A Custom Fit

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overbarrel49
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Re: A Custom Fit

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web-ed wrote: Being rather socially conservative, Willjohn, I can't support a divorce under these circumstances. Therefore, by a process of elimination, it will simply have to be "a bare arsed spanking" :lol: !
hi web-ed,

excellent decision :D :lol: .
web-ed wrote:I got here rather late in the day I'm afraid, Phil, so everyone else has already covered the main points. As an expert on the comics medium :ugeek: , I will add my two cents' worth on the question of the "loquacious speech balloons," however. In general, it's very easy to overwrite comics, because depending on the size of the panel, there are two hazards to watch out for: (1) Writing so many lines that the art is obscured, or (2) Writing so many lines that the pace of the story, which is controlled largely by how fast the reader moves from panel to panel, is slowed down too much (of course the difference in subject matter between successive panels also controls the pacing) .
i always consider how much room will be taken up by the word balloons, usually when i am posing the pics, although sometimes i am more successful at this than others :lol: . it is never my intention to cover up the players in my toons, or even small portions of them if i can help it, although sometimes i am left with no choice but to cover bits of them if i have misjudged the amount of space required for the dialog. however, your second point about the pace of the story is something that i had completely missed. i had never even considered that :o . perhaps that is because i generally post them one pic at a time but your comment has caused me to pause and consider folks who are reading the whole toon at one sitting. the example that comes most strongly to mind is Sunflower. she is a relatively recent addition to our little family here and i know she went back and read many toons that were posted before she arrived. i'm glad you mentioned this and it is something that i'll be thinking about from now on.
web-ed wrote:The first of these shouldn't be a problem for the artist/writer, since he presumably will not cover up the best portion of his artwork with a lot of speech balloons! The second is more tricky - I have found that a rather "standard" sized panel in a comic book, say 1/6 to 1/4 of a page, really only has room for two or three rather short lines of dialogue. In fact, probably the greatest limitation of the comics medium is that it cannot sustain extended dialogue the way the stage play and the movie can (the play and the movie being closer to comics than prose or poetry are). Early comic strips really struggled with this, and featured tiny panels crowded with dialogue balloons because you had so little space on a newspaper page. [In the 1980's, Alan Moore showed that you could however sneak in extended monologues by switching to first-person narration and using captions instead of balloons. This has some pitfalls of its own we don't need to get into here.]
these are more interesting observations. one advantage i have over comic strips or books is that my pics are much larger..............which is a good thing for me since i can get away with being more wordy :lol: . i could correct part of this by moving the camera back and having the action smaller to leave more room for dialog and i do consider that when i am posing the pic. as a general rule, though, i like to be as close to the action as possible to give the viewer the best view, except in some cases where a wider view better depicts the action. also, i have noticed that if i crowd the players too much with word balloons, it sometimes detracts from the way the pic actually depicts the action. i am constantly trying to balance the 2.
web-ed wrote:Still, I think your crowded panels are defensible here for two reasons: first, they are largely expository, thus it's o.k. for the forward motion of the story to be slowed down a bit, and second, although this is surely the comics medium it's not exactly a comic book, and therefore perhaps the rules can be stretched a bit. Digital formatting provides both opportunities and limitations that I don't think anyone, even myself, has given enough serious thought to. Maybe the presentation on the computer is different enough to constitute a third branch of comics, along with the strip and the book - or maybe I'm making too much of this and eventually digital comics will come to be seen as no different than the strip or the graphic novel.
i don't know if the rules will ultimately be different for this kind of medium than it is for more traditional ones. i would like to find ways to get by with less dialog if possible, but the problem is that i have a certain story that i am trying to tell and the only good way to do that would be to do more pics and spread the words out and i don't really know if that would be better or not. i am open to suggestions if any of you have any. as far as these first 4 pics go, even though they are pretty crowded, i don't see it as a problem since this is all set up and there really isn't any action going on.
web-ed wrote:Anyway, I'm sure the panels will be less crowded as the action begins to pick up and Tina learns the hard way the truths her mother tried to tell her. :)
there will indeed be fewer words as we get into the spanking although Steve WILL be doing some lecturing as we go along 8-) . i have a question for everyone. i am currently using a font size of 18 to make sure everyone is able to read the dialog. sometimes i will use a 14 if i want to indicate that someone is speaking softly. do you think it would be a problem for folks to read if i used a 14 all the time? thanks, phil
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daneldorado
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by daneldorado »

overbarrel49 wrote:

i have a question for everyone. i am currently using a font size of 18 to make sure everyone is able to read the dialog. sometimes i will use a 14 if i want to indicate that someone is speaking softly. do you think it would be a problem for folks to read if i used a 14 all the time? thanks, phil

Phil, I am no computer expert; thus, I'm not sure that every single computer out there -- desktop, laptop or tablet -- is able to do this. But you are asking if we, your readers, can read your prose if you used a number 14 font. Well, if you use a small font, most computers should be able to magnify the letters on our screens, if they have to. So I would say: Yes, in the interest of keeping your images free from crowding, a number 14 would be fine.

