Here’s the thing, because I fixed so much I thought was broken in the last iteration, all my posts are broken. Sounds counter-intuitive, huh. Trust me. I’m going to go through them all and make them look right. And, while I’m at it, I will be proofreading them. The design was not the only thing I was getting tired of. I’ve hidden those posts for now.

Full disclosure, I still need to review what the blog looks like in this design… but you don’t need to worry about that. The most important thing is that my work page looks excellent. And I think this design is far more future-proof than the last.

Let’s do this.

Speaking of idioms, our latest project was to respond to something interesting found in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. I chose to build a vague and cryptic narrative (as I do) out of a handful of entries.

So, the story of a man wandering alone. The first clue as to the reason of his wandering is the name of the pub he visits: the fox and grapes. From the story of the same name, a fox who wants grapes, but cannot reach them. Eventually he claims he didn’t want them anyway, because they were sour. Sour grapes.

The man enters the pub, there’s something fishy about this place, or are the locals just drinking like fish? Really though, why are they staring at him like that?

He’s got egg on his face, perhaps because he’s got his finger in the pie.

Finally, while sat on the fence, he realises he needs to pull his finger out. The end.

Using literal visualisations of idioms was an interesting exercise. I like that. That’s totally my thing.

But, did you get it? Is this a good way to tell a story?

Don’t worry — as I’m sure you’re concerned for the future of my otherwise virile ability to show you things I make — I’m still at University, and I’m still doing reasonably interesting things I want to post. So, here’s something I finished up some months ago.

Although these images look nothing like the sketch I uploaded a while back, the character design has come directly from them. Above is Woland, the devil himself.

Koroviev and Behemoth welcome Styopa. That big black cat is the reason I chose to illustrate these scenes. I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than a cat drinking vodka and eating mushrooms.

Margarita, on a broom. I tried to avoid a cliché here.

Matthew Levi holding the body of Yeshua Ha-Nozri, in a cave. I tried not to draw Jesus as meek and mild, or pale, because he obviously wasn’t, even in this story.

Pontius Pilate, the Procurator, waiting for his story to be known. I felt that although he’d been there for a few thousand years and perhaps had not aged, his chair would have been updated now and then. So I put him in the chair we have here at home, a comfortable leather armchair.

I’m rather pleased with the result, and I reckon I nailed the key scenes in a self-imposed limit of five images. Overall, a really enjoyable book, even before researching the context and satire missing from the translation. A massive and complex story for illustration, but enjoyable. I recommend, too, Julian Rhind-Tutt’s performance in this audiobook edition!

Until next time.

Now that I’ve posted this sketch, I have to stop developing these characters. At least, I should. I am currently working on a series of images from the story The Master and Margarita *by Mikhail Bulgakov. *It’s a good read, but ’twas the characters that really got me drawing. Weeks later, I’m still drawing them.

I’ve got a lot on right now, and this is my excuse for not blogging recently. I’d like to upload work from the previous academic year as there is plenty to share but I really don’t have the time.

Instead, I’ll share a job I recently began, and finished yesterday; the kind of job we could consider as bread and butter, but this particular case was more like the icing on the cake.

The brief was delivered by a friend, for a friend, whose passion is cake-making and whose recent aim is to set up a site devoted to the sharing of the recipes she formulates.

I had to get on board, if not for a chance to pretend I have a feminine sensitivity, but at least an opportunity to display some versatility that I’m sure I’ve been lacking up ’til now.

A lot of the fun to be had was using the dip pen and behaving like a calligrapher, and wishing I wasn’t such an amateur or insult to genuine calligraphers.

Took me a while to get a feel for the pen, and then to balance the letters, and then the words. It was a difficult set, but the exploration eventually led me to something that mirrored quite nicely. Scan, print, trace, and repeat, eventually led to the border and the flourish of the ‘T’.

After this adventure, while I wanted to see if I could get away with a hand-drawn logo, I realised it really needed vectoring. The brush tool in Illustrator has a neat set of options to make this very easy, creating consistent strokes that remain editable. Excellent.

After putting everything together, with a few polishing tweaks, the space beneath the words was just calling out for a thing, like, an embellishment. Cupcakes are cute, right?

Well, I like it.

It’s not that I don’t like cats; I just disagree with them. It could be a primal opposition, but I doubt my uncertainty and assume it fact. Point is, my feelings are completely instinctive.

Domesticated house cats obviously pale in comparison to their sabre-toothed ancestors, and it’s not that I still fear them, but I certainly don’t like them in my domain.

I have no problem with my problem with territorial animals on my territory. That is to say, it’s not wrong that I should like to ensure my garden receives minimal fecal deposits.

