So I did another comic tonight. Only took a couple hours, which is fast for me. Below, I thought I’d share a sketch of the comic. Did the whole thing in Manga Studio and one of the things I love most is sketching with the ‘pencil’ tool. It’s not like the pencil tool in Photoshop. It behaves like a REAL PENCIL. That is, it behaves like the photoshop brush tool for the most part, but its opacity is already set to act like a pencil! The image below is my ‘pencil sketch’ inside Manga Studio.
You can also see that I ‘hand-lettered’ this comic as well. It’s pretty easy on the Cintiq. Perhaps I’ll make a tutorial video of how I do that.
Check this out! I drew this picture of a skull with a mohawk for Jon’s Kid Brother and then he went graffiti’d his back with it. I like how the tattoo artist changed the shading on the gear, for the most part. The shading right around the hole almost makes it look bulgy, like a donut.
I made an avatar for you. Also above is the original “life is pain” avatar. You can use ‘em if you have a place where they still let you use animated gif files as avatars. Download them and put them on your own server, though. And be sure to tell folks where you got ‘em.
Below is the animation larger. I think I may go in and thicken up the lines as it loses some weight when it’s shrunk down. Animators: anything I can improve? I will do some more work on it. Animating that guy reacting to the hammer blow was tough, but I will keep at it to make it the best guy-getting-hit-with-a-hammer animation it can be.
Here’s the second in this series of Word bubble tutorials using Photoshop. Hope you find them informative. Both vids can be found on the video tutorial page.
Check out this video tutorial I made so you can see how I make word bubbles in Photoshop CS4 using paths. If you want to see this tutorial as a sequence of still images, go to the CS2 Word Bubble Tutorial.
I tried to finish this comic by streaming it on Ustream while drawing it, and I had a whole 9 visits! They all watched about 30 seconds before leaving. This comic has bees and a gramophone in it!
In case you didn’t notice, I put up a word between able and abnormal. That word is abnegation. There is also a RSS feed for you if you like. The site still looks like boring horses, but I’ll get around to that at some point. I just want to get some drawings done for now. And as I’m writing this, I am in the middle of sketching the next AIR comic.
So, how do you like this little redesign? I enjoy it, although it feels a little claustrophobic compared to the old one.
Which I loved.
Dearly.
Since I spent so much time on this damn thing, due to ridiculous little things going wrong, and I just realized I found out some more stuff I forgot, I didn’t get much of a comic drawn for tomorrow. It was going to be another Thesaurus entry and an Adventure in Retail comic, but I just didn’t get a chance.
To tide you over, here is a sketchy version of the Thesaurus entry. I drew up the sketch in Manga Studio, then turned the page and the Cintiq sideways and used it as a lightbox to get the sketch onto the sheet of Bristol. Betcha didn’t think of that! Just scaled the workspace in Manga Studio till it matched the paper on top of the Cintiq.