Cheers,
Dan
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Re: Font Sizes

Post by web-ed »

overbarrel49 wrote:i am currently using a font size of 18 to make sure everyone is able to read the dialog. sometimes i will use a 14 if i want to indicate that someone is speaking softly. do you think it would be a problem for folks to read if i used a 14 all the time?
That's a hard question to answer because font sizes in the context of your art are not absolute. Let me explain what I mean.

When you create one of your panels, you're working from a particular size. I'm not sure what it is, but your finished panels are 1280 x 960 pixels. I'm not sure exactly how your text tool works, but if it's like Microsoft Paint, the text is an absolute size that is independent of the size of the picture. Therefore, a given text size will look larger in a small picture than a large one. You have to use trial and error to find what size looks good - at least that's my experience when creating a diagram or rewriting some comic's word balloons.

The next problem is that you can't be sure how readers will be viewing your art. If they view it here on the bulletin board itself, then the text size will depend on the zoom factor they have chosen in their browser for the page. Note that the apparent text size will now be independent of the Font Size Control on this page (did everyone know they could adjust the text size by using this control, which appears just above the "Logout" toward the upper r.h. corner of this page?) and of the font controls in your browser (you can specify minimum font sizes in your browser's "preferences" or "tools," depending on which browser you're using, or let the page determine the font size and style). The reason none of these font controls will work on your art is because the text is now part of the art as far as the browser is concerned - it's not "true" text any more. In fact, it's not text any more as far as any picture-viewing software is concerned either (except for Optical Character Recognition software, which is designed to recognize text).

I myself prefer to download your art into a folder, then use either a previewer or ACDsee to view it at fullscreen size. This also makes it easier to go from one panel to the next using the arrow keys on the keyboard.

What does this mean for you? At full screen size, the current font you're using is probably as small as can be read easily by middle-aged people (or older). I would guess that a smaller font size would mean some readers having to change their zoom factor. I suggest you experiment with one balloon on a copy of the art: write some dialogue in size 14, then save the work and view it full screen (as with previewer). See if it looks too small this way - I don't think you want people to have to zoom in to the point that the full panel is no longer visible on the screen in order to read the speech balloons. And that's your answer :lol: !
-- Web-Ed
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overbarrel49
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Re: A Custom Fit

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web-ed wrote:When you create one of your panels, you're working from a particular size. I'm not sure what it is, but your finished panels are 1280 x 960 pixels. I'm not sure exactly how your text tool works, but if it's like Microsoft Paint, the text is an absolute size that is independent of the size of the picture. Therefore, a given text size will look larger in a small picture than a large one. You have to use trial and error to find what size looks good - at least that's my experience when creating a diagram or rewriting some comic's word balloons.
hi web-ed,

