Unplanned events are the source of much pleasure when it comes to both homeschool and summer vacation in our family. I had all kinds of artwork and learning planned for this summer as is well attested in this blog. We were going to work on drawing people. We were going to take some art classes. We were going to do some big woodworking projects. We did a little of all that and we plan to keep going on it, but with my work, the swim team, and just the busyness of life, most of that fell by the wayside. That is really OK. We like to give the kids a break in the summer and a chance to be just kids. So, we decided to just keep up with the read aloud books we had chosen for the summer because that is really not work, but something we genuinely love doing together. For summer reading, the kids draw while I read.

Kelly started in on what she called “gag” comics. Those are stand-alone strips that do not tell a big story. After the first couple of those, Kelly moved on to do week long, very uncomplicated story lines that she hopes will help the readers to get to know her characters. The longest that any story line might go is two or three weeks and each of the strips can stand on its own. Christian, on the other hand, has decided to tell a much longer story. He has about forty panels written with quite an interesting story featuring the same characters, but with a much more involved plot. We plan to put his strip up in three or four weeks when he gets it finished and scanned in.

I had kind of decided to write a program to help me scan in the strips, adjust them for size, and accumulate them into a single strip with four panels because I have had to do that one step at a time by hand up until now. When Christian saw how I was doing it with the open source image editing program, GIMP, he suggested I use a GIMP plug-in called David’s Batch Processor to adjust the individual images after I have them scanned. That took a twenty step process that has been taking me about 15 minutes down to a two step process that takes about 30 seconds. Very, very cool.

The only thing I have left now to really make the preparation of strip more tractable is something to perform the accumulation of the four panels into a finished comic strip with a title, byline, and copyright date. GIMP works really well, but the way I am doing it now is a little tedious and not as consistent as possible in terms of individual panel positioning. Currently, that process takes about ten minutes. After Christian showed me David’s Batch Processor, I looked into the GIMP a little deeper. It looks like I can write a script using either Python-fu or script-fu to perform the panel accumulation steps automatically. Very cool. That beats writing the program from scratch all hollow. If I get the script written and the steps worked out, I will post a “how-to” here.