• Kickstarter Campaign: Carpe Chaos Concept Art Book
    Wed, 02/22/2012 - 11:17 — Jason

    Hellooooo blog readers! I just finished prepping our Kickstarter campaign, and it has launched! It is now live!

    What we're trying to do is create a concept art book of all of the artwork that we made when we were building the Carpe Chaos universe, and since. There are lots more details on our Kickstarter project page, which I really hope you'll look over. Here's the widget and the video:

    You can also get there using the shorter link carpechaos.cm/kickstaarter. I hope you'll support us!

    By the way, Unwelcome Emissary is all set to finish at the end of February and we'll start another new story during the first few days of March. And we'll be at WonderCon during March 16-18!

    -Jason
  • Carpe Chaos News Roundup (February 1st, 2012)
    Wed, 02/01/2012 - 07:04 — Jason

    Happy new year, and also happy Chinese new year to you all. Carpe Chaos had a good end-of-year vacation and a great January publishing pages of The Myth of Midigan. The news has really been piling up so allow me to let you in on all the latest:

    • Chapter 4 of Trading Tales: The Myth of Midigan is done, it's live on the site, and you can read it for free right now! The story will conclude with a Chapter 5 that we are planning to publish in April, if we can get it done that quickly. Things are reaching a climax, and if you loved that page spread at the end as much as I did, you can get it as a desktop wallpaper here:

    • You may have noticed CarpeChaos.com was down on January 18th. We were one of the more than 100,000 sites that voluntarily went dark or otherwise altered our front page to protest the American censorship bills SOPA and PIPA. It had a huge impact and this article sums up the fallout pretty well.
    • The indie comics blog Panel Bound did a big feature on us while we were on our vacation. They posted a writeup on Carpe Chaos on December 30th, and then on January 3rd they posted an interview they did with me, Eric, Anthony, and Joe. The interview turned out great, so click here if you want to learn more about how Carpe Chaos got started and how we make comics together.
    • I rewrote the Advertise With Us and the Parental Advisory pages on the site to be more useful.
      • For the Ad page, I finally published some rates! If you want to add your full-page ad to the rotation in our digital comic books, you can do it for a scant $5 per month. And if you buy 10 months you get 2 more for free! Contact us!
      • For the Parental Advisory page, I made a list of all of our stories with my best guess as to whether they'd be OK for kids or not; I even consulted some actual parents. Let me know if you disagree with any of them. You can also use the links on that page if you want to grab the direct link to a specific story on the Comics page. Example: Reinvention.
    • Jailing Fortune Chapter 4 has been added to Graphicly! Now you can own all 4 chapters of Jailing Fortune in your digital Graphicly library, and you can let Graphicly guide you through the pages with their special flow mode. Here's the preview:
    • Speaking of Jailing Fortune, now that the story is done we're looking into making it available as a digital e-book on the Amazon Kindle Fire, in the Amazon Android App Store, in the Barnes & Noble Nook App Store, in the Apple Newsstand, and in the Kobo eBookstore. No promises yet but if we can get into that many eBookstores it would be pretty awesome! If we succeed, and if the comic does well enough, we'll put our other stories in those places too. Jailing Fortune and the rest of our stories are already available in Graphicly, which itself is available on several mobile devices, and we're still (slowly) working on our own iPhone & iPad app to show off our comics in a different way. Big plans, slow progress.
    • Printing the 6 new wallpapers as posters is taking a little longer than originally planned but they should appear in the store in the next week or two. I'll post another update when they're ready!
    • WonderCon is less than two months away! It's in Anaheim on March 16-18 this year, and we'll be there in the small press area for all 3 days. I'm already getting excited... it's been a few months since our last show! And we'll have some new stuff: the final chapters of Jailing Fortune as floppy comics and the 6 desktop wallpapers as posters. I try to keep our conventions page up-to-date so if you go there you can see our upcoming convention plans.
    • I'm working on setting up a Kickstarter campaign for a book of Carpe Chaos concept art. It's our art the years we spent building the Carpe Chaos universe before we began making comics. We're still chasing printer quotes and producing the video (every Kickstarter campaign needs a video, right?) but if we can pull it off I hope to launch the campaign by the end of February. We have SO MUCH concept art that we want to show off, and a book of concepts seems like the best way to do it. We're really hoping people will back the project, not just because of the cool perks/rewards we have planned but also because the book is going to be killer. I mean, look at the concepts we have just laying around. For example, we have over 130 spaceship concepts. Why did we make so many?! I don't know! But we are putting them in this book! Expect another update from me on this in a month or so.
    • Speaking of crowd-funding campaigns, Amya is running an Indiegogo campaign to fund the printing of the third chapter of the series. If you haven't heard of Amya before, give it a look and consider contributing to get the books!
    • February's gonna be pretty awesome. Starting on February 4th we're going to update with a new page every single day until the new chapter is complete on March 1st. This new one-chapter story is illustrated by Daniel Allen, it features both Kaeans and Turikasuul, it's 27 pages long, and the cover looks like this:

    -Jason
  • Stealth Mode Vs. PIPA
    Mon, 01/16/2012 - 23:03 — Eric

    Carpe Chaos is joining that great big horde of people who are going dark on January 18th in protest of SOPA and PIPA. Basically a bunch of big corporations are asking the US government to give them the power to shut off whatever part of the internet they want. That includes Carpe Chaos.

    Well, if they want the internet dark so bad, a bunch of sites are getting together to show everyone what it'll be like. Carpe Chaos is going to join the blackout as well. If you want to know more, watch this video.

    -Eric
  • Carpe Chaos News Roundup (December 22th, 2011)
    Wed, 12/21/2011 - 20:50 — Jason

    The holidays are here, and for me that means VACATION TIME! But before I go, let me catch you up:

    • Jailing Fortune is done! Man, it feels great to finish that story. Four chapters and 84 pages later, the action, drama, and profanity have come to a close. And that means that Anthony Cournoyer is ready to move onto another, even bigger, even more action-packed story that we hope to debut early next year. More details on that coming soon. And I wouldn't be surprised if Nate turns up in another story someday.
    • So maybe you noticed you didn't get a new chapter in December, because Chapter 4 of Jailing Fortune started in November and its updates were stretched up until now. And now you're probably noticing that we're taking the last week of this month off, returning in January. Yes, it's vacation time for Carpe Chaos. But to make up for it we made SIX FREE DESKTOP WALLPAPERS to help everyone last until our next chapter in January.

      Yes, for your downloading pleasure we have created two desktop wallpapers from Rising Up, two desktop wallpapers from Jailing Fortune, and two desktop wallpapers from The Myth of Midigan. The Rising Up ones were done by Daniel Allen, the Jailing Fortune ones were made by Anthony Cournoyer, and of course the Midigan wallpapers were created by Joe Slucher, the same artists that drew each story, respectively. Enjoy! And if you like any of them enough, they'll all be available as posters in the store in just a few days.

    • I set up FeedBurner for our blog! This means you can click this little animated GIF, , and by doing so get both chapter updates (once per month) and blog updates in your feed reader. You can also use it to get an email every time that happens! Looking at our update history, it would mean something like 4 emails a month, or so. Not too spammy, right?
      Enter your email address:

      To get blog updates delivered to your inbox!

    • I might have gotten a little carried away when setting up FeedBurner, because I got a bunch of other widgets for our blog too. You can see them all in the column on the left. DeviantArt didn't have one so I just took a screenshot of their page and made it an image link. Jerks.
    • One thing I did that was cool was add a ShareThis thingamajigger to the bottom of the main site at CarpeChaos.com. Hopefully this will make it easier to share Carpe Chaos, now that we are a fully mature web-based graphic novel series (webcomic for short) that has been updating regularly for 19 months now.
    • Got some convention news. We were confirmed for both WonderCon and Comic Con in 2012! Our table number in San Diego will be Q 13 in the small press area, and they didn't tell us our WonderCon table number yet. But that will also be in the small press area. WonderCon is in Anaheim this year, but the people at Comic Con International promised me that WonderCon will come back to San Francisco in 2013. You can get the latest on our Convention appearance schedule by checking our conventions page.
    • You might have noticed that the front page of the website looks a little different. That's because a few days ago we updated the site to remove the mini-descriptions from the New Chapters column. Really what we did was gain the ability to put different "teaser" text there, which we are working on. It's such a small space...
    • Another of my articles made it onto MakingComics.com. Here's the link, it's about what I look for when reviewing Carpe Chaos comic word balloons, pretty much.
    • So the new wiki article that I keep mentioning about the Porg's homeworld. Yes. It's still waiting on Eric, but since he's such a big man over at Red 5 Studios working on Firefall now, he's had to prioritize making Carpe Chaos comics over other "extra" stuff, like releasing more universe information on our wiki. At this point I think it's fair to say the public wiki project is on hold, unless, you know, you guys want to start adding information to it. Which we are hoping will happen, someday. If you want to get us to release the canon "citation" article we have about the Porg's home planet, the best thing to do is to contact Eric using our contact form here or tweet a plea with @EcnaEcna in your tweet. If he sees enough interest from fans, he'll be more motivated to stop drooling over the Firefall cosplay he likes so much and review and post the article!
    • Publishing schedule update! Our next story will start somewhere around January 5th, give or take a day or two. Depending on production schedules, either January or February will be the month for Midigan Chapter 4. The other Jan/Feb comic is called Unwelcome Emissary, a one-shot, 28-page comic written by Eric Carter and illustrated by Daniel Allen. And it's looking freaking awesome. Here's a preview:

      Kaeans in strength suits! So awesome!