my computer is right at one year old and was specifically designed to operate Poser efficiently by my computer man. pics that used to take me a half hour to render, now render in 1 minute or less. i can't give you all the details but it has 2 tarabytes of ram and a 14 gig processor. in the winter, i often have to go put on a flannel shirt when i am at the computer on because the fans are moving so much air, i get cold. it's at least 1 1/2 times the size of my last one and, as i told the man who built it, it looks like it should be directing ICBMs or something :lol: . the screen resolution is 1920X1080 and the text size is set to smallest.......100%. i used to use photoshop 7, which is an excellent program, but this computer has 64 bit graphics and photoshop 7 is and old program that Adobe no longer supports so it will not operate on this machine. i bought photoshop elements 11 and that's what i am currently using to do the post work on my renders. it won't do as much but will do nearly everything i need. i started doing the pics in 1280 X 960 with my last computer and i think it is still plenty big.
web-ed wrote: The next problem is that you can't be sure how readers will be viewing your art. If they view it here on the bulletin board itself, then the text size will depend on the zoom factor they have chosen in their browser for the page. Note that the apparent text size will now be independent of the Font Size Control on this page (did everyone know they could adjust the text size by using this control, which appears just above the "Logout" toward the upper r.h. corner of this page?) and of the font controls in your browser (you can specify minimum font sizes in your browser's "preferences" or "tools," depending on which browser you're using, or let the page determine the font size and style). The reason none of these font controls will work on your art is because the text is now part of the art as far as the browser is concerned - it's not "true" text any more. In fact, it's not text any more as far as any picture-viewing software is concerned either (except for Optical Character Recognition software, which is designed to recognize text).
yeah, i knew that everyone views it differently...........not only because of where they are viewing it and what program but also factors like screen size, age of the computer and personal settings are involved. that's why i thought it would be good to ask folks and see what they thought about the smaller font. i think i will ask this question to my toon groups when i post today's pic. you are right about the dialog not being text anymore when i post the pics as i post them as jpegs. when i am working on them in PSD format it is still text but once i save them as jpegs, the dialog is just part of the jpeg.
web-ed wrote: I myself prefer to download your art into a folder, then use either a previewer or ACDsee to view it at fullscreen size. This also makes it easier to go from one panel to the next using the arrow keys on the keyboard.
mine are, of course, saved to a folder in my computer before i post them and i use Microsoft office picture manager to open them. it opens them at 95% which is full screen on this computer. this also has the arrow keys which is why i use it, so i can quickly go from one pic to another.
web-ed wrote:What does this mean for you? At full screen size, the current font you're using is probably as small as can be read easily by middle-aged people (or older). I would guess that a smaller font size would mean some readers having to change their zoom factor. I suggest you experiment with one balloon on a copy of the art: write some dialogue in size 14, then save the work and view it full screen (as with previewer). See if it looks too small this way - I don't think you want people to have to zoom in to the point that the full panel is no longer visible on the screen in order to read the speech balloons. And that's your answer :lol: !
GEEZ! :roll: what a struggle!i am planning to do some tests on this. not only am i gonna look at the pics after reducing the font but i have a friend who is gonna check them out too plus i plan on asking the members of my toon group for opinions about it too. it would be nice to be able to use the smaller font size to de-crowd my pics some but i do want folks to be able to see it. thanks for all the info.............i think :lol: . phil
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by overbarrel49 »

UH-OH!
UH-OH!
005.jpg (310.59 KiB) Viewed 2004 times
hi everyone,

it looks like Steve has decided his dad was :o right after all................ :lol: . Tina seems to be wondering about what her mom said to her too :roll: . i hope you all enjoy the new pic. phil
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by sunflower309 »

hi Phil,

seems like it's better late than never with our young couple! Steve is definitely inexperienced! I don't see an experienced spanker let Tina go on for so long without checking her behavior! we will see how fast a learner she is now. I think you have captured Steve's determination and Tina's surprise! I bet she is going to be even more surprised in a few moments. I hope Steve keeps his determination! Tina is a girl looking for a spanking, whether she realizes it or not. hope she gets a good one! knowing you I bet she does!

as always, good one Phil! thanks for all your hard work ad effort!

sunflower
willjohn
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by willjohn »

Looks like Tina's mouth has been making promises her arse cannot keep.

"Operation Red Rump" is beginning. If a chair is involved it will not be for Tina to sit on. :twisted:
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Re: A Custom Fit

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sunflower309 wrote:hi Phil,

seems like it's better late than never with our young couple! Steve is definitely inexperienced! I don't see an experienced spanker let Tina go on for so long without checking her behavior! we will see how fast a learner she is now. I think you have captured Steve's determination and Tina's surprise! I bet she is going to be even more surprised in a few moments. I hope Steve keeps his determination! Tina is a girl looking for a spanking, whether she realizes it or not. hope she gets a good one! knowing you I bet she does!
hi Sunflower,

yep. Steve is inexperienced or he would have spanked his bride on their wedding night ;) . we will indeed see how fast a learner she is. however, as much as Steve is inexperienced as a spanker, that's how much Tina is inexperienced as a spankee so it might take her a while.............she'll catch on though :lol: . yeah, not only is she gonna be more surprised at what's gonna happen, but she's also gonna be surprised that her mom was right about the stuff she was telling Tina :lol: . Steve is determined right now but i have a hunch that might be hard for him to maintain. you have to remember that he's young, inexperienced as a spanker and just chock full of testosterone, all of which is gonna make it hard for him to keep his concentration 8-) . i can remember spanking my high school girl friend. by the time i got her turned over and got her dress up, i was struggling to keep on task :lol: . i liked your comment about Tina looking for a spanking whether she realizes it or not..............i'm betting Steve doesn't realize it either but those realizations should come as time goes by 8-) .
sunflower309 wrote:as always, good one Phil! thanks for all your hard work ad effort!
you're welcome :D . thanks, phil
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Re: A Custom Fit

