Heya folks. I’m working feverishly to wrap up the Kickstarter book and among the items on the to-do list was “re-letter” the book.

Kind of daunting, I know, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the word balloons. I’d mentioned this is the past and I tried some previous fixes like painting the balloons and filling them with color. The problem with that approach was that on soem of the more dialogue-heavy pages, the balloons started to get distracting.

This latest approach softens the edges of the balloons as if they were painted on top of the art. I think it makes for a softer effect.

My main problem with word balloons in Bloop is that they feel like an abstract THING in a story where I’ve tried to remove almost all of the blatantly abstract things – like panel gutters.

I hope you like the results.

There’s one more page in this first part of he story.

The next page will be posted on Monday, May 27.

– Steve

In this page, Bloop and Tomo see the villain for the first time.

I had sooo much fun drawing Pinion’s ridiculous spacesuit, specifically the silly metal diaper. There is no end to the man’s indignation.

As always, you can read the first 22 pages for free here.

– Steve

This week’s new page includes a diagram of Bloop’s tree house (I used to create news graphics for USA TODAY, Time magazine and hundreds of other newspapers and magazines – it was fun to dust off the infographic skills and use them to give readers a peek inside Bloop’s home).

I hope you like the results!

You can read page 21 – and all the pages so far – at www.bloopstree.com/webcomic/

–Steve

I have had quite a few people ask about the color work on page 20 – the first appearance of Bloop’s tree house.

In a nutshell… The work was colored, like all the pages of Bloop so far, in Photoshop CS3 on a MacBook Pro. It was colored in three pieces with the figures, the tree and the background all colored separately. Each file is 10×15-inches and 600dpi so these are very big files. In the case of the tree house itself, the file – at times – had nearly 100 layers and used 2.2GB of memory.

I’d regularly flatten each file and bring a copy into the other docs to make sure the colors were playing nicely with each other.

Once each was done, I brought them into a single file and composited them together – I then painted glows and gradients between the layers to help them have the layered effect i was going for.

The background was created entirely in Photoshop with no linework beforehand. I knew I wanted the glow behind the tree to melt away most of the background anyway.

Here’s a look at how the three layers fit together…

Thanks again for the kind words.

– Steve

This was, by far, the most challenging page so far. The page has more detail – and more subtle detail – than any of the previous pages and the color needed to be just as complex.

I’m really happy with the result. Hope you like it too!

As always, the complete story so far can be read here: www.bloopstree.com/webcomic/

– Steve