EDA and the Three Dwarves

What a long journey this coloring book has gone on! This blog post has been sitting in my drafts for over a year and I thought it was finally time to publish it.

If you’re not aware of the previous coloring books, they have been a series of projects started by Máirín Duffy and Dan Walsh to increase awareness and convey a better understanding of different technology.

For example, ‘The Container Coloring Book: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ is a coloring book where the three little pigs teach you how to keep the big bad wolf from blowing your container-based applications down. The book covers security, management, resource control, namespaces, and much more that people should keep in mind when creating their own applications with containers.

All of the past (and hopefully future coloring books too!) are kept here at www.red.ht/coloring

‘EDA and the Three Dwarves’ was written by Máirín Duffy and then the script was handed off to me when I was an intern in 2020.

I numbered each beat in the script that I could imagine a visual for, which was a lot since this was going to be a comic and not just one picture on each page.

When I drew a thumbnail version of the page I could then add the numbers to keep track of how far I was. This way I knew which parts of the script had visuals.

Below are some of the pages in thumbnail form. There are page numbers 1,2,3,4 etc. at the bottom - as well as the other numbers that correlated with the script scattered on the page. Ultimately after I thumbnailed the whole script I decided that it would be 20 pages total.

After the pages were roughly blocked out I went into Krita and sketched out the illustrations. Sometimes certain pages were easier, or they would need a reference photo, but I drew all the pages in a good amount of detail. You can see how the first thumbnail above on the top left, turned into the first page below.

Snow White is the main character of our story and I wanted the first page to have her in front of her bakery and draw the readers in.

After the pages were blocked out in Krita, I brought them into Inkscape to vectorize them. Below you can see how the sketch transformed to the final!

This was a really great project to launch my Red Hat career, it gave me a great base for knowledge about containers and to familiarize myself with Open Source programs.

Mo and I gave some comments about the process that you can read in this article.

As always, thank you for reading about the process! If you are interested in reading the coloring book or printing it for yourself at home, you can find the PDF here.

Summer Intern Restart Up

Red Hat Internship Round 2 for Summer 2021 is officially under way! Last summer it was a new and fairly wild time especially with covid being fully remote and starting at Red Hat. But this first week actually included a four day weekend, as well as a lot of new hire intern orientation meetings. Some open source, kubernetes, and red hat products bootcamps also sprinkled in there.

In between meetings and bootcamps I’ve been going over how much of the coloring book to get done so I can finish as much as possible by the end of June- and I’ve attached below one of the pages I completed this week.

This summer I’m working on some illustrations for the Red Hat Research Team Podcast, as well as a comic strip to explain open source licensing to creatives (to help make the case for them to open license their work). As well as the element matrix wallpaper which I’ve been trying to reformat so the login bubble that will go in the middle wont cover too much of the design.

I’m attending design team meetings as well as Open Studio team meetings and finally getting in the feel of being back full time! Happy new month and Happy Pride!

-Madeline

Finished Storyboards!

First off the storyboards for the Knative coloring book, all 20 pages are all done! 🥳 Click here to read them all together in a pdf!

My feelings are captured similarly in this high five session going on between Snow White and the Dwarves!

On Monday I wrapped up the last details on the pages and on Tuesday we had two meetings with our amazing technical reviewers who helped make sure the script was accurate and gave the thumbs up towards the images that correlated with the script! It was really amazing hearing some feedback face to face from people besides my family.

I also came up with a few logo ideas for the Nest logo, which is related to Flock I believe. A lot of logo design is just small changes and as your keep drawing and designing, you keep getting ideas!

I also attended an executive talk this week which was really interesting to listen to. I believe it was by DeLisa Alexander (Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer) and hearing about her career track and how she encouraged working for cool places who actually took listened to your demands was an important thing to remember.

