So, being not content with only ONE comic project, apparently I have to start up a second. This one is short though! I promise myself... ish.

Anyway, I have no compunction about sharing with this one since the first big twist comes on basically the first page - second page if you want to get technical.

I'm not doing any planning for this one. I know the beginning, middle and end of the story, generally, but I'm writing the dialogue as I draw the pages, and I kind of like it this way - I get to focus more on telling the story with pictures instead of words. It its really quite liberating.

Writing is HARD. Writing is even harder when you have half a script already and only 3/4 of the knowledge of where it was supposed to go. It's even harder when you want to go back through pages you already drew and re write them while sticking hard and fast to one's own laziness and lack of desire to redraw them.

From this you must gather that I've chosen to attempt to continue the comic on my own, without Jia. Her lack of willingness to come forward and discuss the future of the comic tells me that she feels that there isn't one. If this isn't true well...

In any case, Now I have writing duties as well, and I don't know how this will affect the future of the comic. My major problem is that I don't want to start writing lots of random shit and then go back afterwards to make it all fit the end, or find that the end I end up deciding on. That and the fact that I'm dissatisfied with the original ending right now.

Plus I keep wanting to write the really cool climactic scenes and dodge the slower, plot building scenes. It is very frustrating.

On the plus side, I LOVE world building, even when it relies heavily on source material. After all, the 'city of St. Laurence' the setting of our comic is my own little fictional place with which to play. ( double checking this, there are cities called st. Laurence in existence, but none of them sit where MY st. Laurence is going so I'm in the clear)

Also extra, possibly unrelated side note which wasn't relavent at the start of this entry: Cough medicine and wine don't mix. Or they mix a little too well if you catch my drift.

Unfortunately for me, (or fortunately, depending on your point of veiw) the chapter I'm working on right now (chapter 2) has a bucketload of narration. I really hope that this will be the only really narration heavy chapter, but the fact that we have one only two chapters in does worry me a wee little bit. SO although I get pages where the only drawing is this man on my right, it also means that the entire left side of the page is filled up with text. Oh the words are alright, full of usefull plot background info ( of course, none of the important stuff) but I'll be damned If I know how to make it look good. When you open up a webcomic, presumably you want to read a comic, not a novel, and god knows I love to skip over heavy narration sections.

But practicality rears it's ugly head. To add more illustration means that there is less room to  put that lovely text that needs to get in there, which means more pages, which throughs the balance of the scene out of whack. I'm a total sucker for symetry, so when I've got this image of Lewis Wong, I have to balance it out with another similar one of his rival. If the Wong family gets a narration free page, then their rival the Walters must also.

What does this mean? I'll be damned if I do, except that somehow avoiding work gets me more work in the end . ALso, that I can't draw debonair housecoats worth a damn.

As it is, I'd like to document the rudimentary comic process I've been using so far to make my comics. I'm always fascinated by other people's working process and how they've developed their own personal style for creating comics and digital art. Much of what I do I've cobbled together from the helpful tutorials of other artists, including Sarah Ellerton of Inverloch , J. Harper of The Curious Adventures of Aldus Maycombe (whose tutorial on Deviantart I highly recommend) and Tracy J. Butler's Lackadaisy . (I've linked the individual tutorials down at the bottom)

 Having developed character sketches and sent them off to my counterpart writer for approval, I sit and wait a bit for Jia (The half of this comic that can actually write plot)  to write up the script for the next chapter based on all the plot stuff we've discussed so far. The script gets broken up into pages, and looks something like this at this stage:




From here I plan the entire chapter out in thumbnails and send the doodled on script away with the doodled thumbnails to Jia, hoping against hope that she can decipher my pasta scribbles as real drawings. A typical thumbnail ( for page two of the chapter) looks like this:



... come to think of it, that's mostly a lie. Some of them end up more detailed, with facial expressions or clothing details. Some of them are a box that says " Mo" inside, or a scribbled circle with eyes on it. All this goes on to the writer who does a third edit of the script based on what I can and can't apparently draw. What comes out at this stage depends on my commentary and if  Jia has read The Godfather again in between edits.

