Highlights

September continued to be a lull in productivity for personal reasons, but I had an opportunity to attend the “Denton Zine & Art Party” with my daughter, so I decided to create something for it. This took a fair amount of my time this month, but I was very pleased with the results, and I think it got me more energized again.

Production

I did make more attempts at fixing the animation interference problems in LA-6-A & B shots. This is very frustrating! Even after my NLA experiment and demo work, I still don’t really understand the problem. I’ll figured it out eventually.

Two-shot of Sergei and Georgiana in Soyuz (LA-6-B) — Getting a little sick of looking at this shot, to be honest. I can get parts of the animation to work, but not together as it’s supposed to be. When I try, I get a lot of unplanned changes in pose.

“Lunatics: No Children in Space — the Coloring Book”. I’ve been looking at the ink-layer renderings of my animation for sometime, thinking it would be interesting for a line-art project. The Zine fair gave me an impetus to try this out. What I came up with was part coloring book, part storybook, part comic, perhaps.

Sample Pages from Coloring Book — Four pages from the Coloring Book to give an idea of the style. There are line-art illustrations taken from the ink layer of the animation files. And there is narrative/descriptive text, as well as occasional speech text in bold. It isn’t really a comic, because the text is separate from the images. You could color the pictures, or leave them as-is

I made home-printed and bound chapbooks of it for the fair. The PDF files are available as a Patreon perk. I think I might have some of these commercially printed or offer them print-on-demand. The covers for the chapbooks are some shiny silver paper I bought years ago for a resume or a brochure, which I have just been storing. I wound up using all of it on this project. The binding is just side-stapled with a standard desk stapler and then sealed with some regular silver duct tape (I would’ve used something that looked fancier, except the regular duct tape matched the cover paper really well).

Home binding of the Coloring Books for the zine fair.
The back side of the finished coloring book, featuring the Soyuz in orbit.	Inside pages, showing the launchpad and characters.

It’s also some motivation towards making a “light novella” version of the story, which is another application I had thought for these. That would probably involve some custom renderings and more touch-up work for the illustrations, plus of course, a lot more thought about the writing. But I really felt kind of inspired just by writing the story in the coloring book. There is so much more background material we worked out for this story, and it’d be nice to get some of it down in writing.

This was also my first serious project created using Inkscape’s new multi-page support for layout. There are still some oddities about the interface, but it was an excellent option for a project of this type.

Coloring book layout in Inkscape — In Inkscape, with a close up of three pages of the coloring book.

Coloring book in Inkscape — In Inkscape, with Coloring Book zoomed out to show the whole project. It lays out multipage documents in a horizontal row by default. I’m sure there’s a more efficient way, but it’s adequate for a project this size.

Documentation

Still working on editing the NLA Demo for the Production Log channel. Since I discovered a complication while working on the NLA problems in LA-6, I may have to record some more for it. Namely, there is an operator selection for both the track and the individual strips on the track. How do they interact? There is no “inherit” or “none” setting to allow one to override the other. So what happens when they disagree? Why is there any need for two settings?

I’ve also been ruminating over an article for the Production Log about the Fediverse. A personal guide, perhaps. This month I made one of the illustrations for it, showing how a single profile looks on different Fediverse software platforms (and that it appears on them all).

Fediverse Profiles — The same (Misskey) account profile (upper left), as it appears on Hometown, Mastodon, PeerTube, and Pixelfed.

Events

The main event this month was the “Denton Zine & Art Party” in Denton, Texas. This was a fairly small venue, but there were perhaps 200 people in attendance, and the sale tables were the main attraction. I sold one coloring book, got some interest in the Lunatics Project, and donated one book to the University of North Texas library, which has a zine collection. It was not a commercial success, but I think it was a success, nonetheless.

My view from the table. — My point of view when sitting at our vendor table. We were kind of in a corner.

Me, at the zine fair. — A view of me and some Lunatics merch, but especially the coloring book, from the customers’ perspective.

I did notice a local indy record label offering cassette tapes (!), CDs, and T-shirts for sale. Maybe next year I’ll come back with DVD editions of the “Lunatics!” pilot for sale? One very cool thing was that there was no admission charged and no vendor table fee. That’s very unusual for a convention event.

So, on the one hand, I got a small project from initial conception to completion and sales in less than a month. But on the other hand, it took up a lot of time, and I was still kind of stuck on some of the animation production work. Hoping to get unstuck in October!

September 2025 Timelapse

Video Log

Video Log 2025-09-24: Coloring Book

This video also includes some video from the Zine event on 9/28.

September 2025 Summary