I wrote Mark Dooley this morning and told him that I find this his most compelling storyline yet. People think that such simple artwork is easy to achieve. If anything, it is more difficult. If Mark wants to submit a comment on how he breaks down a 3 panel strip and moves the story along and so on, then I would be delighted to post it to the blog.
Here are the next 3 chapters in what promises to be a heart-breaking tale (tail?)
Expect a Christmas tie post later on today! And post 2200 should be out tomorrow as well. Look for it!
Bevboy
1 comment:
Well, it's not something easily explained. For one of the few times in my artistic endeavors, I've actually done a strip-by-strip breakdown of the first ten strips, although I've largely ignored it, as I just have a feeling of how this story should be paced.
It all starts at the art page: I use a pre-bluelined 11" X 17" Strathmore comicbook page that makes two comic strips (less expensive and more flexible than buying actual comic strip-sized pages). I use regular No. 2 pencils, though I'm seriously considering going to a blue-line in the future. I do the breakdowns, then use a .01 Micron to do black fineline work, so everything is outlined. I erase all the pencils so that I have the very basic drawing before me.
One thing I always have trouble with is making sure there will be enough room on the panel for the dialogue, which I hardly ever write down. So a word of caution to all you potential comic artists: make room for your words.
After this, I use a #2 round brush for the embellishing with FTP India Ink... very dark and solid. Having finished the artwork, I take it over to my local UPS Store and use their best copier to make a reduced photcopy of the work in a text finish so that it will reproduce perfectly on my office scanner.
After scanning the strip in Adobe Photoshop in 600 pixel bitmap B & W form, I make whatever corrections need to be made, then take the pixel size down to 300 and transform it into a greyscale TIFF format. You can actually see the drawing soften and become more solid. I save it as a TIFF image. After that, I use the SELECT file and "ALL", which allows me to put the entire drawing on the clipboard. I then open a new palette (giving me a totally clean board to work on) and paste the art on it. Using the magic wand, I pick one spot on the drawing to seperate from the art. I go back to the SELECT menu and choose SIMILAR, which will raise the black lines above the palette. I then go to the MODE menu and choose CMYK color and choose not to flatten. From this point you can use your brush of paint bucket to color your work underneath the black lines.
After I've finished coloring, I close out the finished art as a JPEG and save it. I close out the other palettes without saving any changes (I might need them again in the future).
I then open the artwork up in Adobe Illustrator 10, where I do all the dialogue in BLComic font and making word balloons using the ellipse tools and the pen for tails. It took a while for me to master this, but it was so worth the time. When this was all finished, I saved the image as an AI file.
Back to Adobe Photoshop. I open the AI file and convert it to a jpeg, replacing the one that I made earlier. And it's all ready to be put up on the net or place in our church newsletter or Whoosier Network newsletter, The Gallifreyan Gazette.
Yeah, it sounds a bit complicated, but I just have a love for what I do, and whether or not I ever make some serious money or a career out of it all, I have to follow that muse. 'Cause she packs a really big frying pan...
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