What Foamy Has Been Up To

Not sure if anyone noticed, but I haven't been posting that much lately, and it's because I've been working on some projects that I'm hoping can earn me some money. I might be needing the money because my family is on the verge of losing our home. My father worked at the same construction company for over 20 years before he was laid off last year. We've all been scrambling to find work but so far nothing steady has come up. We're waiting to hear on our approval/denial for the mortgage modification program, and, fortunately, my father will be getting his unemployment benefits restored soon.

So, I was trying to come up with ways to earn some money to help the family or at least enough to buy a basic laptop that could use at a library for WiFi and at home to finish up my online degree program. Growing up, people told me I had a lot of artistic talent, but that side of me kind of shriveled up and died when my little sister was killed in auto accident about 6 years ago. I've been trying to reawaken that part of me in hopes I could sell some designs to SplitReason.com, because apparently they give you $350 if they like your design and I figured I'm plugged in enough to geek culture to come up with some good ideas.

One of the hurdles I came across was, uh, only having Paint to work with. Being unable to afford a laptop, I was naturally unable to purchase Photoshop. I managed to find a freeware image editor called Paint.NET, so I've been using that to experiment and get a feel for what it's going to take. Today I finished my first design and I'd like to get some feedback from the center of geek culture in my life.

I'm looking to submit it to the site sometime this weekend, so overall I'm asking a few questions of anyone who comments:

• Is this a design you would wear on your shirt?
• Do you know of anywhere else that would give me more for the design?
• Are there any notable improvements I could make on the design?

First thought: Cool shirt design.

Second thought: Are any of those images copyrighted? Don't want you to get into legal trouble ontop of everything else.

Well I used referenced shots for them but I obviously made some modifications to make them more stylized and I was thinking I would be okay since it's like parody. I've seen designs of popular characters on the designs from that site of like Stormtroopers and Optimus Prime and such.

If it was me designing the shirt, I'd go for a bit more abstract/stylized version of the characters. The farther you get from the baseline image, the better you'd be, at least IMO and IANAL, in terms of parody/fair usage.

Well if the usage thing is the biggest issue, I'm going to go ahead and submit it, and if there's a problem with that aspect, they'll just reject it and I can move on. I've got plenty of other ideas to design. I'm just eager to get this one in the bag.

First and foremost you and your family have my best wishes that everything works out for you.

I think your design looks cool but I share the concerns others have voiced. Best of luck with it.

Something you may, or may not have considered Foamy, but have you given thought to starting up a comics review blog? I mean, based upon your past history and rather eloquent reviews, that may be a route for you.

You could throw on some Project Wonderful ads or Google ads and see if you can get anything from it.

Well I would have to have money to buy comics to review 'em.

I've even considered selling off my TPB collection but I dunno if fellow geeks are looking to make such big purchases right now.

On a different note, there is an open-source equivalent to Photoshop that you might want to look into. Check out gIMP: http://www.gimp.org/

It's 100% free, and it can do probably 90% of what Photoshop can do. I turn all my web design students on to it, and it works for them, at least for web design stuff, so hopefully it'll help you as well.

Also just whipped this up:

Ha. That would definitely be a shirt only comics people paying attention to the current comic scene would get, but I love it.

For the respawn shirt, I would do the faces individually and try to sell each one to that site. I'm not a hardcore fan of all of those characters, but I am of some. I think having all of them on there would keep people who love one but not another from buying it.

Can you do multiple submissions? If so I would submit as many varieties as possible. Something's bound to stick.

Then I would submit them all as individuals and the whole thing. Think like a corporation. Saturate the market. Shift paradigms. Think outside boxes. Practice your execu-speak.

If you were going to do individual ones, it would be more amusing if you individualized the saying...like if you had a faceplanted Neo, then a copy of WoW's resurrection prompt saying "The Matrix wants to resurrect you. Accept/Accept", instead of Accept/Decline. Or have Buffy down with the prompt saying "UPN wants to resurrect you. Accept/Oh God, not Season 6, where's my $&%^ing agent!"

Given the other things I've seen on the site, they seem pretty confident that their stuff falls under parody use, so I don't see them not accepting it.

The second image is perfect, I would change nothing. It's money in the bank, IMO.

The first, I think it's too busy. I'd pull two or three of the characters off of it.