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In the time-honoured tradition of Inspector Columbo: before I forget...
I also wanted to mention that I was feeling bad about having gone to the lower panel count per page. The 6-panel grid was giving me claustrophobia so I went to a lay-out based on 4 panels a page. This does look better and give me a little more space, but it does mean that this story is moving verSy slowly.<P>I hope I can compensate with the color, and that eventually I'll be able to produce 6 or 7 strips a week again. You can help by spreading the word about ROCR. Nothing builds morale like having lots of people read the strip every day...<P>------------------
Reinder Dijkhuis
<A HREF="http://www.rocr.net/" TARGET=_blank>Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan</A>, Humorous fantasy strip, updated Mon-Fri, and really rather good. <A HREF="http://www.rocr.net/d/20000701.html" TARGET=_blank>Read it from the first strip!</A><P><A HREF="http://whio.keenspace.com/" TARGET=_blank>White House in Orbit</A>

My problem with color is that I can make some really great color pages like the <A HREF="http://www.rocr.net/d/20010102.html" TARGET=_blank>opening page of The Faerie and the Earth-Pig</A>, but at the expense of making the pages huge JPGs and putting in six hours of my time. The new coloring approach is intended to result in color files that take an hour to make and don't take up nearly as much bandwidth. They are flat color pages saved as PNGs with a very limited color palette. In fact what I did was to create a palette based on the Faerie and Earth-Pig opening page and use that to color in the pages for this week. These were than saved in whatever palette was optimal for that page. Each of the three first strips were allowed to have one area with a color blend so I could rack my brain a little over the optimal way to save them.<P>The final result is not as impressive as when I go all-out with the color, but I think it's a good compromise. At the time I did the first three, the strips for Thursday and Friday weren't done yet, so I worked on these with the results from the first three in mind. They are even more simple and outline-based than I have done so far; the flat colors make much of the internal detail superfluous and also draw attention to the abstract shapes of the color areas, something which I've been interested in while drawing those black dresses - i.e. how to make those dresses look woman-shaped (three different female shapes, in fact) with as few lines as possible.<P>The color palette is interesting because it is dominated by green and brown. There are two shades of orange and a few peachy-pink that I use in the obvious places but if I want to use blue or bright red, I have a bit of a problem. I have added shades of blue and red for those few places where I need them, but because the pages are largely green and brown, these tend to clash anyway so I am very sparing with them. This does result in a color scheme unlike anything else that I've seen in Webcomics.<P>I would like to do this for a few more weeks, improving my color sense as I go along and building a more generalised palette that is not just suitable for forest scenes. It's also a nice complement to the White House in Orbit color experiment in which the basic colors are actually very bright and hard before I run the script to make them look old on them (the script blurs them, fades them to sepia and adds noise. I then superimpose the original image at a very low opacity level to create the overall effect of badly faded ink. I'm pretty sure that the color engravers at the old newspapers were also aiming for bright, bold colors, and at the time of publication actually got them).<P>------------------
Reinder Dijkhuis
<A HREF="http://www.rocr.net/" TARGET=_blank>Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan</A>, Humorous fantasy strip, updated Mon-Fri, and really rather good. <A HREF="http://www.rocr.net/d/20000701.html" TARGET=_blank>Read it from the first strip!</A><P><A HREF="http://whio.keenspace.com/" TARGET=_blank>White House in Orbit</A>