The semester is over, no more taught sessions until January. I am half-way through my final year, or five-sixths through my degree. It feels like it, but it’s not over until the fat lady sings, they say.

They do say things, don’t they. Things are often said, though. I’ve always been somewhat interested in those things, sayings, particularly. It is fascinating how idioms survive the context or era they were born in — that is to say, I suppose, how they become idioms. Further, how we can relate to them without knowing what they actually mean, what they meant, or where they come from.

I found them useful in lyric writing, but since I don’t do so much of that now, I’m finding them useful in illustration. One of the briefs given to us this semester was an exercise in this, or had potential to be: to respond to a phrase or fable found in the Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. I chose to use a few to build a story instead, limited to phrases that featured something beginning with F.

I took the opportunity to fiddle with brush pens, too. How liberating they were. Although it’s not evident in the final illustrations, they were all constructed by brush initially. Interesting? Probably not, but true nonetheless.

Even though they are pretty clearly digital pieces now, I was interested in seeing how using a brush would affect the Adobe Illustrator’s auto-trace. Aiming for a natural look in Illustrator without resorting to textures was the plan; using the natural imperfections rather than trying to simulate roughness afterwards or entirely digitally.

It went pretty well, I reckon, so about the story. It’s 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. This is from the story of the same name, about a fox who wants these grapes, but cannot reach them. Eventually he claims he didn’t want them anyway, that they were sour.

He 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. On the wall is a picture of a fox and a goose.

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

The story is obviously vague, relying on literal visualisations of idioms to tell it but it seems to be fairly accessible. People know what it means to have egg on your face pretty well, and hopefully this allows most to re-read each image expecting to find an idiom embedded in it.

As an exercise, I’m very happy with it, as finished pieces, well I’m not sure all of them are of the same standard. My serialisation is lacking consistency as usual. This time, having much to do about the utilising of new materials, I suspect. Becoming more familiar with them as the project went on, the way I was using them changed. Isn’t it obvious?

Am I rambling now? Probably. I’ve got some posts lined up. Until then.

Another timely update, of course… but I’m late for good reason: I no longer work for the devil, as a henchman for the dissemination of magic that nobody believes in. Instead, and since August, I have been working in what I can only describe as my dream position as Concept Artist with a software company in Cambridge. I haven’t shared any work from this because I don’t yet know what kind of NDA’s I’m up against, and cryptic revealings of images out of context probably isn’t interesting for anybody to look at.

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 have no problem posting. So, here’s some I did 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. Complicated for illustration, but enjoyable. I recommend, too, Julian Rhind-Tutt’s performance in this audiobook edition!

Until next time.

However, along with the gifts I inevitably receive, they come with obligatory apologies, as if they gifter knows I’m going to disapprove, or, they just didn’t know what to get me. I don’t know how I make people feel guilty for being extremely generous to my undeserving indifference to the etiquette of receiving free stuff, but that’s all going to change — now nobody has an excuse to get it wrong, or disappoint me.

So, before my sarcasm  pours ice over your otherwise warm and healthy opinion of why you should buy me things, I’ll get on with showing you why I don’t mention the things I want.

EDIT: As it would happen, some items have actually been claimed for, so I’ve striked them.

Codekit

Codekit, made by the same guy who made the LESS compiler I use perhaps a hundred times a day, is an app that looks like it could solve all my web design woes. Basically, Codekit could save me some serious RSI from my Command+S, Command+Tab, Command+R, Command+Tab, Repeat (save code, switch to browser, reload page, switch back to code, and so on — for those who probably weren’t interested in what that meant) workflow. Perhaps you’re already understanding why I don’t talk about this kind of thing in casual conversation.

Anyway, if somebody wanted to buy a licence for this for me, they would only have to put my name and email address in this Buy Codekit page, and give the man $25. Easiest gift ever.

Coda 2

Oh yes, another application for building websites with. How many people can I talk about this with at a party? None; never met one. I won’t bore you now, suffice to say, I currently use Coda, and as with anybody who knows they’re on to a good thing, they make the next thing better than the last and don’t bring out those small updates that would have made it perfectly comfortable to live with for a long time to come. I want it, it makes my work easier and better organised, but I can’t justify buying it right now.

Ah, it’s possible you can’t buy Coda 2  for me, unless you have access to the Mac App Store (I want iCloud support). But this post is not titled “Buy me stuff, dammit” for a reason. I prefer donations like these:

App Store Gift Card

With an App Store Gift Card, you’d be funding my addiction to the better designed apps that are available on the better designed devices I own. Technically, any iTunes Gift Card will do, but by showing you the picture of a £50 gift card, I can subliminally ask for a lot while appearing to ask for nothing. Unless I revealed what I was trying to do to your good intentions in the first place… ah.