Next things on the immediate to do for the workday list include:

1. Finish making the changes for the script and panels

2. Compile all the selfies from the technical reviewers into cartoon faces for their credit page

3. Play around with vector-izing stuff finally!

On the less immediate personal to do list for the three day weekend:

1. This one’s actually related to work. There’s an intern video challenge that needs to be submitted by Monday at 5pm, and I do love making videos! It only has to be one minute long and I finally have an idea for the prompt which is “school spirit”. I think I’m going to make a promotional video for a made up college. We shall see!

2. Lately in the intern bootcamps and just with other interns, we have discussed successful linkedin profiles and other social media type profiles. It has made me realize now more then ever, that I need to make some professional icons and banners for my various platforms that make it clear to my audience I am a ✨ professional artist ✨ haha

3. Gonna make a pavlova tomorrow because I dream of sweet sugary desserts.

Work Update

My last post was a dip into talking about my work that I’ve been doing, and as I type this I’m listening to a Red Hat meeting on how to support your Black Associates. In the past two weeks the Black Lives Matter movement has extended even more across the globe, sparked this time by the unjust murder of George Floyd. The movement was initially created in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. I suggest if you haven’t looked around their website that you take advantage of the resources provided, as well as the lists of important texts and books by black authors being shared around the internet. There are no shortage of podcasts as well (I’m currently listening to Fanti). Black lives have always mattered, they are beloved, and needed. Every time I as a white person feel the need to speak on the current situation, I need to take a step back and ask, “Is this going to drain black people emotionally? Am I going to unintentionally add to the trauma that they are going through? Am I in my lane?” Don’t talk about the racist conversations you try to shut down to your black friends, just so that they can give you a medal, because no ones giving them a medal for all the racist encounters they experience. Sit in your discomfort but don’t stop learning, continue to sign petitions, donate, and if you can go to protests then do so safely.

Black lives matter.

And now I provide a sneaky peak of one of the pages I’ve been working on this week, which I hope that you will enjoy as you take time to take care of yourself.

I save all my files and jpegs of the coloring book here on github, so if you’re curious about what else is getting wrapped up it’s all out in the open before I even create my blog post.

Right now I have a few several pages created and formatted that I’ve been jumping back and forth from, so I guess you’ll just have to wait until they’re done, or download my saved files for krita on github haha.

Stay safe out there!

First Week of my Affair with Fedora

Hello! So perhaps I should introduce myself really quickly.

I'm Madeline, I'm 21 years old, I've lived in the same house my entire life, I'm the oldest of three (I used to be able to pin my two younger brothers at the same time, and then they kept growing *sad resigned face*. They remind me that's in the past now [but really we love each other!]) I've wanted to be an illustrator ever since I heard that it was a proper job at the beginning of high school, and I adore drawing. Since it'll be awhile before any of us actually meet imagine me at 5'8" so you really get the tall energy through the computer screen.

I am developing a new, openly-licensed coloring book in the style of the SELinux Coloring Book and the Containers Coloring Book, in order to help explain kubernetes technical concepts and open source technology to a wide audience. I am going to be developing storyboards for the next two weeks, which I will then clean up to produce a final, print-ready coloring book for the end of the summer.

This doodle like page was after I downloaded Krita (which by the way is amazing? My dad said to our family, "Madeline has been drinking the open source cool aide a lot this week" but honestly I think kids who want a digital program that's way cheaper than Adobe would love Krita) and was trying to set up my tablet, figure out what brushes were speaking to me, and how the characters for the story should look.

Everyone really likes the huge mustache-y dwarf apparently. Which makes me extremely glad.

This is the storyboard/rough version of the cover.

And the back cover.

These below, are my first pass at creating a layout for all the pages at once while looking at the script.

I don't expect many to understand what is happening, but I wanted to have a clearer idea of how many pages I needed to be working on in a day. Also it's interesting because Mo said 12-20 pages, and I really hit the limit with 20 pages exactly lol.

And having the general overview will help me make these more clearer, and in the style of the cover and back cover, to present to the technical advisors on the project.

Have a wonderful start to your week!

- Madeline