Otherwise, cats and I get on very well. They can have a stroke if I find myself encroaching on their lounge, or bedroom. It’s their ‘owners’ I feel sorry for. Mostly because they call themselves ‘owners,’ when in fact they’ve completely misunderstood the relationship.

I also find the way cats move enchanting — I envy that agility, and that genetic disposition for hunting in the sneakiest, pounce-iest way. I just don’t need their fur all over my clothes.

The Video

The text from the above video was written for my Writing for Images module from last semester. The exercise was to write using a particular verse such as Triolet or Villanelle. I ended up with more of a Tri-llanelle with no real meter. Never mind.

I guess a cat had left a deposit somewhere recently to the writing because I don’t remember struggling to write it. Words don’t usually come so easy. In the script, I’m referring mostly to an old friend’s cat who was rather fat, and mostly slept on their front lawn.

When it came to the visual response, I decided it best that the narrator of this video be slightly older and slightly more dialectical than I am. It sounds ridiculous but I had to spend some time relearning my west country mother tongue. Which reminded me much of that scene where Gaius Baltar talks about his Aerolon roots. I knocked down the pitch a bit to take some of my twenty-something-year-old and nasal timbre out.

Then I animated it, in the fastest, cheapest way I could. Took some inspiration from this lovely animation, The Man with the Beautiful Eyes, and well, you see the result. It may seem a little lazy with the background and the mere 8fps, but I had a lot to work on at this point with Boyhood and that. Forgive me.

I felt it was time to post my work on Boyhood, a book I worked on for the last half of the second year of my Illustration BA. I did actually post some bits on Dribbble, but only one person I’ve met in the last two years knows what Dribbble is, so I essentially posted it to myself, and whichever strangers happened across it.

So here, I’ve added it to my work page, go read Boyhood in all it’s digitally presented glory.

The reason I’m posting now, is because it wasn’t a complete waste of time and amounted to some rather nice recognition from renowned publisher Pan Macmillan. I entered my work into their annual competition The Macmillan Prize (for children’s books) and received news recently that it had been highly commended.

Only 28 entrants out of 246 were highly commended — or won something, I’m not sure as I didn’t count the people at the private view — so I’m rather pleased to be in the top ten-ish percent. We were all invited to the private view and winners’ ceremony at Foyles on 28th May. It was a good night, plenty of wine and nibbles. The mango chutney and pappadums were a favourite among my Cambridge School of Art companions, I think we may have eaten more than is acceptable where etiquette may be concerned, but we have been well-trained to take full advantage of the ‘free stuff.’

Here is a picture of me making an awkward, possibly drunk, smile while holding my certificate, alongside Max Machen, who is laughing at his own jokes:

In case you like my work, I’ve made a little desktop background featuring some Boyhood armour. Actually, it’s not little, it’s 2560px x 1440px, because I made it for myself. No, I don’t think that’s sad, I think 27″ is a reasonable size for a monitor.

Anyway, you know how to do it: right-click, ‘Save Image As…’, and if you don’t have an Apple Cinema Display like me, you can set it to ‘Fill Screen’, or ‘Center’. If you have a bigger screen, I suspect you’re more than capable of making your own damn wallpaper.

Introduction

If you don’t care much for my story, download Blank Book here.

I have recently been digging up all the dirt I can on eBooks for children’s picture-books for a research project I shall be assisting on from next month. We intend to make a few books to encourage independent reading with iPads in special education, so I was quite happy to find that iBooks in fact supports some very useful features for our needs.

However, it has not been an easy ride learning all I’ve learned. Nobody seems to be helping anybody build a complete publication, or nobody actually cares about making a complete publication, I’m not certain. The information out there just seems to be thin on the ground.

Okay, sure, there are books you can buy but they are covering old ground for those familiar with XHTML, or those who don’t need to learn how to create a flowing ePUB, and you have to buy them. I was elated at my discovery that I already knew how to lay the pages out with HTML and CSS, though. The problem was that I hadn’t a clue what an OPF or an NCX was and the internet was not readily divulging that information.

Fixed Layout

The breakthrough for me was in reading How to Create Fixed-Layout iBooks from a gent named R. Scot Johns whose articles just spelled out the contents of an ePUB very quickly and neatly for me to get my head around.

I urge anybody wanting any kind of understanding to go through the tutorial.It does come in seven parts, lacks through-links, and the example file he includes actually contains some errors, but hey, he did a great job that nobody else was doing so I’m going to list the links to each part here:

How to Create Fixed-Layout iBooks: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7. Phew, load ‘em up in tabs.