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willjohn wrote:Looks like Tina's mouth has been making promises her arse cannot keep.
hi Willjohn,

well said :lol: .
willjohn wrote:"Operation Red Rump" is beginning. If a chair is involved it will not be for Tina to sit on. :twisted:
i hadn't thought about giving the spanking a name :lol: . there will indeed be a chair involved in this and no, Tina will not be the one sitting in it :D . thanks, phil
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by butch46163@yahoo.com »

You are so right Balllooms don`t give much space for a lot of words in a comic strip remember when I was younger and trying to draw a spanking comic book and using two or more thought ballooms so that the characters could say everything :lol: LOVE YOUR SPANKING DRAWINGS KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK 8-)
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overbarrel49
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by overbarrel49 »

butch46163@yahoo.com wrote:You are so right Balllooms don`t give much space for a lot of words in a comic strip remember when I was younger and trying to draw a spanking comic book and using two or more thought ballooms so that the characters could say everything :lol: LOVE YOUR SPANKING DRAWINGS KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK 8-)
hi Butch,

yeah, it's hard to get all the dialog in those little balloons............especially for someone as wordy as i am :lol: . i'll do my best though. i'm glad you like my toons :D . thanks, phil
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by overbarrel49 »

here's a surprise
here's a surprise
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hi everyone,

in our last episode, Steve vowed to follow his dad's instructions to the letter but looking at this week's pic, i don't remember his dad saying anything like this :lol: . it appears to me he might have committed a rookie mistake as a spanker and just reacted to all the verbal stimuli Tina has been giving him rather than thinking this through thoroughly :roll: . of course, in some cases, there can be some interesting results from using Steve's method 8-) . i hope you enjoy the new pic. phil
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Re: A Custom Fit #6

Post by web-ed »

Well, Steve's inexperience is showing but at least he's got the idea to turn his soon-to-be-blushing-again bride over his knee. It wasn't done very smoothly, but she's almost in position. Let's hope he remember the all-important lecture!

Good progress with this installment :D !
-- Web-Ed
willjohn
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by willjohn »

To paraphrase the old Army saying, "spank first & ask questions later." 8-)
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Re: A Custom Fit

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web-ed wrote:Well, Steve's inexperience is showing but at least he's got the idea to turn his soon-to-be-blushing-again bride over his knee. It wasn't done very smoothly, but she's almost in position. Let's hope he remember the all-important lecture!

Good progress with this installment :D !
hi web-ed,

yeah, not very smoothly at all :lol: . he'll figure it out as time goes on though :D . in this case, i think he was just reacting and not thinking about technique :lol: i'm glad you enjoyed it :D . thanks, phil
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Re: A Custom Fit

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overbarrel49 wrote:To paraphrase the old Army saying, "spank first & ask questions later." 8-)
hi Willjohn,

well said.............apparently Steve agrees with you :lol: . thanks, phil
sunflower309
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by sunflower309 »

ahhhh, 2 rookies! I guess they can learn together. they should practice a lot because after all practice makes perfect! another good one Phil!

sunflower
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Re: A Custom Fit

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sunflower309 wrote:ahhhh, 2 rookies! I guess they can learn together. they should practice a lot because after all practice makes perfect! another good one Phil!

sunflower
hi Sunflower,

they can indeed learn together which is an interesting comment since i think that's the approved process for young couples :D . besides, if they keep practicing, they might eventually make their marriage "a custom fit" :lol: . thanks, phil
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by overbarrel49 »

OOPS
OOPS
007.jpg (306.5 KiB) Viewed 2215 times
hi everyone,

speaking of rookie mistakes.............here's a classic :lol: . a classic that i have to admit, i made a few times myself in my younger days :oops: . it's not fair though............all that testosterone running amuck in your system interferes with higher brain functions and causes the spanker to lose his concentration :roll: . of course, this same process may cause spankees to make mistakes too :? . i hope you enjoy the new pic. phil
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Re: A Custom Fit

Post by daneldorado »

Great looking legs in the latest toon, Phil.

Cheers,
Dan
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