Sunday, March 2, 2008

Elfworld Alphabet: A to Z(ed)

Last night saw a trans-Atlantic flurry of Elfworld-related activity as Isaac and I took care of the final tasks for our story prior to submitting it, at long last, to the editor of the Elfworld anthology. (Cross your fingers for us, folks.) True to form, we were both up most of the night in racing to meet our comics deadline, but this is the first time we've engaged in such behavior while on different continents. Verily, this story would never have happened in this form without scanners and email.

But what kept us up, you might wonder? Didn't the last page of our story get posted back in December? Indeed so. But I still had to letter the title and Isaac had to wrangle a lot of computer files to get the story ready to submit. And alas, we both had some final drawings to do, so as to complete our series of alphabetical fantasy-world portraits designed to fill out the bottom margins of our pages in book format (as opposed to postcard format).

Well, we got those drawings done, by gum, and then Isaac, bless his heart, chopped up fifty itty-bitty files [Edit: see comments] and laid them out in order and labelled them. BEHOLD:



If ever there was an image on this blog for you to click and enlarge, this is it.

And now, our story is really and truly finished--in its black and white form, at least...

6 comments:

Isaac said...

Actually, there are ninety-nine cut-and-paste jobs in that image, not fifty. Each of the labels had to be wrestled in there, too.

But it wasn't nearly as hard as that makes it sound. In fact, making this file was the easiest way to get all the portraits lined up nicely before putting them on the bottoms of the pages.

It seems like I learn something new every time I have a Photoshop project, and this time was no exception.

Ben Towle said...

Beautiful! Can't wait to see the completed thing in both book and postcard format. -B.

Isaac said...

If you think they'll be fun in book and postcard format, wait till we print up these little portraits as stickers!

(I'm not kidding. But it'll be a while. Maybe we'll do it in time for MoCCA, though.)

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Shira said...

Congratulations on completing the comic and the alphabet. Perhaps it's just my imagination, but do the glasses on the Pedant resemble Isaac's when he does self-portraits? and does the scribe have a fleeting likeness to Mike? Just wondering if my eyes are playing tricks on me or if there was something intentional or subconscious going on in your drawings.

Isaac said...

Oh, don't worry, Shira -- that's entirely deliberate. We have put a "cameo" like this into every issue, so it seemed right to engineer one into the Fantasy Folk as well.