Issue #89's article was about using clones to produce mirrored and kaleidoscopic images.




Issue #890's article was all about using "unset" fills and strokes so that clones can each use a different colour or style.

I've just posted Sam's final Season 5 French translation to our website. Meaning that, of our 139 Greys comics, he has managed to translate 138 of them, complete with commentaries and Easter Eggs! An incredible achievement for just one man in his spare time, and we can't thank him enough.

Things may have appeared quiet on the Greys front, but we have been busy behind the scenes...

First, we've been continuing to create our 'Elvie' strip for Linux Voice magazine. A few of those are now on our website, with the source files in our Github repository.

Secondly, we've been catching up with our backlog of French translations. We now have all of Season 2 translated - in addition to all of S1, S3 & S4 and most of S5. Huge thanks to Sam, our French translator, for the amazing amount of work he's done!

Finally, we were having trouble keeping up towards the end of Season 5, so some strips went online without Easter Eggs and SVG files. This has now been rectified, so all 139 Greys strips on our site have Inkscape SVG files you can download, each of which contains at least one Easter Egg.

We've started work on Season 6 now, but the struggles of S5 have shown that we can't continue to hit a fortnightly deadline - not if we want to keep the standards up and continue to produce ever more elaborate Easter Eggs. So S6 strips will be posted on an "as they're ready" basis, rather than a strict time scale.


One final thing: we're going to have a table at Oggcamp in Oxford (UK) on 4th & 5th October. It's a "Free Culture unconference", featuring Free Software, Free Culture works, open hardware, 3D printing, and a few Creative Commons comics ;)

The first two Elvie strips are now on our website:

http://peppertop.com/elvie/comic/000-introducing-elvie/
http://peppertop.com/elvie/comic/elvie-001/

If you're interested in how we combine the artwork from MyPaint with the lettering and frames from Inkscape, we're making all of the source files available via GitHub:

https://github.com/Peppertop/Elvie


As always, we're also on the lookout for new translators. We already have a Brazilian Portuguese translation of one of the strips, but Italian would be a nice addition  ;)

Issue #83 is now available to download, with the Inkscape article finishing off my look at the Tweak Tool.

There's a new Linux magazine called "Linux Voice" which is a little different to most magazines: they aim to contribute 50% of their profits back to FOSS projects, and they intend to release all their content under an open license (currently CC-BY-SA) within 9 months. Oh, they've also got a comic strip ;)

"Elvie" is created using open source software: MyPaint, The GIMP and Inkscape running on Linux Mint. I won't post a lot about it on this site, as Inkscape is used mainly for the final layout, speech bubbles and text. Like our Greys comic, we intend to make the source files available for download. The first issue of the magazine has arrived with subscribers now, and will be in shops in the UK at the end of this week, and in various other countries soon afterwards.

Here's Elvie in my subscriber copy:




We would also love to have Elvie translated into other languages - we hope the open license and availability of the source files will help with this, as it did with The Greys. If anyone's interested in helping with this, we're mainly seeking people to commit to translating the first two strips at the moment, just to start things off and hopefully encourage more translators to come forward. If you're interested, please email "mark AT peppertop.com", reply here, or send me a private message.

Issue 79 and Issue 80 continue my tracing tutorial by looking at Inskcape's Bitmap Trace dialogue.

Issue #76, Issue #77 and Issue #78 are all available, containing parts 16, 17 and 18 of my tutorial. These cover manually tracing sketches, using one of my 'Monsters, Inked' characters as an example.