Day: January 22, 2010

I updated the Betty Blonde About page with a few short bios. I’m hoping to make it better and more detailed later (maybe with some illustrations?) but this’ll do for now.  Christian’s been thinking about putting up a wiki for it soon too.

About:

Betty Blonde is a Monday-Friday web comic created by my brother (Christian Chapman) and me (Kelly Chapman).  It’s pretty random because the characters were developed when we were 9 or 10,  so here’s a quick guide to help you out.

Characters:

• Betty Blonde:  Very exuberant, very blonde girl who has absolutely no problems with hair volume.
• Big Wilma: Betty Blonde’s best friend and next door neighbor.  Big Wilma is proudly Hispatalian, and has been blessed with an even disposition, comely looks and lots of pets.
• Spike the Kaktus: Spike is an anthropomorphic kaktus.  Just don’t use that word (the long one) around him.  Not much else to say here. He acts like most other kaktuses.
• Mr. Nobody: Mr. Nobody is an invisible man who lives with Betty Blonde and Spike.  No one knows much about him, but he keeps everyone in check, so they keep him around.  He enjoys reading the Daily Bleat and eating cold toast.
• Quirk: Quirk allegedly ‘came with the house’. He is the resident nerd.

Secondary Characters:

• Bart Simestinkle: Betty’s other next door neighbor.  He used to be a rich and famous rockstar back in the 80’s, but now he’s not. Famous, I mean. He’s still rich.
• Rodney Simestinkle: Bart’s obnoxious son who could probably lay off on the Doritos a little.
• Hank Dangerous: Hank is very secure in his manliness. Hank used to be in the Army, but now he travels all around the country touting gun rights.  Hank approves of the killing of delicious animals.
• Faith, Hope and Charity: They’re so nice and perfect it’s not fair.
• Betty and her friends live in Somewherest, Washington County, USA.  They do things like carve pumpkins and hate on Apple and go to cosmetology classes and get buff at the gym and participate in art contests and stuff.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, don’t hesitate to email us at bettyblonde@chapmankids.net

Christian, Kelly, and I have been thinking and talking about the Betty Blonde comic.  Kelly works hard to improve her skills.  She reads everything she can find about drawing, story, humor, and everything associated with the creative side of the strip.  She and Christian put there heads together every day to think of new ideas.  They work to refine the way the characters, background, and objects are drawn.  The try to make the humor “work”.  The think of ways to develop the characters.  It is a super creative exercise.

Now, we have decided we want to focus our efforts.  We plan to start with two things.  Kelly will start a weekly post on Betty Blonde that describes the history of the comic strip, how we started drawing when we knew absolutely nothing about it, the development of each of the characters, the drawing of each of the characters, books and articles that help, other comic strips and artists that influence her, the tools she uses for drawing the strip, the other kinds of drawing she does that helps her refine her skills, things that happened in our lives that gave her ideas for stories, etc., etc.

Every night while I read aloud to the kids, Christian scans the strip into one of our Linux computer, then accumulates it into a comic strip and uploads it to our web site with the Betty Blonde Accumulator of Comix (BleAx).  BleAx is a great little program written in Python that runs on both Linux and Windows computers.  It would probably run on Mac’s, too, but we do not have one to try.  After the four individual panels are scanned into the computer, Christian uses BleAx to resize the panels to exactly the right size, add a drop shadow to each of them, accumulate them into a single image, add copyright, date, title and author text, create a thumbnail image of the strip, save everything to an archive on our home computer, and upload the image to our website.  This process used to take between 20 and 30 minutes.  Now it takes about 30 seconds.

There are some small irritations with the program.  The biggest of those is that we have to run the program from the Eclipse IDE (a programming environment) because we have not taken the time to package it for general use.  That is something regular users would never do.  We have decided that Christian will rewrite the program in C++, build binary installers for Windows and Linux, and offer the program as Open Source software.  It will be a great learning exercise for both Christian and I.