color
- Middle Button Foreground black, background white
- Bottom Middle Button Suppress signal on dials
- Top Left Red Button Not used yet
- Bottom Left Button Copy
These current settings are mostly based around things I need for shading. I’m thinking of doing up to four modes. When you hit the red button, it’ll change what the other buttons do (I’ve got pretty solid plans for a mode for layer manipulation but nothing past that).
I’m terrible with tools, so when I manage something like this or the lunchbox server I made a couple years ago, I’m really pleased that I did it without Dremeling off any fingers.