Friday 29 April 2016

Tales from the Till Roll: There's a Little Shoe in Aisle Two!

I came up with "Tales from the Til Roll" as a little sub/alternate title for Working Doodles (as seen in the banners and other such branding) but I now may make it a little series of shop related doodles. Don't worry, they won't all be little quaint rhymes based on real events, some of them will be the usual fun tales of existential anguish and torture you all look forward to.

Friday 22 April 2016

REQUEST: M.C. Burns


Back to normal now with a request from Chris, who wanted to see Rabbie Burns writing the techno version of Auld Lang Syne. Hope it's everything you imagined it would be. While Chris requested this doodle just under 4 months ago, this may be the first doodle ever that I've posted on the day I drew it. Which just goes to show how much of a buffer I lost while trying to figure out what to do with episode 100. I'm just going to need to try and get the buffer back now.

Tuesday 19 April 2016

#100 The Back to the Future Tilll Roll Tapestry


 Warning: Almost 50Mb

So here's the full Back to the Future till roll tapestry, to conclude my overly milked episode 100 celebrations, in gif form. I came up with a few ideas on how to present the full version in a way that people could easily view it and possibly share it. The scrolling gif format as suggested by someone on one of my previous posts seemed like the best idea. I also like the unintentional texture that the gif format adds to the piece which actually makes it look a bit more tapestry like. It is a little jerky but I seem to have reached the maximum limits of the gif format, as I did with Photoshop when creating the full image.

Of course if you want to see it in more detail and spend a bit more time looking at the images it's still available in it's cut up format on my other posts.

Now you can enjoy all it's 42.88 foot length in one manageable file.

After this we should be back to our normal programing.

Saturday 16 April 2016

#100 (Part 3) The Back to the Future Tapestry

As we reach our exciting conclusion you may all be wondering just how big this thing is in real life. You may have seen my previous post with a photo of it spread out through my living room, all the way along my hall and out the door, well it still wasn't all fully unravelled. After taking that photo it took my around 5 hours to scan the whole thing then I'd hate to even figure out how long to piece it all together to then only split it up again to post here. The till roll is a standard 8mm in height, or 3.15 inches if that's your preference. I didn't even use half of the full roll for the tapestry, probably not even a quarter but it's still a pretty impressive length. Sitting at 13 meters long, or 42.88 feet or 14.29 yards. That's half the width of a hockey rink or a little under 44% the length of a blue whale or about 68.6 standard pencils long. While not as long as the Bayeux Tapestry (last time I mention it, I promise) if you scaled the height up to match it, my Back to the Future version would be longer.

So now that all your questions have been answered you're free to enjoy the last part of the story. Of course I will be back to present the whole thing in a slightly different digestible format.














Wednesday 13 April 2016

#100 (Part 2) The Back to the Future Tapestry

Wondering what happens next to The Doc, Marty and Jennifer? Well wonder no more as Back to the Future Part II is now available in online webcomic till roll tapestry format!

It really helps to be already familiar with the films to know what's happening in this "tapestry." It's not designed to tell the story outright like a comic might, it's more to show the essence of the films and to pick out some key scenes and sayings that stand out. I hope this doesn't alienate anyone that doesn't know the films (though if you don't, you should) as I think you could still enjoy scrolling through the images with even just a little understanding of what they are about.

I added a few limitations to help make it tie in with the Bayeux tapestry theme. Things like using only a select few colours. Of course I stuck to using ballpoints as is tradition to Working Doodles but I bought a pack of 8 coloured pens and stuck to using only those. I also added the border round it which really limited the amount of space I had to draw in (easily takes over about 1/3 of the height in total) but gave it the tapestry like feel. As you can see I quickly abandoned the little drawings in the borders, they were taking up too much time to add in there and were difficult to think of details small enough and relevant enough to put in each section.

Wondering how big this thing actually is? You'll need to wait until Part III to find out.

 









Monday 11 April 2016

#100 (Part 1) The Back to the Future Tapestry

Great Scott! We reached episode 100. I'm sure once you see this you'll be able to see why I needed to take that short hiatus to get it ready.

After doing something a little bigger than normal for episode 50 I decided I wanted to take it a bit further and do something even more epic. One of the advantages (possibly the only advantage) to using till roll as a medium is the infinite canvas like properties. While not entirely infinite it's probably longer than anything most people would like to create. It reminded me a bit of old tapestries. Arguably the most famous tapestry is the Bayeux Tapestry which tells the story of the Norman conquest of England.

At first I thought of recreating the Bayeux Tapestry but adding some kind of twist to it but then I decided I wanted to do something a bit different but still keep a similar-ish style. My first thoughts, following the release of the newest film last year, was to do a Star Wars tapestry but upon a quick Google search I discovered that had already been done in actual tapestry form. My next thought was maybe Lord of the Rings but that maybe seemed a little too large scale and people can get a bit picky with the continuity between film and books. For some reason the next thing that came to mind was Shaun of the Dead but I wanted something a little more expansive and the whole Cornetto Trilogy isn't one continuous story line. That's when Back to the Future came to mind. There was a lot of buzz surrounding it last year too what with it being 2015, and I've already done a reference or two to the films, so why not go one step further and create the Back to the Future Tapestry.

Anyway, I'll let you enjoy part one now and I'll annoy you with more facts and figures in the next part.


















Tuesday 5 April 2016

Interview is up!

You may remember me posting a while back about me being on the front page of Best-WebComics.com and saying that they will be posting an interview with me. Well now it's live! If this interests you in anyway, you can check it out now by visiting http://best-webcomics.com/working-doodles/ . Enjoy!