Talking of addictions…

Caffe Nero Gift Card

I don’t actually visit Caffè Nero as often as I did when I was working in the town, however, I still think that of the major players they make the best coffee and I visit when I can. In the past, I’ve been known to spend more in a month on damn good coffee than on my nutritional intake — so lend a hand for a broken soul and buy me coffee. I need it. Really. Or…

Espresso Maker

Since I mostly work at home, I suppose I could do with just making slightly better than instant coffee in my kitchen rather than cycling to the city, or getting a train to London (I once made a long detour especially for coffee while on my way to the zoo). I was thinking of getting an espresso machine for my bedroom/studio, but I think people would start referring me to rehabilitation centres. Instead, here’s a good looking espresso maker that I would use, and I would be very grateful for, thank you.

That’s Sad…

I can’t think of anything else right now, this is what my life amounts to right now, code and coffee. That’s why I don’t talk about my interests, I don’t have any. How depressing.

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 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 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 until now.

A lot of the fun to be had was using my dip pen and behaving like a calligrapher, and wishing I wasn’t such an amateur or insult to genuine calligraphers. I sadly hadn’t the time to study too much on this, I just scribbled a few pages out.

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. A scan, print, trace, repeat, workflow 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 after the fact. 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 hate them. It could be a primal opposition, but I doubt the uncertainty and take it to be true. Point is, my feelings are completely instinctive and I hold no intellectual liability for what I feel about them.

Domesticated house cats are obviously feebly small and useless beings compared to their ancient sabre-toothed counterparts, 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.

I mean, when a cat is looking over my fence, it’s checking to see whether its available for taking, I just stand my ground and let it know that it’s not. It tempts a paw down to the shed, I move closer, it backs off. That’s the game, and I feel like a caveman every time we play it.

Until the neighbours are coming round apologising with their poop-scoops in hand and scrubbing my patio on their knees the cat doesn’t get to visit my garden. The cats are okay with that, it’s how that works, I think.

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 their relationship with their cat.

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 the 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 recently to the writing because I don’t remember struggling to write it. Words don’t usually come so easy unless I’m despising something at the time. I was reminded of a friend’s cat who was rather fat, and mostly slept on their front lawn. So I wrote about it.

When it came to the visual response, I decided it best with my tutor 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 Gaius Baltar talking 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 had worked on for the last half of the second year of my Illustration BA. I did actually post some 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, opened the top drawer and stuffed it in an odd sock.

Sorry about that, but here, I’ve added it to the 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 recently the news 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. Only 28 or so, and 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 is in question, but we have been well-trained to take full advantage of the ‘freebies’.

Here is a picture of me making an awkward 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… gutted.

Introduction

If you don’t care much for my story, download the 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

Download — Blank Book v1.00 by Jason Hibbs

Restauranto was a lot of fun to make, particularly because it was made in collaboration, secondly because seeing things ‘alive’ is 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 beckoning food into his mouth and my absolute disgust. 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 white plasticine we knew we could play with shadow to communicate the expressions on our characters faces.

We later decided the guys all looked the same. We added hair, facial and head…al. 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 it’s edges are scorched. We had been recently acquainted with a laser-cutter, so I grabbed some greyboard from the Student Union shop 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.

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 some scratched film 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 which resident amateur taxidermist Mark Kenny had no problem performing. It’s a thing of beauty, no?

I’m not sure we portrayed it quite as gruesome as we had hoped to, but there you go, one learns. We agree it was worth it, actually, it was our largest expense.

I hope that details enough of 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. And here…

I’m not sure if it is that I don’t get out much, or that it is not often sunny enough in England to enjoy being outdoors, but I find when I’m out in the sun I tend to drink a lot of coffee. I wouldn’t call it an obsession, more a healthy interest. I have a genuine admiration for a good latte. In Spain, I found myself drinking a lot of coffee, I don’t know if they’re made differently, or that it was just how hard I was working, and being cooped up in the hostel each evening for a week, but I was drinking more coffee than usual.

When we got back from Seville, we were set the brief to produce a sequence based on something that happened on the trip. Well, I drank a lot of coffee.

We produced a lot of work in the Seville drawing trip (or at least we should have done) but of it all I felt I got the most out of our afternoon spent among marketeers and browsers. These sketches took 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 by tutors 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 old friend now and then. I remember feeling a new confidence sketching these and churned them out.

If anything, I’m only sad that I came to the end of that sketchbook so quickly that day and couldn’t do any more. 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 there.

Hm, I’m tempted to do some of this in Cambridge while it’s sunny.

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

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, it’s not likely a chance occurrence: coming across a ship headed directly away from you, except for very slow-moving boats, maybe.

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