Comments on: What Do You Use to Make Your Comic?

By: Dwight Williams

Dwight Williams — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:09:56 +0000

Oh, but you’d have had fun sitting in on the languages panel this weekend…

By: quarktime

quarktime — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 18:14:19 +0000

Hey Tara,

I use a pretty-much all-digital process, but it’s a wacky one. I have a virtual space about a kilometer high and about a hundred meters on a side full of 3d assets — full-size sets and environments — that I’ve built or set up myself, and I also use “found” locations elsewhere in virtual space as backdrops. I also pull others in and out of inventory as needed, that don’t fit in the limited space I’ve allocated, or that I don’t use on a regular basis. (I know…don’t fit in a kilometer? Huh? It gets crowded when you’re talking about space stations and planetary dioramas.) I set everything up in 3 dimensions, including custom characters and poses, then “fly” around the scene with a 3d mouse, taking still shots at high-resolution. Then I pick my best stills, and start cleaning up and layering in matte work for extra pieces that couldn’t go in the original shot. I add in layers for special effects, and the usual stuff like motion blur and movement lines. Then I composite up my panels for proper page flow. I don’t usually just flip a picture, since I can go back and reshoot it from a different angle, if I haven’t got that angle in the ones I took already. As this is all going on, I’m subtly enhancing the clarity and cleaning up any image imperfections, improving aliasing, adjusting colors and lighting values. After the raw page is done, I letter.

I use Windows, not Mac, and a combination of GIMP and Photoshop, with Second Life for the virtual stuff. Ironically, I wind up having to redraw the hands, especially fists. Second Life is awful at close manipulation with hands. So I wind up redrawing them anyway.

Sometimes, I’ve done a storyboard from hand, especially on a particularly tough page. But I’m not a good enough artist by hand — yet — to draw it the traditional way. Maybe someday. I’ve got pretty much all of that stuff you use, but I’m using it to learn how to do it your way. I don’t use it for my comic yet.

By: Tara

Tara — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 23:42:37 +0000

Hi Dawn, one 11×17 page holds one comic page for me. The actual image size is 9×14, which leaves room for the “trim” border and “bleed” border (both of these are printer terms, for when it comes time to get the comic printed in book format). I used to draw larger, but I switched to that size because it fits easily on my scanner.

By: Dawn

Dawn — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 07:39:33 +0000

I love blog posts about artist tools! Just wondering – how much do you fit on one 11X17 page? Is it one page of the comic, or just one panel? And why that size?

By: Kev

Kev — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:59:52 +0000

To heck with all digital – how could I purchase original art then?

By: Tara

Tara — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:12:21 +0000

I do sometimes wonder if I ought to switch to that method, because erasing does get annoying. But I guess there are two advantages: 1) the final page looks a little cleaner, which makes it nicer for selling original art, and 2) When I'm drawing a page I erase a lot. Even with the pre-planning of thumbnail drawings and layouts, I still end up doing a lot of moving figures around and re-drawing. Blue/red pencil has been, in my experience, very difficult to erase completely. My pages would be an illegible and uninkable mess if I wasn't able to lift off those early lines.

By: Tara

Tara — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:03:54 +0000

But that is the correct way to spell “coloured”!

By: AndyL

AndyL — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:38:31 +0000

‘Coloured’? Bah. My tablet keeps changing its autocorrect dictionary to British.

By: AndyL

AndyL — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:33:07 +0000

This is great, I love posts like this.

I do have one question though. What’s the advantage to doing all that erasing as opposed to using coloured pencil and removing it digitally?