Egads! Who let Jostle Times Letter?!?

[Jostle Times]

Ha!:lol

Well folks, as you may or may not know, Victor (super awesome artist) and I have been working together making a few fun one-shot fairy-tale type comics. The first one ("The Allotted Witch") came together with some great help from a great letterer (Brant W. Fowler).

The second project ("The King and The Tomorrow Lake") we were able to have another great letterer on board by the name of Coleen Allen.

That left two books to be lettered. The last two are special in that they are "plot first". This means no script existed. I did write a rough script for one of them, but that's about it.

So anyway, (I know by now you've skipped ahead to look at Victor's cool art, but that's okay;) ), it seemed logical for me to letter the last two comics. So I got a program called comic life (cheap, I know) and have photoshop elements for sizing stuff up. I'm having a lot of fun, and fully realize that what follows is far from pro-quality letters. Ha! Yeah, I ain't aiming to create perfection. "Good enough" will do for me.

On to the pretty pictures! (Oh, and they're kinda' big so you can read them. I have trouble reading small pictures sometimes.) I'll do one per post so hopefully it loads better for you.

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_1.jpg

This one is page 1 to "The Court of Birds". What follows will be in order...

[Jostle Times]

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_2.jpg

[Jostle Times]

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_3.jpg

[Jostle Times]

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_4.jpg

[Jostle Times]

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_5.jpg

[Jostle Times]

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_6.jpg

[Jostle Times]

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_7.jpg

[Jostle Times]

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_8.jpg

[Jostle Times]

So anyway, how'd I do? I will probably get a different font, but getting stuff in place is the first step. Is it readable?:ecstatic

[Jostle Times]

Oh, I almost forgot! I am also doing a Logo for "The King and The Tomorrow Lake". Coleen did a great one, but I decided it would be fun to play around with some ideas I had. I bought a font called "Huckleberry" and toyed with it. I gotta' fix it to size a bit, but this is what it will likely look like....

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb211/Johnyjaybird/Page_1-1.jpg

Weird! Yeah, the "and" took a while (days), and I'm still not 100% happy with it. So I might still play with that.

So opinions? Critiques? Funnies?...:arms

[Victor Cabanelas]

Man, when people see my stuff in such a big size they get to see all the flaws and cheap techniques I used...

Pages are looking good, if you ask me, though the logo's way too much colorful for my taste ;)

[Eric Williams]

Great lettering, Jostle! It's a tough and underrated gig, but you're off to a great start. Good choice of fonts and balloon placement.
As for the logo, I might go with something a bit more simple/muted and medieval looking (Blambot (http://www.blambot.com/) has a number of great free fonts) - something simpler will let the cover shine a lot more without too much distraction.

Also, I really like the textures you're using these days, Victor! The more relaxed pace of the story gives you a lot more breathing room for the panels, and they're looking great.

(And side-note for Jostle: My goal for the weekend is to catch up on my greyscaling, so I should be sending you everything up to and including page 13 for The Tonic Tramp :))

[Jostle Times]

Great lettering, Jostle! It's a tough and underrated gig, but you're off to a great start. Good choice of fonts and balloon placement.
As for the logo, I might go with something a bit more simple/muted and medieval looking (Blambot (http://www.blambot.com/) has a number of great free fonts) - something simpler will let the cover shine a lot more without too much distraction.

Also, I really like the textures you're using these days, Victor! The more relaxed pace of the story gives you a lot more breathing room for the panels, and they're looking great.

(And side-note for Jostle: My goal for the weekend is to catch up on my greyscaling, so I should be sending you everything up to and including page 13 for The Tonic Tramp :))

First off, thanks for the kind words!

Yeah, I may have to play with the logo a bit more. As both you and Victor pointed out, the colors may be a big part of the distraction.

Oh, and I agree about Victor's awesome panels! Indeed, of all the books we did together, this is my favorite. I always seemed to try putting too much story in the books; this story (largely thanks to Victor) came out much smoother. I liked it so much that we made it longer than the others. It is a fun read at 32 pages, I hope. Yes, Victor's art truly shines on this one!

((and side note appreciated! Awesome!)):ecstatic



Man, when people see my stuff in such a big size they get to see all the flaws and cheap techniques I used...

Pages are looking good, if you ask me, though the logo's way too much colorful for my taste ;)

Flaws? Cheap techniques? You always make your work sound so easy to create. I wish that were the case! I wish I had your skills!:hail

Yeah, it seems you both agree on the colors. I'll play with them a bit.

Thanks again:)

[Brant W. Fowler]

Hey Jostle!

First, thanks for the compliment, it was a pleasure working with you guys.

Now, I won't bag on you too much as your effort was a great one. There are some basic problems like spelling and extra spaces and so forth though. Overall the placement is good, but some balloons have too much "air" around the letters. But my biggest piece of advice is the lettering may be too big. It's hard to tell with the pages so big, but it just looks a little large to me.

Another small piece of advice is you want to shape the text in your balloons to a diamond shape as best you can. That minimalizes the amount of empty space in the balloons.

As for the logo, I agree with everyone about the colors. It's very garish at the moment, so play around with that. It's also a little too large on the cover. With that particular cover it would work that size, but it wouldn't on every cover.

Like I said though, great effort all around.

[Jostle Times]

Hey Jostle!

First, thanks for the compliment, it was a pleasure working with you guys.

Now, I won't bag on you too much as your effort was a great one. There are some basic problems like spelling and extra spaces and so forth though. Overall the placement is good, but some balloons have too much "air" around the letters. But my biggest piece of advice is the lettering may be too big. It's hard to tell with the pages so big, but it just looks a little large to me.

Another small piece of advice is you want to shape the text in your balloons to a diamond shape as best you can. That minimalizes the amount of empty space in the balloons.

As for the logo, I agree with everyone about the colors. It's very garish at the moment, so play around with that. It's also a little too large on the cover. With that particular cover it would work that size, but it wouldn't on every cover.

Like I said though, great effort all around.

Thanks!

Yeah, your points are quite valid. I noticed the lettering looked a bit weird to me, but I couldn't figure out what it was. The air thing is particularly troubling. The diamond idea is interesting and likely would fix some of it, but with this software it's not quite so easy to arrange in that fashion.

The font size looks okay to me, but maybe it is just the file size. You see, I recently upgraded to a better monitor. Unfortunately, the slighter higher resolution results in standard pictures looking slighter smaller. Yeah, it's a wacky thing. That's why it's tough for me to tell what a good size for posting pictures is anymore. That coupled with my not so brilliant computer skills, well,.... ha! Is there a standard preview size we should use? That would help.

Anyway, I seen that you posted as available for hire again. I may end up hiring you again for this project. I'm not a quitter or anything, but I do know that you are much better at this than I am. The cool thing is that if I do letter the whole comic first then you will have a nifty blue-print to work from, instead of just a boring script.;)

Sound cool? If so, I'll e-mail you in a few days and we can go from there.

Thanks again.

[Brant W. Fowler]

Hey man, I wouldn't want to step on your toes, but yeah, I'm available. I really do think you've made a great effort so far though.