Well, *that* was an experience.

This is the third comic done entirely by me (Jim) from beginning to end. Wait, that’s a lie. Michelle re-did the last panel. I think my muse expired, or something.

Anyway, it took me about five hours. Eek! Yeah, this is why Michelle usually does most nearly all of the artwork.

The first comic I did myself consisted entirely of Harry watching TV. No challenging artwork there! The current comic, I had to design a store, a samples cart, and a pinata.

Anyway, it’s up now. And I’m tired. Oh, and bonus points for anyone who can figure out what the other two “all-Jim” comics were.

I recently got an email from Jenni over at One Thing. She wanted to tell me that several of her kids are fans of Bitmap World. In particular, her 12 year old daughter was so inspired by it that she started her own webcomic. Right now, Jenni is featuring her daughter’s work every Sunday on her blog. But who knows what the future will hold! Perhaps Jordan will have her own site in the future.

Jordan uses Paint to do her comic, something Jim/Ravenswood would be proud of. I know there is a lot of negativity about Paint, but it really is a great free utility for those starting out. Even though Jim uses Paint Shop Pro, he still does the majority of the work in Paint.

It really does warm our hearts to hear that our comic is loved by kids, and also inspires them to be creative. In fact, we have learned that 2 separate schools (one in the States and one in Europe) offer classes on how to do comics, and Bitmap World is included in their reference curriculum. We are very proud of that, because our goal from day one was to create a strip that would be safe for kids to read, but still enjoyable by adults.

Anyhow, thanks to Jenni for letting us know about the strip. Here’s a link to Jordan’s comic. Kudos to her, and best wishes for a long comic career!

Well, as is pretty typical with us, things just happened this week, throwing us into a tailspin. We had a hack on one of our other sites, and then a very sick baby who kept us up all night…and slowed our work on the computer. We actually had the Booyah ready on time, but then at the last minute forgot one of the items! We had done the WiiMiis nearly a month ago. When we were gathering the pieces for the Booyah, we stumbled upon the images and did one of these: And that meant a lot of running around, trying to get it together for the Booyah. The thing that stymied us the most is that Jim really wanted to get screenshots of the actual Check Mii Out Channel. Problem is, while you can download certain content onto a memory card from the Wii, you can’t save WiiMiis. To do so, you need to patch in a DVD Recorder into your television. Well, we have a DVD recorder we had never set up, so Jim decided to use that. Now, if you have ever read about any “easy” project we embark on, you can totally guess what happened next. This comic pretty much sums it up. Getting the images to pipe into the DVD player was not the problem, it was getting the player to write to the disc properly. Quite seriously, it took 3 hours and a half dozen discs, and it STILL didn’t write right correctly. It saved the data, but not a menu, so we couldn’t access the pictures. So, that meant Jim spending several more hours on the internet, trying to find software that could repair and/or read the disc. After that, there was the matter of ripping the screen, creating graphics, putting together the tutorial, and… Well, you get the idea. Anyhow, the neat thing is if you are a fan of the site and have a Wii, you can use Bitmap World characters in your games! How cool is that?I am also super excited about the Comment graphics. There are over 100 different graphics. Literally, this took me a huge amount of time to do. If you are familiar with doing glitter graphics, you know that to make one, you need to create 3 different images, then merge/animate them. So, literally I had to create over 300 images. It was a challenge. But the good thing is that during the process I learned a TON about Paint Shop Pro, as well as getting some techniques that will help me considerably in doing the comic. In fact, some of the shortcuts I used for the current strips, and they went a lot faster than those I did even a week ago!Oh, and speaking of the Comments, we reported earlier that the Booyah was initially delayed a bit because of some programming. That was actually for the comment graphics. I did not want to hardcode pages with the graphics and the links–it would have taken me days. We did consider going with some fancy gallery program to display them, but that turned out to be overkill. Eventually we found a so-so program that we could drop into the directory and it would list the graphics. Jim modified it so it would automatically generate the link codes. It worked up great! Took time, but hey, it will help us loads in the future.

I’ll let everyone get into all the goodies of the Booyah. At the current rate, it looks like we’ll be tying up the current storyline on Tuesday. I’ll post another blog entry there with my comments on the most recent strips.

Well, this one (Issue 178) was done BEFORE midnight, but I wanted to do a blog so it will be up just a wee bit afterwards. Though, Jim argued it is still Tuesday on the West Coast, so he is putting a Tuesday date on the front page!

