Bohemian Zen

Yes, my little New Years surprise comes out today, as I’m finally able to announce that writer Chad Boudreau and myself have made it into the first Zuda competition of the new decade!  We’d been working on this behind the scenes and had to keep the majority of it offline, but thankfully today we can open our big mouths and let everyone know.  So check out the comic on Zuda.com by clicking the image above or the link below.

The Thunderchickens @ Zuda

Sign up, vote, and fave us, please.  You don’t know what it means to us getting this far but we want to win this one.

Peace,

3!LL

As of right now we are in FIRST in the Zuda competition!

http://zudacomics.com/competition/results

Chad, myself, and everyone at and involved with Bohemian Zen wouldjust like to thank everyone for the support.  We’re closing in on 4000 views quickly and we’re doing pretty good in favorites (and by that I mean we lead in the favorites, just not a big enough lead that I can relax) so week 2 is gonna be interesting.  I just cleared some stuff off of my plate, so expect a little surprise next week that should help us with promotion.  As for now, it’s not over yet, so keep voting, ranking, and favoriting TEAM THUNDERCHICKEN!

Peace,

3!LL

Second week in a row and we are still in FIRST!  Thank you guys so much for all the support, it’s really fueling Chad and I to make this thing even bigger.  Right now though I just wanted to share with you a little comic we put together to help you get to know our heroes.

Click the promo poster to vote!

Peace,

3!LL

I just wanted to share a little behind the scenes insight into the creation of our promotional comic for The Thunderchickens on Zuda. You can click any of the images below to see a higher resolution.

The first thing I did was grab a full screen capture of the Zuda frontpage. I immediately started thinking about how the characters could interact with the page itself. After a few ideas hit me, I broke the page up into panels, fade the background, and start penciling in Photoshop.

Then I save those pencils to a new file and start inking, leaving the background faded. I’m inking with a basic round brush with pen pressure on and a slight fade at the edges of the brush.

I finish the inks on all of the figures, and double check to make sure all my character details are in.

Next I copy just the inks to a white background, close me open lines, and run a flatting program that auto-fills all my spaces. I open the style guides we created for The Thunderchickens, and pull my colors from there, properly filling in the spaces with the correct color.

I open a new layer, and set it to multiply. With a basic brush I take a light desaturated blue/ purple and fill in my shadows. It’s all a very cel-shaded style, so I’m just making the basic two-toned cuts.

Next I open a new screen layer, and drop a few highlights in across the figures with a light yellow color. I then select just the non-shaded parts and add another highlight. I also add drop shadows in the second panel.

Next I add secondary highlights in the shadows with a color just a bit cooler than my shadows. I add a bit of a gradient to the background to add a bit of depth.

And finally I open the image in Illustrator and add the lettering, paying attention to the pacing of the dialog in the balloons, and making sure the lettering leads the reader through the page.

And that’s it. If you want to see more, please check out and vote for our entry over at Zuda.com!

And be sure to check out The Thunderchickens Super Fun Time press kit!

Gallery View

Flash Viewer

And thanks again for all of the support!

Alrighty, 3!LL here,

An interview with Chad and I went up yesterday at RocketLlama.com.  We’d like to thank them for their interest in our project and for allowing us to talk a little bit about the creative process involved in making it.  The interview can be found below.

http://www.rocketllama.com/blog-it/2010/01/20/interview-the-thunderchickens/

Also, our good friends over at Red Bar Radio gave us a little plug on their show the other day.  We just wanted to thank them for their support. You can check out their show at RedBarRadio.com, and you should vote for them every month over at Podcast Alley.

Also we’d like to thank Tim Henson at the Distorted View Daily podcast for the shout out on his show the other day.  He recently released a video talking about a comic book character he created when he was a kid, and I did a little sketch of a couple of his characters.

And lastly but far from least we’d like to share with you the sites of some people who have been the backbone of Team Thunderchicken.  We’ve had so much support coming from so many places so we wanted to make sure we gave them a shout back and show our appreciation of support. So please, if you get a chance, check out some of out friends below who’ve helped us bring this together.

http://roundhoward.com/

http://www.enemyofpeanuts.com/

http://www.sidebarnation.com/

http://pkdmedia.com/

http://twitter.com/bholliday

http://thedailyzombie.blogspot.com/

http://sorethumbs.keenspot.com/

http://dwightmacpherson.wordpress.com/

http://twitter.com/AdamAtherton

http://twitter.com/tommydacomicguy

http://twitter.com/jeff_mccomsey

http://www.th3rdworld.com/web-comic/The-SuperFogeys

http://twitter.com/jamiegambell

http://mattzolman.wordpress.com/

http://therejectscomic.com/

http://geekywhiteguy.carbonmade.com/

http://twitter.com/tonytrov

http://ljamal.com/

If there is anyone I forgot I apologize. You can feel free to smack me upside the head and send me a link to post on the blog.

Peace,

3!LL

Just so the first post wasn’t a sea of links, I wanted to post another thanks post to more of our supporters.

First off I’d like to thank the fellas and ladies over at the Fur Affinity forums. There has been a ton of support from that community and I wanted to say thank you especially to them for digging The Thunderchickens.

Secondly, I’d like to thank the creators of Pavlov’s Dream, which is also in this month’s competition. They’ve been extremely nice people and a joy to follow on twitter.

http://twitter.com/bicyclefish

http://www.drunkduck.com/Brainfuzz/

http://twitter.com/shiwoo

http://machinegolem.com/

Again, there has been so much support, it’s hard to remember everywhere it comes from, so if I forgot anyone please let me know, and I’ll rectify it.

Peace,

3!LL

Just wanted to thank JK and the cool cats over at Robot6 for posting this today.

You can check out their post by clicking the image above or HERE.

Peace,

3!LL