Read Aloud

With that sorted, I now had to learn the Read Aloud feature separately. Of course, I found almost nothing out there on the subject. It’s mentioned in a WWDC 2011 video, briefly, as if everybody already knows what a SMIL file is, and how it works. Not helpful.

It is also not helpful that many books in the iBookstore are encrypted, and when they’re not encrypted the code is too sloppy to learn anything from. It took a while but I eventually found this terribly formatted post displaying an entire SMIL file. With a little bit of copy and paste I began to decipher it — I’m not sure if it’s stolen from somewhere or what but it was useful nonetheless.

That understood, recording audio came next. While GarageBand makes that simple, Audacity is the only application for labelling tracks easily, and my is it easy. Label the track, and then export the labels. That easy.

Sadly, after that it becomes quite the neck-ache. Copying and pasting the time stamps from the label track to the clipBegin and clipEnd attributes of  <par> elements in separate SMIL files is a joyless experience and I would give much to have this process automated.

A lot of the fun in ePUB-making seems to be renaming files, or changing the numbers on the end of long lists of consecutively numbered filenames, or having to make small changes across multiple files, and going through the process of deleting the last version from iTunes so that you can check those little changes you made, and realise they weren’t quite right.

Rewarding at the end, though. So at this point, I was quite pleased with myself for having produced a talking ePUB, until I realised that there is a standard for it. More fun making changes in multiple documents, then.

ePUB 3

This stage in the process reminded me of my web design beginnings. It was 2007, I was using Dreamweaver and it was outputting table layouts. While trying to fix the problems it was causing, I eventually realised that I actually needed to learn Web Standards and completely rebuild the site. You could say I was late to the table. But nobody would, because that would be a revolting pun.

I found that indeed the ePUB 3 standard tackles fixed-layout and media overlays, and that they have some examples of books to demonstrate the standard. I haven’t looked into which other readers support it yet, but it does seem recent. At least I can say I was there near the beginning.

So I go about a lot of work to make sure I’m doing everything properly, like throwing away the NCX file (as if I even wanted to learn what one was in the first place), using HTML5 elements (thankfully, I feel modern again), and adding up all the milliseconds of my audio for the media:duration property (fantastic…).

But even this wasn’t an easy task, like looking for needles in haystacks, few parts of the many examples actually went towards building a complete package. It was at first difficult to find the differences from the previous standard, and then pick out and piece together the essential code in a neatly structured document. Is nobody concerned with beautiful code in publishing?

However, I managed to get my ePUB up to standard and to validate with no problems, so I hope that’s enough of that malarkey. I’ve even added and declared an iTunes PLIST file in the manifest because it makes iTunes play well, keeps the validator happy, and everybody else I’ve read only seems to moan about it. It’s not part of the spec, but iTunes is going to add one if you don’t. These guys could have just declared it. Seriously. Sometimes. But anyway, on with the exciting part of this post.

It’s Yours

I’ve made a template to make the next few weeks of my life less painful and I’d like to also make it available to you, and to the world. It will be the first real thing I’ve ever contributed to the coding community so I’m rather excited to see what happens with it. As far as I have researched, there is no blank fixed-layout Read Aloud ePUB out there yet, so I only hope it travels far and wide and evolves with contribution and people pointing out any mistakes or misunderstandings I’ve made.

Unfortunately I will probably never be able to write a tutorial for it, neither will I document it, so perhaps it will only be ideal for those familiar with XHTML and such enough to make sense of what’s going on. Having said that, I do believe experimentation gets you far, and got me where I am.

The files are reasonably commented and most of the publishing stage with a file like this should be replacing the images and audio I’ve provided. Any additions you need to make are generally going to be duplications of what exists already. So no excuses. Go and play with it.

I’ve added a Creative Commons BY-SA License, to say in short that I don’t mind if the next big publisher founds their business on publishing books they learned to make from my template, but if the template code is improved or forked I’d like everybody to be able to make use of that (and I’d like to see it).

So you can grab your Fixed-Layout Read Aloud ePUB 3.0 Standard ePUB Blank Book here.

(Please note that I hold no liability for any problems that may arise from your use of the document and its contents and I provide them as is, free of malicious and/or harmful software but with the advice you should scan it yourself. Or in English, I’m sharing this file with only good intent out of the kindness of my heart, so don’t be so rude as to try and sue me if you screw stuff up with it, not that I’m sure you could.)

