Original DA Upload Date: January 22, 2022
I may not have had much to say in the artwork in which this mock-newspaper was featured, but damn, do I have a lot to say about the newspaper itself. I don’t know how long this description is gonna be, but just trust me when I say that this description will probably be the most in-depth you’ve ever seen about a mock newspaper. So get comfortable. This is gonna take a while. Then again, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’d know long descriptions are usually to be expected. Whether you’re a follower or not, though… let’s dive in.
I – The color of the newspaper
“The color of the newspaper? But it’s black-and-white! Why are you dedicating an entire section to this?”
Yes, yes, ‘it’s black-and-white’. What a very broke observation. But you know me. Just turning it black-and-white never cuts it around here. Here’s the woke explanation.
The colors you’re seeing here are actually not black and white. Or any shade of grey, for that matter. The ‘white’ is actually a faded yellow, chosen for its close resemblance to the paper of actual newspapers, with a subtle paper texture added over it. The ‘black’, however, is actually black… or at least it was, before I applied blending effects and set the transparency so that it’d more closely resemble ink on paper. So it’s not true black you’re seeing here. I never logged the actual hex values of the ‘white’ and the ‘black’ before the paper texture was applied. But if you want a ballpark estimate, the red, green, and blue hex values for the ‘white’ are around E8-EB, E4-E7, and DC-DF respectively (with a margin of error of two units each), and the hex values for the ‘black’ are 27 and 28 for red and green, and 25 and 26 for blue. And for those unfamilar with hex values, that’s not ‘twenty-seven’, ‘twenty-eight’, and whatever. That’s ‘two-seven’ and ‘two-eight’, which are hex code for thirty-nine and forty respectively.
II – The newspaper title
As you can see, the newspaper is called ‘The Grunvale Gazette’. That’s self-explanatory, and it’s not what this section is about. It’s about the font I used to write it.
The font is called ‘Chomsky’, designed by Frederick Brennan and modeled after the font used in the New York Times logo. I’ve also seen similar fonts used for many other newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald. Because of how prevalent Chomsky and similar fonts are for newspapers, I used it for the Grunvale Gazette logo. Call it cliche, but be honest, what other font do you think of as ‘that newspaper logo font’ other than Chomsky?
III – The issue information
Below the Grunvale Gazette logo (and of course in the title of this work), we see that this particular edition is the 34th issue of the 151st volume, dated August 26, 2017 and costing fifty cents. The fifty cents part is self-explanatory, except for the fact… apparently the cents symbol is so underused nowadays that modern keyboards don’t bother including it. So I went with ‘$.’ instead. Since it means the same thing. As for the rest of the information on this line…
This paper being part of the 151st volume of the Grunvale Gazette, means that 2017 was/is the 151st year of the Grunvale Gazette’s publication. Which, in turn, means that the newspaper has been published since 1867. And no, people bad at math, that would NOT mean issues published in 2017 would be volume 150. 1867 to 2017 includes 151 years. As for this being ‘issue 34’… well, that’s a part where I paid particular attention to detail.
I imagine the Grunvale Gazette being a subsidiary to the Grunvaliverse’s equivalent of the Times Union (the real-life newspaper of Albany county). It’s a smaller paper, of course, that has less content, narrower focus, and smaller circulation than its parent paper, and distributes only a Saturday edition. August 26, 2017 was indeed the 34th Saturday of that year; I counted through the 2017 calendar myself, and then did a Google search for ’34th Saturday of 2017′ to confirm.
Finally, ‘NP’ is an abbreviation for ‘New Pork’. For those outside the US, we Americans often refer to the states with two letters. For examples, New York is ‘NY’, and Florida is ‘FL’. It only makes sense that the Grunvaliverse would do the same for their versions of the states.
Those are the production notes for this section. Before I move on, I’d like to talk some notes on Grunvale’s history related to the Gazette… I’ve canoned ever since the web novel era, that Grunvale was founded in 1817. That would mean that the Gazette was founded during the 50th anniversary of the town, the Golden Jubliee. The anniversary was actually the original motivation for the newspaper’s founding. In fact, it was originally called the ‘Golden Grunvale Gazette’, before dropping the ‘golden’ from its title for its second volume in 1868.
IV – The headlines
The text reading ‘50,000 TWEETS’ is the second and last use of a font other than Times New Roman anywhere on this newspaper… mock-up. It is in DIN Condensed. The subheadline is also uniquely kerned, as I felt that special kerning would make this mock-up better resemble a newspaper. The smaller headline at the bottom, on the other hand, is a joke I’ve been wanting to do for a while, referencing the decreasing relevancy of newspapers.
V – The columnist names
The names of the columnists who ‘wrote’ the articles present on this page, are puns. ‘Tyne W. Roman’ is a pun on ‘Times New Roman’, the font which the majority of the text in this newspaper mockup is written in. And you are very familiar with by this point. I’d even say that it’s the font you’ve seen the most throughout your life. Although unless you’re a designer like me, or you remember the names of the fonts your teachers from school required you write in, you may not have known its name. As for ‘Walt Breaker IV’, that’s a pun on ‘fourth wall break’, doubling as a reference to how the headline itself is a fourth wall break.
