20080207

I was going to write this rad post today unveiling a mystery of awesome corruption and deviance in the realm of youth fiction. I had evidence, you see. I was not certain what my conclusion would be but I did know there were questionable things afoot.

Then I really looked at my evidence.

As it turns out, while there still may be some shennanigans, the evidence is not as strong I thought it was when my comparison of the two exibits was made without the two pieces side by side. In any case, here's the deal.

This morning as I perused the comics news (a morning ritual by which I ascertain the health of the subculture and discover things to which one should pay heed), I noticed that Evan Kuhlman's Wolf Boy has been optioned for the cinema by the Weinstein Co. As I read, I noticed the book's jacket art and thought, Waitasec! Something looked way too familiar. See, The Monk has been reading, just finished, and greatly enjoyed Nate Wilson's recent book (also aimed at a youth market), Leepike Ridge. I haven't read the book myself (save for the first chapter), but the book jacket by Tim Jessel is pretty engrained in my mind since, for the past week, it has stood placeholder for The Monk's face during many of the evening hours.

Something seemed fishy to me. And here it was:

The thing that set me off was having Jessel's Converse-clad feet ingrained in my mind for how poorly they were rendered. The just looked awkward there, more rounded than long and with strange bulges beginning immediately as the rubber toe ends. I had been thinking, Who would draw Chuck Taylors like that? So when I encountered similarly rendered Converse-clad feets on the cover of Wolf Boy, I didn't think, Wow, someone else drew sucky-looking shoes. Instead, I thought, Wow, are those shoes clip art or did one artist rip off the other? Or is it the same artist just going for an easy paycheck?

So, naturally, I put together a post about it. But while gathering evidence, I thought I should overlay the art in order to see just how alike the two pairs of shoes actually were. The thing is, they are close but not exact.

There may still have been some copying* going on, but I suppose we'll never know. It does seem overly coincidental that two youth-market books bear such thematically similar covers within the space of a year (Wolf Boy was published in 2oo6** and Leepike Ridge in 2oo7), but since I don't know the illustrater for the prior book and the art is slightly different, I have little case for conspiracy theorizing.

Wish me better luck next time!

*note: or the more tasteful homaging, which really amounts to copying but is a friendlier way of saying it.

**note: Wolf Boy no longer features the badly-drawn-shoe cover in its current form.

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At work I've been putting together a number of tutorials detailing different ways to achieve a variety of visual goals using Photoshop CS2. I thought they were pretty snappy and would have found them useful when I was trying to figure out things like layer masks and adjustment layers, so I thought I'd try to port them over to some of the free video sites that are out there.

With little luck.

YouTube will not post video that is over ten minutes in length and most decent tutorials are going to hover around the ten-to-twenty minute mark. Further compounding the difficulty is screenRes. YouTube requires video at a miniscule 320x240. I had already shrunk my photoshop canvas from a sprawling 3000x1200 down to something like 1400x850 for initial recording and then resized the video for compatibility with 1024x768 screens. That works just fine. 320x240 does not. Nearly all detail is lost and it becomes very difficult to see what's going on.

So then I tried Google Video. It asks that you upload video at 640x480. And I saw hourlong videos available on-site. So that was encouraging. But then, after upload of my 25 minute test video, I checked to see how it looked and despite requiring 640x480, Google resized it to 320x240 anyway.

And double sigh.

Anyway, if you care to learn how to colour in line art in Photoshop, here's a twenty-five minute video in which I demonstrate how to colour the art I used in the masthead above.