As I said a while ago I now want Seekers to be optimized and ready for a print version. The fonts I used for the text and logo come from a font cd that I bought years ago, assuming them to be free to use for commercial items too then. Well, I was wrong. The people who put this cd in store simply downloaded free fonts from the web, removed the copyright notes and sold that. I noticed out of coincidence that both fonts I used are only valid for free items. While I don't plan to become a megacorp with this I also don't want to get in trouble for selling a few comic books later.

So I was in need of a new font and a new logo. Doh!
Comic Sans is a no-go, the fonts that come with Linux aren't pretty in a comic and the free fonts from comic font websites don't have German umlauts and may not be edited. So what could I do? I did what Scott McCloud suggested in his great book "Making Comics" and turned my own handwriting into a font. I hope it's not too much chicken scratch. ^^
Such a font is supposed to blend better with soundwords and the actual art.

Like most comics, Seekers will only use capitals from now on. As an added bonus, this removes any possibilites for mistakes with L/lady, m/Mylord and others.

I worked on the font for many, many days and I'm still not happy with the result. The letters are finally fine in height but the spaces between some of them are too small and uneven. Now it's up to my hubbie to explain FontForge to me so we can fix this.

Next up is the new logo. The old font is also only for free items and I decided to add the subtitle "Yonar Chronicles" to the Seekers logo anyway - lately there are so many movies, shows, books etc pp which have "Seeker" or "Seekers" in their title, I want to avoid any misunderstandings.

Since the new art software is way more complicated than expected and also offers a wealth of radically new options to me (like... maybe drawing my manga completely digitally!) Seekers is still stuck while I test and exercise.

I also got myself a new graphics tablet which is now an L size instead of an S. This is totally different from my old stuff too, especially the pressure sensitivity I never used before.
Since it required a foil on display right away to prevent scratching I had to postpone my training even further.

In order to not mess up Seekers by fumbling through the first dozen pages with no experience and training whatsoever I quickly hammered together a tiny side project. Yesterday I bought the Kindle version of the only book available that teaches how to use Manga Studio 5 EX and now I read it chapter by chapter and do as I'm told.
Today I learned about story folders, custom tools, page numbers and setting up pages with the correct measures for print. Next up is making colour palettes of my own. I will tackle that today but it's exhausting to learn so much at once. So I won't reach the chapters on layers, drafts, templates and materials today and my mini project still only consists of empty pages. (In the right size and with page numbers, though! )

I can tell you so much: It has to do with Seekers and it should be amusing.

I'll keep you updated on my progress! There is so, soooo much I have to re-learn, unlearn, re-think and decide now... it's like hitting a brick wall all day long and I need to take it slowly since I think I'm close to burn-out anyway (not from comicing, from live altogether).
In any case, I spent over 1,000 Euro on drawing equipment of all kind since Jan 2013, so I can't afford to quit drawing. I guess half of it will end up wasted - I'm pretty sure I'll either do most stuff digitally OR by hand, but I'll find other uses for those items.

As a small compensation for your patience here's the first draft of the first page of my mini project!
So I guess the cat is out of the bag now - it's a 6 page Whacky Wingling! Err... it WILL be one, as it's the first page, righto. He he.

This was drawn completely digitally. I will place another layer on top and draw a more detailed sketch. Then that will become the draft and I can ink the final version.
The experience was unusual but the result is very okay - when I throw the first anatomy pointers onto paper it doesn't look better. I also overlooked one line of text and Errol ended up in the wrong panel. On paper I would have had to erase him but here I just cut him out, scaled him up a bit and placed him in the right panel. Then drew another Errol besides Ellis and scaled him down to get some depth in. That is neat-o! Especially when I'm out of training characters constantly end up too small or too large and here I can fix that right away without wasting time redrawing them over and over. I think working completely digitally might really turn out as a boon for me.

Today I finished the book. The latter chapters weren't so good and I am left with a ton of questions, especially about panel templates, vector layers and speech bubbles. So I'm fiddling around and trying to find out what can and can't be done. There's a ton of great stuff in Manga Studio which really makes things easier - it creates custom screentones on the fly, has hatching brushes, perspective rulers and 3D models for hard poses. Some of that got so much coverage in the book that some comic basics were too shortly explained.

(Meh, must have done something wrong with the export - the larger panels should end OUTSIDE the visible borders of the comic so they should be cut off. Seee, still stuffz to learn!)

Translation for the first speech bubble:

Eh, what is that here?!

And here's the draft for page 2, made late at night.

Although I'm awake now! Actually I listened to my audio drama, then thought "Darn, why did it end so abruptly?". Then noticed that I had dozed off for 30 minutes and missed 8 chapters. Ooops. So I quickly went online, saw that mjkj diligently posted praise and was promptly inspired to draw the next page.

On page 3 the cast for this comic will be complete then. I think you know whom we're missing when Gisi shows up, righto?

Yayy for page 2

Better late than never, here's the sketch for the 3rd page of the Wacky Wingling for the English board, and the brandnew logo which I finally finished today.

Doesn't seem like there's any English-spoken community left, but just in case.