VI – The article
Oh, was this a fun one to write. For this one, it wasn’t enough to just write a mock newspaper artcle about me reaching my 50,000th tweet. I had to imagine myself as a Grunvalian who has only heard of the human world, our world, through what me, the Phoenix of Grunvale, has revealed about it to the Grunvaliverse, as well as conspiracy theories and information distorted through word-of-mouth. I know that COVID-19 isn’t named after Corona beer, and 4 BC is the year I hear the most regarding Jesus’ birth year. This ‘Tyne W. Roman’, however, heard some time before writing this article, that coronaviruses are named for the beer, and that 2022 is the 2022nd year after our world’s Jesus’ birth.
It was also fun writing about my work and my life in a fictionalized matter. The ‘second senior year’ part is indeed true; I graduated high school in 2017, being held back a year to have me ‘better prepared for the adult world’, as everyone around me has liked to put it. And I admittedly forgot that my Twitter account used to be called ‘PRSToonCritic’ until writing that part; AnimationFan15 didn’t even know that’s what I originally went by on the site before ‘StormTheArtist’.
The ‘hue-mans’ thing is nothing new, I’ve had my anthropomorphic characters refer to humans that way before. But since I have an opportunity to talk about it now, I guess I’ll reveal what inspired it. It’s probably the weirdest place I’ve ever found inspiration from as far as Grunvale/OTOG is concerned… it comes from a movie I saw as a kid, called Aliens in the Attic.
Anyone remember that movie? Aliens invading home in the country? A lot of video game references? Ashley Tisdale was in it? Yeah, don’t feel like you missed out on anything. Even as a kid I thought it was stupid. But at least it has the weird distinction of inspiring the way my anthropomorphic characters pronounce ‘human’.
Finally, to keep continuity with the 50K arc, the Tetrad are all 12 years old, the age they’d be in August of 2017 on the strict timeline, on which they were all born in 2005. I’ve already stated the Tetrad’s birthdays before; Gilda’s is May 14th, Margo’s is June 23rd, Wendy’s is March 7th, and April’s is March 30th. And yes, I do acknowledge the irony of April being born in March. Always have. She’s the chain-breaker when it comes to the Tetrad being born in successive months. However, her Tetrad opposite, Margo, is the chain-breaker in terms of them being born under successive astrological signs. Wendy is a Pisces, April an Aries, Gilda a Taurus, and Margo a… Cancer, skipping over Gemini. And similar to April’s ironic birth in March, Margo’s birth being under Cancer is ironic considering that she’s from a set of multiple births, and Gemini represents twins.
VII – The Gilda photograph
This was the most fun part of the newspaper to work on. Gilda’s photograph here doubles as a WIP for the actual 50K special, as it features the assets that will be used in it. However, they won’t be presented in the same way that you see here. Gilda’s left arm? Not only is that asset rotated from what you’ll see in the artwork, but cropped out of the image is… April’s right arm, detached from the rest of her body, high-fiving Gilda.
Good luck getting that image of body horror out of your head, heheh. Truth be told, I could probably make an entire Twitter account dedicated to my most shitpost-looking WIPs. Hm… I’ll do it if you all can get my Twitter account to 1000 followers. It’s at 885 as I write this, I only have… a little while to go, numerically speaking. Then again, I haven’t crossed a hundred-follower barrier since August of 2020. Maybe I’ll start bringing in followers in bigger numbers again soon? Maybe?
Anyhoo, if you zoom into the artwork, you’ll see I went the extra mile with that photo in making it look like it’s actually printed on a newspaper. I used ASP’s built-in Halftone effect to render the asset in dots, much like those that would be used to display it if it were printed on paper. Not just newspaper, any kind of paper. Much like the text, the asset also has blending effects applied to it to further sell the idea that it is ink on paper.
That’s all the details regarding the piece itself, now for some miscellaneous production notes.
VIII – The miscellaneous production notes
There were typos in the paper in the 1.00 version of 50,000 Tweets (Give or Take)!, namely an omission of the word ‘runs’, and using the term ‘human’ instead of ‘hue-man’ twice. By the time I noticed my mistakes, I had deleted the PSD and only had the PNG. Thankfully, ASP has an inpaint tool, which is used for filling in blank areas of a layer with procedurally-generated pixels based on the imagery around it. So I just cut out the areas that had typos, filled them in with the inpaint tool, and typed the new text over them, complete with the correct blending effects. I even made sure the placement of the text was pixel-perfect. The 1.00 version of the paper is still visible in the background of the 1.01 version of the parent piece, however. Parent piece… does that term work here? Because the mock newspaper was made first. I guess you can call this is a chicken-and-egg scenario. Hm… egg piece. The dual-panel comic is the egg piece. And the paper is the chicken piece.
My logo is nowhere to be seen in this paper. I didn’t feel I needed to include it this time, since my name is already mentioned in the egg piece several times. Plus, the egg piece for includes my logo, so why include it twice, right?
IX – Conclusion
This was fun to make. I may even do more Grunvaliverse newspaper/magazine/print media mockups some time down the line, if this gets enough views. Say, 1000. That’s a 1000 barrier I break on a regular basis, DA views. I think this can make it too.
Anyways, that’ll be all for this one. Until next time, take care, stay safe, get vaccinated, reject crypto, and have a good one.
DON’T FORGET TO FOLLOW ME ON OTHER PLATFORMS:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/StormyAdlerPoG
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Discord: Contact me by my tag (Stormy Adler, P.o.G.#1752) for an invite to my server.
Grunvale/OTOG is owned by me. You’re free to draw fanart of it, as long as you link me to it.
This artwork was made at a resolution of 2160×2880 (aspect ratio 1:1.33).
The Gallery of Stormy Adler 