I e-mailed Brad privately asking how I could offer new characters I've doodled. I never received a reply. I now have 9 characters drawn, many with more than four expressions each. I've been bored last night and this morning.

Anyway, I have all this stuff to donate to the site and no idea how to do so. I'd appreciate any help as to how to do so.

Thanks,
Gin
http://www.stripcreator.com/~gin

Don't be too harsh on Brad - he's a busy guy. :)

There used to be a link to art submission guidelines in the FAQ, but it has recently been rewritten, and that helpful little tidbit has been lost.

Characters are transparent GIFs, technically size-limited to 125 pixels wide and 200 or so pixels high, but it is best to keep them within 115x180. When you make them, you have to make sure they use the smallest possible number of colours - file size is important.

Backgrounds are JPGs, with minimum dimensions of 250px wide by 350px high (the size of a comic panel). They can be a bit bigger, so there are no ugly borders when the frame is stretched by extra-large text boxes, but this makes the file larger as well.

If you can't work the formats out, or want the double-checked before submitting them, feel free to send them to me - mcdexx@optushome.com.au - but try to keep the email under a hundred KB or so, please.

Hope this helps...

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Thanks for the reply, DexX. I figured Brad's silence was nothing personal. ;)

I've taken care to use no gif larger than 120x200 and 5-6 colors. They're already transparent and ready to use. I've a web directory I've uploaded the characters to, as well as the zipped version of everything for easy transportation. I just wasn't sure who I tell that I have this stuff.

200 pixels is [u]way[/u] too tall. I didn't notice if any of yours are that tall, but if they are they need to be shortened. My general rule is that a really tall character is 180, a moderate character is around 170, and a short character is 150-160.

I had a quick browse, and they look really good, but... you might want to trim them down to a few favourites. As it is, it's a very large collection, and I know Brad doesn't like to add huge amounts of art, as it eats up his precious bandwidth. I suggest you have a look through the characters already available on the site, and decide which of yours would be most useful (ie. don't do a very similar job to one or more other available characters). Also, you could ask the forum users to give some feedback on which ones they would be most likely to use.

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Speaking of which, Brad hasn't given me a yea or nay on Jamalia and Lennny yet, so he must be really, really, busy.

And that whole main page banner thing kinda fell through the floor, too.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

Thanks for the width/height norms, DexX! I've resized them, deleted 2/3 of them, and uploaded the remaining back into the aforementioned directory, updating the zip file as well. No one character has more than four expressions, and I only included 3 on many. Am I getting closer? :) And it's not required that Brad use all of them. I'm just offering them and seeing which ones are used. I'd rather offer too many than too few. I would like to see the females and the darker skinned male to be used, not many of them in the site. Anyhoo..

Gin

Okay, now email them to Brad. :)

brad@stripcreator.com

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They're very rough. It might be worth loading them into some kind of vector package and going over them to clean up the lines.

I would still cut them down to 1 or 2 expressions each. You've be surprised how expressive the caracters can be with the help of dialogue.

And, while I can't draw, I'll still offer this honest critique: I find the large size of the heads relative to the bodies oddly disturbing. Bill and Sue are the only ones who seem really "right" to me.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.