Of course, this one has new art. The Cosmic Dungeon scenery are mostly from pre-existing video game backgrounds (though they are moderately to heavily modified by me), but the Inn is all new and original. It took me forever to decide what style I wanted to do the building. We always knew we wanted the big sign on the top, but actually putting it up there, with the neon arrow was a bit tricky. Anyhow, I spent a good deal of a day looking at tons of medieval inn and pub pictures, and finally decided that I wanted to use this one. When I finally showed it to Jim, he thought it was a pretty good pixelation! What do you think?

The Inn would not prove my greatest challenge. Instead it would be the wording on the sign. Reason being is that there are TONS of gothic and medieval fonts available on the Web, but very FEW that are pixel/bitmap. The difference between a bitmap and regular font is that bitmap fonts are created to be legible at very small sizes. Most regular fonts degrade badly and are illegible at small point sizes. Considering the fonts in Bitmap World range from 10 to 6 points, I was having a very difficult time finding a gothic font that would look good. Most needed to be 12 to 14 points, and we didn’t have enough room in the panel–which I learned the hard way after spending the time to do 2 different signs in 2 different fonts, to have both be a bust. Ugh! I probably Googled about 50 different combinations of keywords trying to narrow down a “gothic pixel font” or “medieval bitmap font” or…you get the idea. I was actually getting pretty desperate and considered drawing my own font, but I had already taken so much time with this! What I eventually ended up doing is hitting bitmap fonts sites and just manually going through their whole catalog until I found something.

And I did! Hours and hours later. But, I am very happy to say that the font in the last panel is a pixel font called HeinzHeinrich, and it’s awesome. And I think it looks awesome too. I do love the gag on the sign. I meant is to be more of a play on words, but thinking about it, it really does seem to be a sign of our times as we have more businesses sharing space to save money.

I am very hopeful Friday’s comic will be a tad easier, even though I have to do the inside of the pub.

Well, I felt so bad about the whole forum blow-up that I did 2 comics today. Forgive me??? Please, someone, a pity comment. ;O)

The forums will be up tomorrow, along with the contest winner. Sorry for *that* delay, but Jim is doing some work on the system which I hope can be done by then. I figured you guys would rather we work on the extra comic.

The last few strips have been grueling! Most the carnival stuff had to be done from scratch. There is some stock pixel art in there, but a good majority is my original art. What pre-existing art had to be heavily modified. Each one took much longer than even the Cosmic Dungeon strips. However, I feel it was well worth it. I am happy with the look, and now I have a lot of props for further issues!

I think the thing that got me the most with this last round was all the supporting characters! You know how you watch Spongebob or any other cartoon, and there are a bunch of recurring secondary characters? Well, now I know why. Getting all those faces in the crowd took an enormouns amount of time, since I needed to create a ton of non-descript characters, as well as putting in key characters and members of their families. I just wish I hadn’t been so pressed for time with the site problems, because doing the art was a lot of fun and I would have liked to have had the time to enjoy it more.

I do have a lot of comments on the individual strips from the last 2 updates, so I’m just gonna rattle them off one by one:

Strip 151 - I would love to say my kids behave in the car all the time. They do mostly, but even on the best of trips there is the kicking and the poking. This was certainly a tribute to that.

Strip 152 - This is one of my all-time favorite strips. I laugh just thinking about it. The mayor has definitely developed into a colorful character, and a bit different than what we first envisioned and planned for him. Makes you wonder what that baby looked like, eh?

Strip 153 - I am WAY proud of how those porta-pottys turned out! The joke in there about the family motto was actually something Jim said to Linus once as a gag when Jim made him use the facilities at a public place. I thought it would be funny if it actually *was* someone’s family motto. Now it is!

Strip 154 - The Dott-Com joke never occurred to me until just a few weeks ago. We’ve been doing this strip for over a year, and such an obvious tech joke was under right my nose. Too funny.

Strip 155 - I am sure we embarrass our kids by making them do things with the little ones. Most of the time they truly don’t mind, but there are moments in public, particularly when their friends are around, where they cringe at the thought. Coincidentally, this was Linus’s favorite strip of the Booyah update–because he could relate to it!

Strip 156 - Have you ever played the Wii game, Carnival? That was the inspiration for the dunk tank with Mr. Domain in there. A tidbit, Korn’s son is the one who dunked him. Also, I had more fun drawing the little drama in the background of that strip than I did the dialogue between Max and Blip. Though I do say, I am really proud of how this strip turned out overall.

Strip 157 - Jim asked me, “are we really going to do a vomit joke?” C’mon, how could I pass that up?! Seriously, I don’t normally like potty-humor, but there are times it’s appropriate and pretty darn funny.