    See you all next year,

    -Jason
  • Creating the lines of Jailing Fortune
    Wed, 11/30/2011 - 12:20 — Anthony

    Hello, my name is Anthony. I've been an artist for Carpe Chaos for a little more than 4 years. My previous blog entry is here, and like before Jason is helping by editing my English. Also like before, my example is taken from Jailing Fortune.

    In this blog submission I will talk about my inking technique, and how I use Adobe Photoshop to do it. The method aims at work efficiency. It is really easy for inexperienced inkers to use since it tackles head-on the most common problem with inking, which is line consistency. The results of this method work well together with colors... but I would use a more complex style for anything that was going to be only black and white.

    I did not need to go too in-depth with the penciling here. You need to have a solid understanding of the designs and model sheets to allow yourself to ink something this basic. But then again, you have a lot more freedom when inking digitally than on paper.

    The first phase usually consists of locking the edges of the different elements. Here I used a hard brush with no pen pressure sensitivity. This helps a great deal in keeping some consistency in the line weight. The second default brush is the one you wanna select. To customize it you'll need to set the size jitter control to "off".

    These lines will end up being the heaviest. They are the #1 and #2 on the reference cube below. The lines of #1 are the outer edges that stand in emptiness. The thicker they are, the more cartoony the result. The lines labeled #2 are created by different objects touching each other. Their weight should be a bit less than the first but they basically play the same role of defining an object, or in other words wrapping a shape. Consider sizes 3 and 2, respectively, for panel-size artwork.

    To create these long lines without wobbliness, just add one "dot" at the start of a line, press and hold shift, and then add a second "dot" where the line should end. This will automatically draw a perfectly straight line, and because you have chosen to remove the pen pressure, the line will be the same thickness all around.

    Next up are the inner edges and are labeled as #3 on the reference cube below. I usually get rid of these lines by blending them with the rest of the colors... but until then they serve as shape guidelines and help the coloring and shading processes. I use the thinnest size and I still leave the pen pressure off.

    So from this point... everything inward can be inked with a small, pressure-enabled brush (marked #4 below). You do not have to cover an entire wall... a fraction is enough to give you cues when you do the shading. Like for the edges, these lines are likely going to be colored. But putting a fair amount of time in while inking makes the subject material (cement, brick, metal, etc.) recognizable. You can also use this step as a final polishing phase and loosen up some of the edges that may look stiff.

    There are a few things that are better left un-inked. In the example panel, these are the chain-link fence and stripes on the gate arm. Brick walls and tags are also good examples... Anything that you suspect will drastically change in appearance from the larger element in which it is contained should be treated as a flat templates for colors.

    You might think that using the brush I described above might result in a stiff look. But you cannot think that every single stroke you draw is permanent. You can come back and loosen up some of the edges when you lock up most of the line weight. You can also judge for yourself with the two characters in my example panel, which were inked using the same inking method. Some of the major lines that wrap the silhouette were tweaked a bit later one, to feel more natural.

    If you want to see how it turned out once colored, here it is:

    So in conclusion, the simplicity of this method can help inexperienced inkers get sharp results early on. That same simplicity is also very "selection-friendly" when it comes to colors. It is overall a core method from which you could push the details further, if you wish, with the assurance of good line weight all the way through.

    -Anthony
  • Carpe Chaos News Roundup (November 24th, 2011)
    Wed, 11/23/2011 - 19:55 — Jason

    Happy Thanksgiving! I got you all a whole bunch of brand new news:

    • Comikaze happened, and it went really well! Eric was there, and you can read what he thought of his experience in his blog post here. He was also interviewed by "Code Name: Epic" and thoroughly impressed the interviewer. I put the interview video on the blog here.
    • I mentioned in my last news update that I was working on a new wiki article for our wiki. The good news is that I finished it! The bad news is that Eric hasn't finished redacting all of the sensitive information, what with Comikaze and all. With any luck it will be up soon!
    • Reinvention is now in Graphicly! Here's what it looks like in Graphicly's web widget thing:


    • Chapter 3 of Jailing Fortune is now also in Graphicly! AND HERE IS YOUR PROOF:


