Catching Up - Part One

I've done some comics in the past but nothing ever published or shared on the net.  Just passed around the circle of friends is all.  About a year ago my wife got me a digital drawing tablet (it was a Father's Day present if you must know) - nothing fancy - not a real Wacom or anything.  A budget model for a budget dude.  At the time I was a few months into my stupid web comic "This Little Piggy..." which was originally put together with Microsoft Paint but at that point I had graduated to Paint.net[http://paint.net/] (a great piece of software if you're looking for a simple upgrade from regular Paint).  The tablet was a real step change for Piggy's quality and I think it's pretty clear if you go back where the change happened.  Anyhoo, at the time I was having some financial difficulties and was actively whoring around Piggy hoping to pick up a few clicks (and a few bucks) and started to get actively involved on a couple of comics forums.  I won't list them now, but I received tons of feedback from the wonderful folks there and a lot of really good recommendations for formatting, resolution, style and software.  It was then I became aware of GIMP [http://www.gimp.org/] the freeware equivalent of Photoshop - and the rest is history.  


There.  I'm done with the bio and the history lesson and the "who the hell does this guy think he is" stuff.  I'm nobody.  'Nuff said.


Here we are a few months later and I am haunted by what I think is a good kick off story for a comic series.  And I think it's good enough that I want to do it as close to professionally as I am capable.  So I do a little research (OK - I go to Wikipedia) and find out that since the mid-1970's comic books have been standardized to a page size of 6 ⅝" x 10 ¼" (17 x 26 cm).  Following these dimensions I make a quick page template and give it a 1/4" border:

I want the resolution to be fairly clean (in case it is ever to be printed or something) so I increase it to 1000x1529 pixels.  This makes my files much larger but the clarity of the line is worth every MB.

I quickly wrote out the story for the first "issue" and have a clear 'good guy' (the salesman) and 'bad guy' (the lab tech).  As I have sometimes had issues with consistency when drawing characters several times I know I need to do a character study - like those old Disney documentaries I've seen a hundred times.  First the 'good guy':

First Sketch

Ink Over Pencil

Ink And Airbrush

First Ink On Head Studies

Airbrush On Head Studies

Completed Study

I was trying to get this feel of gruff age - slightly disheveled but always dressed professionally no matter what type of horrific mutant he is battling at the time.

Next our evil lab tech.  I'll be honest and say that he is based on an actual person who shall remain unnamed (unless he wishes to name himself - at which point I will gladly confirm):

First Sketch

Ink Over Pencil

Ink And Airbrush

Final Ink And Airbrush

For posterity I've saved every iteration in multi-layer format (the sketch is one layer, the ink another, the airbrush yet another).  This is really meaningless in the big picture, but I'm excited enough about this that I want to revel in every nuance as though I will someday go back and do an epic re-mix of it from the master layers when I attain more skills or technology progresses to the point that there is a comic auto-tune or something I can use to clean it up a bit.

Tomorrow we'll discuss my breaking of the golden rule of comics and the beginnings of page one as our story unfolds.