Work It

To get into this document you’re going to need to unzip it, which is easily done with Stuffit or WinZip (probably) but since you’re also going to need to zip it up again once you’ve finished with it I highly recommend these files if you’re using a Mac (use the latest versions). Simply drag an ePUB over the UnZipper to see the enclosing folder, and drag that folder over the Zipper to create an ePUB. Thanks, to those who made those.

The validator among these files is not able to help with ePUB 3 so don’t bother with it, go instead to the IDPF ePUB Validator to catch your errors.

And that’s it, I think. I can’t wait to see what happens, if anything does.

TL;DR: I made Blank Book because I wish I’d found a book like it four weeks ago. That is all.

The Download, Once More

Restauranto was a lot of fun to make, particularly because it was made in collaboration, secondly because seeing things ‘alive’ is still the most exciting thing one can do with models, and thirdly because we were drinking copious amounts of red wine.

It all began with this sketch of a half-remembered man wandering the outdoor restaurant tables in Seville, beckoning food into his mouth, and my being quite disgusted. What a prude I must be.

Since Seville and that evening was all about the atmosphere, we needed puppets that would translate well. By using only white plasticine we knew we could play with light and shadow to communicate the expressions on our characters faces.

We later decided the guys all looked the same. We added hair: facial and head…ial. Not sure why Mark wanted his puppets to be older men, though.

With that done, it was time to set up stage. This photograph demonstrates how we were interested in focus, and that we were focused mostly on the kind of wine we were complimenting the work with.

There’s some detail on the props here, you may tell the table is one piece and that its edges are scorched. We had been recently acquainted with a laser-cutter, so I grabbed some greyboard and got to work. The puppets were heavy, so the chairs actually required two pieces, the back of the chair adding support to what is essentially a stool.

It’s most pleasing that we could set this up in such a small amount of space and on a very small budget. We used inkjet transparencies to colour the light of the restaurant and tracing paper to diffuse that further.

After all the set up, we eventually got to shoot a short test. We found that there just wasn’t enough light going on in the front, as dramatic as it was looking, we needed to see the guys enjoying themselves.

Using Mark’s Super8 projector and scratched film experiments we pushed just enough light to detail the characters while retaining the mood nicely.

So we went ahead with the shooting. Drank wine and over the course of a few evenings got to the point where we needed our main character.

It nearly never happened, but we managed finally to get a tongue. It required some defrosting and cleaning, and actually some dissection. Fortunately, Mark Kenny is our resident amateur taxidermist, and had no problem performing the duty. It’s a thing of beauty, no?

I’m not sure we portrayed it as gruesomely as we had hoped to, but there you go. It was our largest expense, and it was worth it.

I hope that details all the details that anybody may be interested in. I managed to get a shot of all the guys before they were laid to rest and judging by the pizza around their lips, they had as much as fun as we did.

Obviously if you haven’t seen the short (short-short) film, and if you’re still reading, you must be wondering where you can see it. It’s here.

We produced a lot of work on the Seville drawing trip (or at least we should have done), but of it all I felt I got the most out of the afternoon we spent among the marketeers and browsers. These sketches took a small number of minutes each, emphasising character, narrative, and composition — I hope.

I was particularly happy to get some use out of the fine-liner as it has been much discouraged thus far, and that’s okay — difficult to learn new things when you’re comfortable with what you know — but I do enjoy coming back to the old friend now and then. I remember feeling a new confidence sketching these and happily churned them out.

If anything, I’m only sad that I came to the end of that sketchbook so quickly that I couldn’t do any more sketches. The market was full of oddities and eccentrics — for example, who’s buying enough second-hand pornography for this guy to get by? I could have drawn all day.

I don’t paint often, but when I do… I’m glad that I did. I wasn’t hoping for much in this exercise — to use only complementary colours and white — but we had a few hours to play with and I had been meaning to do this for a long time. Glad.

Who said red and green should never be seen? I think I’m satisfied with the answer that states that if you’re on a boat and you see red and green on the water, there is another boat headed directly for you. Unless it’s headed directly away from you… but having said that, perhaps it’s unlikely that you would come across a ship headed directly away from you. Except for very slow-moving boats, maybe. Hm.

Maybe it’s just good advice for Christmas Card designers.

This semester has mostly been about tone. Apparently we’re struggling with tone in our work, as a year group. Perhaps our outlook is bleak.

It’s fine, I welcome the practice. It also feels like an art school thing to do, something I’d been waiting over a year to be doing…

We tried out a few of the unusual techniques in this session:

Background first: leaving the objects without rendering until the background was complete (as pictured above).

Erasing: taking out dark patches to reveal light.

Our choice: I chose to lay varying tones and cut out shapes to compose an image with.

Other lessons to come.