    • As I mentioned last month, I contributed an article to the blog on MakingComics.com about the flow of a comics page, and things I look out for when reviewing Carpe Chaos pages. Here's the link! If you're actively making comics or thinking about starting, there is a ton of helpful information on that site and I would 100% recommend reading the posts there! Their podcasts are also pretty interesting, at least for me. I hope to keep contributing articles as I find the time. Here's their banner:
    • Google Buzz is going away, so I made Carpe Chaos a Google+ page! If you add it to your circles then you should get updates with it, just like on Facebook. My plan is to update the Google+ page any time I update the Facebook page, because I don't really understand how they're different.
    • The new version of the Carpe Chaos Webstore has always had the option to pay with Google Checkout, but now there is an icon on left to let people know it's an option.

      We should have added it when we launched the new version of the store, but at least we got around to it now, right? :-).
    • I signed us up for the link exchange and webcomic reader site Ink Outbreak, so if you use that site make sure you follow us! I also made this cool banner for it:

      There are no humans in Carpe Chaos, get it? My sense of humor. Anyway our RSS feed only updates when a new chapter is completed, which is on the first day of each month, so our banners might not get "bumped" very often even though we update with new pages all the time. Eric is looking into whether we can build an RSS feed that updates whenever a new page goes up, so we can use it with their site. I'm not sure whether we'll be able to, and our comics aren't written to be read page-by-page, but if we manage to get something working then people that use Ink Outbreak will see us at the top of their lists more often. Being on that site also means you can follow us if you have an account! Here's the button, to make it real easy for you :-)

      I've also added the link exchange box to the left-hand column of the blog, and as an advertisement in our HTML comic viewer's ad pages rotation. By the way, if you want to advertise with Carpe Chaos by putting full-page ads in our comic viewer, get in touch with us!
    • Jailing Fortune Chapter 4 is moving along nicely and is scheduled to finish on December 22nd, making the final page count for the story 84. Another great story finished. Usually we finish new chapters on the first of each month but after putting out a new comic chapter every month for 18 months solid we're all taking a well-earned vacation at the end of December. On the one hand you won't be getting a new December chapter, but on the other hand we have some cool freebies planned that will go up just in time for the December holidays. Just our way of making it up to you, the loyal fan, as we gear up for 2012!

      • -Jason
  • Comikaze Complete!
    Sun, 11/13/2011 - 21:58 — Eric

    Sharon and I just got back from Comikaze in LA and it was a great show! We shared a booth with DWAP Productions and Komplicated.com, under the banner of The Antidote Trust. The Comikaze crowd was great, for a first year show, there were a TON of people attending, and even better, everyone seemed really interested and engaged. Comikaze is definitely high on Carpe Chaos's list of shows to do next year.

    And now the obligatory picture of our booth that looks like every booth we do:

    I gave someone a free comic in exchange for taking a picture of us in our booth.

    Everybody loved our new bookmarks, and our Jailing Fortune floppies. We also donated a Moments of Elation 7 foot wall scroll to a charity auction for Baby Princess Leah.

    The exhibitors at Comikaze were all pretty good. None of the big names like Marvel or Time Warner were there, which really makes the smaller booths shine. The spectacle of those mega-booths seems to detract from a lot of the really great gems that you can find in the small and medium press areas, without adding much lasting value to the show. And better yet, very few of the exhibitors at Comikaze were amaeteurish or unrelated to comics, so it kept the average quality high.

    Three graphic novels caught my eye at the show, Romeo and Julient: The War, Popgun Volume 4, and The Umbrella Academy. I decided to wait till I had read a review beore I bought Stan Lee's Romeo and Juliet, but a transhuman cyborgs vs. genesplicer retelling of the classic tale (brought to life with really stellar art for a comic) is a tantilizing concept. Popgun is just a lot of everything, but at $35 I decided to look for it in a library. I came home with Umbrella Academy, and so far it's been a rompous adventure reminiscent of League of Extrodinary Gentlemen and FREAKANGELS. Very original, very snappy, with dialog almost as good as Scott Pilgrim, I can't help but like the maladjusted twenty-something superheroes. The over-the-top villians really clinch the deal (the first rampaging villian is the Eiffel tower).

    As I mentioned before, the crowd at Comikaze was really great. The show also had a strong presence of talented cosplayers, and the panel I went to had great energy and questions from the audience.

    Judging by the number of unicorn horns I saw at the show, and LA's position at the forefront of fashion, the coming year is going to be socked full of horned equine attire:

    A random unicorn horned girl

     

    -Eric

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