Monday…the parade.

For those of you who are wondering…no, we didn’t get our Christmas cards out. It’s a long story, but we had a huge technical problem on a project we were working on. We had to burn 100+ dvds and had a major snafu with not only the burning software, but the burners themselves. It was a collosal mess we have been working on for a couple of weeks, and it put us behind on everything. Thankfully, the project is done, and we’re getting a little caught-up with other stuff, but as you can appreciate, the comic did come as a secondary priority these past few days. We appreciate your patience.

Any parent who has had to sit through the barrage of holiday specials can appreciate today’s comic (issue #104). Seems everyone has a Christmas tale to tell, and if you mashed them all together, they would make quite a piece of work. Originally I was going to have Dott go to talk to Harry in the kitchen, but decided I wanted to show off another part of the house–Harry’s home office. Even though these are pixel graphics, I spend a lot of time thinking about how a room should look and creating it. As in a set for a show, any creation I make is gonna be used a lot, so I feel it’s important to get it done right–even if it is ultimately minimalistic.

As for the blinking tree, I debated if I wanted to do it or not. Honestly, we had eventually planned on doing something like this in some later strips for effect, and since it seemed appropriate, went ahead and did it now. I think was the key was to keep the blinking rather slow so it didn’t distract from the strip. Weigh in what you thought about it in the forum.

I have it linked on the front page, but if you haven’t seen it yet, on my Pixel blog, I have linked up a bunch of movies and shorts from around the Web that my family likes. You may find quite a few on the list that you’ve seen before, but there are also a few you may not have watched. So, check it out HERE.

We ARE planning on having a strip up on Tuesday. See you then.

Black Friday has actually become as a much a holiday as Thanksgiving itself. Though it has many definitions, predominantly the term “Black Friday” is used to mean the day after Thanksgiving, when most retailers start getting Christmas shoppers. Since holiday shopping sales (meaning the 8 weeks or so in November/December) often account for as much money as the stores makes the rest of the year together, they essentially go from being in the red to the going into the black on their financial books.

This comic (issue 94) was yet again inspired by Linus. Even though in real-life he is a bit older than Max, Linus does provide a lot of material for this character. The other day while watching a television commercial for After-Thanksgiving early bird specials, Linus proceeded to tell us why it was called Black Friday. His explanation (which was identical to the one Max gives) made me laugh out loud. Kids are so innocent and their sincerity is priceless. Of course, I explained the real reason it was called that to our son, but I thought it would make a great strip. Particularly since a lot of people will be celebrating the long weekend (as well as starting their shopping) and won’t be checking the site until Monday or Tuesday. We wanted a small stand-alone strip before jumping back into an ongoing storyline.

On another note, Max and Ada are on the floor coloring in this strip. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. Our kids are all very much into art and drawing. I think we go through more crayons and paper than about anything else. High priced toys and gadget hold nothing over pencils and notebooks. Even though this is a “smiley comic” we really try to add little bits of real-life to it. I think a lot of parents can relate to sitting around while their kids draw and color. Oh, and of course Mike taking a nap on the couch! One of the biggest compliments we get on Bitmap World is how expressive and descriptive we make the smilies and their world. It’s a conscious effort on our part, and we’re delighted people take notice.

Hoping our American friends had a great Thanksgiving, and that everyone has a great start to the year-end holiday season!

In a space only 16 pixels tall by 16 wide, you can create hundreds of faces showing a huge range of emotions. Check out issue 5, for example. Here we have no less than eight distinct emotions being expressed by the various characters, and they all result from alteration of a few pixels around the mouth and eyes. On top of that, we have to keep each character recognizeable and distinct from all the other characters. Sure, we made some people yellow, and some grey, and some green. But that will only get you so far. After a while, you begin running out of colors. So, at first glance, it may appear that we’re being lazy by making our comic out of icons. But it’s actually more work, in some ways, than traditional art.

I’m not trying to brag, here. Really, I’m not. I’m just amazed — I know, we’re the ones doing it, but it still amazes me — at what you can accomplish in such a tiny space. Early video games had to do this a lot. The original Mario, from the first Donkey Kong game, was just incredible. 16×16 pixels, yet so detailed you could tell he had a moustache. That’s just amazing. Nowadays, Mario is a fully rendered 3D object built out of hundreds of tiny triangles. He’s not even measured in pixels anymore. If he met Original Mario, the size difference would be so great he’d mistake his younger self for some type of insect.

An insect with a moustache.