Episode 727 - Painting Series: Sky and Sea
Feb 17, 2025
We haven't done anything about actual art-making for a while so we thought we'd start a series on technical stuff. Starting out we tackle painting sea and sky! These are key general background elements, they're the two biggest simple background features you can get, you don't always need them but it's good to understand these big features for outdoor scenes and how they work.
Topics and Show Notes
Sky and sea can be super simple features in art, in the most basic version all you need is a horizon line and pretty much nothing else, but they can also be super complicated and advanced if you want to go the other way. Skies can vary massively based on the time of day and what's in them, like clouds or pollution, and it's the same with the ocean. There are also basic physical principals that drive how they look: The sky is blue because it scatters and deflects blue light, it's darker towards the top of the sky (as long as the sun isn't there), because the top of the dome of atmosphere is thinner and less light is reflected, while towards the horizon the sky usually gets lighter because the atmosphere is thicker, the angle is different and so it's more reflective of sunlight.
The sea is made up of water which is transparent, filled with stuff, and also somewhat reflective- so it looks various shades of blue in the deeper parts because it's a dark reflection of the sky. In the shallower parts the colour gets lighter because the sea bottom is more visible and helps reflect more light, the sea can also have a lot of green weed or algae in it which also affects the colour, as does the colour of the sea floor. So in the middle of the day the sky will be dark blue at the top and fade to light blue at the horizon while the sea does the opposite, starting with dark blue at the horizon and fading to lighter blue and then even green when it gets close to the viewer.
Colours change at dawn and dusk when the angle of the sunlight is very low and being scattered and reflected in different ways: You get reds, yellows, oranges, and pinks usually. The low angle of the light on the water means that much more is reflected and so the colour is very different! Clouds, night, sun, and moonlight change that again! It gets very tricky and interesting and we cover all that in the cast!
How are you with sea and sky rendering? Do you go simple or complex?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Continuity Falls - Down-home, where the grass is blue, the moon is shining and fiery, the hills are billy and the apa is lachin… Banjo, guitar, drums, and standup bass give us a nice little energetic mountain dancing tune!
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Grapeshot - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2025/feb/10/featured-comic-grapeshot/
Featured music:
Continuity Falls - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/?search=continuityfalls - by Banes, rated E.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 726 - Ego!?
Feb 10, 2025
Do you have a big ego? Do you know someone who has? This Quackcast is about utilising egos for comic characters for comedic purposes, to humanise character, or to make villains more unlikeable and or funny. Big egos are a sign of poor self esteem, people inflate their egos to cope with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. For examples of that we have a certain prominent politician and also a tech billionaire as perfect representations of every facet of that concept. :)
Episode 725 - Your fave comics as a kid
Feb 3, 2025
We're chatting about the comics you liked as a little kiddo this week! The topic was inspired by a thread in the DD forums. This is always a fun topic and I always have to mention Asterix because it was so amazing. This week Tantz had to bow out but we have Gunwallace to replace her, and Banes is back! Gunwallace is a fellow Antipodean, that means he and I share many of the same cultural touch stones, particularity the comic Footrot Flats. (Tantz is still on the Patreon only video)
Episode 724 - America's Plutocratic classism
Jan 26, 2025
Is there a culture of plutocratic classism in the USA? I'm inspired by Trump's America and how people think that people like Elon Musk and him are above the law because they're rich, while conversely the lowest rank in society are the homeless and the poor. But what do I mean by “Plutocratic classism”? A plutocracy is a society where people's position is determined by their wealth, classism is our tendency to discriminate based on social class, put that together and you have people determining social value by how much money a person seems to have.
Episode 723 - Changing tech and design
Jan 20, 2025
We're talking about how technology and design changes so much over the years and how that can change things with plot in story and it can also help pinpoint the date of something sometimes better than other things like fashion. The biggest one we talked about were phones, which have changed so much over the last few decades. Universally connected smartphones mean huge story changes- characters can all look up whatever they need at any time, communicate with people instantly, entertain themselves, take photos and videos etc. That can massively affect plots!
Episode 722 - Main characters with main character syndrome
Jan 12, 2025
Main characters with main character syndrome? What is main character syndrome? Well the way we're dealing with it here it's normally a snide criticism you level and someone who seems to think the world revolves around them, like social media “influencers”, selfish self centred people, that sort of thing. Popular figures like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are great examples: they imagine the world should bend to their whim, and normal rules don't apply, like a main character in a fictional story.
Episode 721 - A plot B plot
Jan 4, 2025
A standard thing in stories is to have multiple plot lines. In short stories or when you're just starting out as a writer you tend to have a single line, the A plot, but as soon as you get a bit more experience and write longer stories you'll find the plots tend to branch and multiply, even if you don't always fully intend it. The usual is to have the A and B plots: the A is the main one that drives the story and the B is where you put other interesting junk like character development, villain stuff, comic relief, love interests etc. But it can get a LOT more advanced than that and you can have far more than simply A and B.
Episode 720 - Happy New Year!
Dec 30, 2024
It's not the new year yet but this is the final Quackcast of 2024 and it's coming out on New Year's Eve! In this Quackcast we do a bit of a year in review. A bit happened this year… DD reached its 22nd year online being one of the oldest sites on the internet and definitely one of the very oldest free comic hosts next to Keenspace which doesn't really exist now. We released another DD anthology comic collection, A Flock of Dreams (linked bellow), in which your Quackcast hosts collaborated on a comic together! We were really proud of that, Key of Dreams, our story was a real work of love, and you can read that in the anthology.