I work a little more than twice as big as the comic is going to be - my starting dimensions right now are 1240 by 1671 pixels at 72 dpi in Ink Art (Unprofessional I know...) That weird little thumbnail becomes this:



 I like to work in colour because it helps me see my lines better when I go to Ink. Also, it makes me feel very professional (I stole this professionalism tip off of another digital comicker, but I'll be damned if I can remember who) This sketch is deceptively neat compared to some of the stuff I produce. Neatness is not necessarily a priority because the reader never sees this stuff ( Unless I stupidly decide to show it to you in a fascimile of documentary tutorial ) . I save that sketch as a Jpeg and import it back into the InkArt file as a tracing paper. I clear everything that exists on the page and go back over it with a black paint brush set to 1% and a very low pressure. This makes my lines a little messy, but also gives them an organic feel that I wouldn't get in Photoshop without actual effort. Ink art does a good job of registering pen pressure, something that doesn't work to well for me in Photoshop Elements with my Tablet PC.  It ends up looking like this:




The file then gets saved as a Jpeg again and goes into Photoshop Elements (I'm too cheap to get Real Photoshop, not that my laptop doesn't crawl enough running that). I break the panels up into layers and shuffle them around until they're placed right and draw a black border using the select and paintbucket tools on another layer.  Behind that one I put a layer all of the extra shading that goes into the comic. The layer's blending style is set to Hard Light so I can keep all of my lines. This scene calls for Mo to be in a Plaid suit, so I went onto google and got an image of plaid fabric. Using the Clone Stamp tool I put the plaid onto the Hard Light layer and the end result of all this meddling looks like this:

 


Other stuff happens involving dialouge bubbles ( which are basically ovals made using the select tool with points drawn on with the lasso. I fill them in white and then modify the selection to become a border selection and paint this black), and copyrights and such. After I finish with my meddling, the comic gets saved as a GIF at 46% of it's original size, and the resolution is changed to 300 dpi . This number has no significance as far as I can tell.

So far this mode of working has proved pretty efficient. I've fiddled around with the physical dimensions of the canvas I use in Ink Art in order to get panels that fit nicely into the page dimensions I've worked out. At first I did one or two pages worth of sketches on one long horizontal canvas, and then I moved to a long vertical one. Now I'm working with a canvas the same dimensions as my page in photoshop, which I'm finding is working much more nicely in terms of layout. It's a bit of a hassle to find out you've drawn a panel twice as big as you might possibly ever need it and hope to high Hell Heaven Mount Everest that things don't get distorted when you shrink them. Not that I did this *cough*

Hopefully I don't ramble too much - and that this is mildly informative. I should do it again in a few chapters to see how my style has changed.

Good Tutorials by Webcomic Artists:

Lackadaisy How A Comic is Made

Inverloch Cell Shading Tutorial  - this is where I first learned to colour, not that much of it will be showing up in the pages

Digital Comicking Tutorial by Ancret AKA J. Harper. Excellent, well done

I'll add more tutorials as I find them helpful.

 

Alright, so I didn't always want to be a web comic artist - I certainly read enough of the suckers to know that these guys do a lot of work, some of them even make money off it ( though I don't think that I could get to the fame of Ghalager of Megatokyo ) But, heck that would be nice.

Nope, I never wanted to be one, but everyone kept insisting that web comics and I were destined to be together. Then This happened: 

   
 

" This" was connected to an entire gritty, assassination plot storyline which we had toyed around with. This now had to happen as a comic. The main character had been drawn, and I'd put my name by her feet. She didn't have a face, she didn't have appropriately proportioned clothing , but she had a hat, two guns, a killer personality (Literally) and she had a storyline. Production immediately began with character sketches, of which the number keeps growing.

My struggle with this blog will be how much do I keep secret and how much goes public before we publish the comic on line. Because of the nature of the plot, revealing too much will be dangerous - but to not tease at all is no fun. As it is I'd like to post up bits of the comic process as I get through them.

Comic Status: 10 pages complete.