Stick Figure Sketchblog & Webcomic Creator @ Stewped.com

Beware! Some of these pics are rather large because I want you to see all the details. These are the final pics of the process for the Spider Pimp comic I just posted over at Chronic Malpractice.

This has inadvertently turned into a process blog for my comics, which is fine. I like seeing this sort of thing on other blogs, so why not do what I love seeing?

In the fourth image I’ve circled the nib that did the lettering and line inking. I love that nib. It’s a Hunt 512, I believe and it’s pretty great for everything. I have 3 of them for some reason.  I had to pick up a wrist brace this week due to the mouse-use at my job tearing me apart. I finished the last two panels with it on and I think it shows. It did force me to use more of my shoulder to ink, which it isn’t used to yet.
The last image shows AAALLLL of my nibs and nib holders. I’ve yet to use all the nibs on a project, but I’ve messed around with them. That shakespeare one is pretty fun, and the index-finger nibs are super fun.

If you look close you can see all the test scribbles underneath the comic after each dip into the ink.

Am I being arrogant with this? I worry about that. I don’t want to be arrogant.

Well look at that! Someone completely botched the month of February. And March.

Only 3 comics. Due to taxes, and holidays and finishing up the Life is Pain site.

However, check out the progress of this comic I am inking! As you can see, this should have been finished in February, when I started it. I was just scared to ink it. However, it won’t get done if I don’t dive in and make a bunch of mistakes. As Jerzy and Rob and other people I’ve been reading about and listening to keep saying.

So I grabbed the following nib and dove in tonight! (it’s a super close-up big picture).

I have a bunch of nibs, but that one seemed good, and the best way to figure out what it’s good for is to just start doing everything with it. So everything in this comic will be inked with it. Fills on the silhouettes were done with a brush because I don’t have all night. And then I used the brush with some Pro White for the hairs in the shadows. Oh, yeah, the word bubble outline and the panel borders were inked with Rapidographs due to their ability to maintain a line with no variance in thickness.

The image above is 3-fold in its illustrative capacity: it shows the nib, the letters it inked, and the size of the letters via the Ames Lettering Guide(it’s size 4).
It took about an hour-and-a-half just to ink the letters and that first panel. Tomorrow night I hope to finish the rest of it and get back on track for putting out 8 comics a month. 4 for Chronic Malpractice and 4 for Illustrated Thesaurus. What a difference it is to think of, sketch, and ink a stick figure Thesaurus entry in only an hour versus this 3-panel, soon to be 6-hour event.

At least if you check this out you get a preview of the comic!

Then, while I was cleaning the pen nib, the whole assembly that holds it inside the handle popped out! Boooo-urns.

Not cool. It still works so it’s not that big a deal, but it’s my favorite holder! Look at the fancy swirls!

This is what my stack of drawing paper looks like. Classy, right?

I’ve been listening to all the episodes of Comics are Great and on this episode Jerzy talked to one of the authors of Drawing Words and Writing Pictures. I was lucky enough to find it at the local library here and started going through it. This is exactly the book I never knew I wanted. Being out of practice for so long, I’ve really gotten  down on myself and completely forgot how to doodle and just screw around in my sketchbook. The first chapter has these cool exercises that basically lead you by the hand into having fun and trying things knew. It’s perfect for when you don’t have any ideas and the blank page is sitting there taunting you.

Here are my attempts at the first part of the chapter 1 exercises. You can compare them to critiqued examples on the DW&WP site if you wish. The staggering guy was the one I had trouble with, but as you can see, I did fill a whole page trying to work it out. And I had a good time attempting it. The tasks were to create:

• A Person Running
• A Car Speeding
• A Ball Falling
• A Person Staggering
• A Newspaper page blowing in the wind

Go ahead and critique these if you wish.

How long have I had this silly website? Since high school? I’m thinking ’98 or ’99. It only took a decade-plus, but I finally set up an email address: aj(at)stewped(dot)com
I am so excited.

On Friday I made an ass of myself and spilled crumbs all over the floor of my office. There isn’t a working vacuum at work, so I swept up as best as I could. I couldn’t get all of the crumbs, but knowing there are ants in walls I let Nature take its course.

When I arrived on Monday, the my new servants had moved ALL of the crumbs against this spot on the wall. Note how they also collected the little punch holes from a paper hole-punch that were also on the floor.

I’ve wanted to do this for so long! “This” being to make an animated GIF file of the JPEGs that Manga Studio spits out when you save your document. I just take that JPEG file and add a number to the end of it after specific saves. Then, when you save it again it creates a new JPEG. So I saved 9 of them over the course of drawing this comic and put them all together in flash with a little title image with the site’s logo. Pretty exciting for me, I hope you enjoy it.

I probably should have put my thoughts on the subject of these types of ladies on this site, rather than the comic site, so the comic can speak for itself. It’s fairly ham-fisted, but I’m okay with that as these types of videos are kind of ham-chested.

If you’re an artist you know how great it feels to have your art on a nice thick piece of paper strewn about the floor of your artin’ room.

I started out drawing these poorly in a sketchbook. Eventually I moved to some series 300 Strathmore vellum bristol. In terms of a boring, white sheet of paper it is pretty great. I have a pad of plate bristol in another brand(borden & riley) and it’s awful. The ink spreads out and bleeds so that the artwork looks all fuzzy. Eww. However, the vellum of the borden & riley stuff is great and doesn’t bleed. I am almost out of the 9×12 pages that I use for the thesaurus entries, too *sad face.* If you want to be super nice and donate something so I can buy some more pads of this awesome paper, that would be great. If there’s any wallpapers or ATCs I can make as thanks, be sure to let me know in the comments or at aj dot stewped at gmail dot com.

I really want to make 2012 worthwhile for you visitors to any of my comics sites. I know that I’ve been a bit of a sappy screw-around the past 5, 6, 7 years? I think I started in 2003, posting stuff here and there. Then, due to some baloney or other I’d pitch a fit and give up for a month. Two months. 6 months. A year. Ugh. How embarrassing. Thanks, chrome, for telling me that there are two ‘R’s in embarrassing. However, this year is going to be different and awesome.
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I worked my little butt off on a thesaurus entry tonight, but it was just taking much too long and I can’t stay up any later. In lieu of a comic, I hope you can be satisfied with a picture of my art table. And the awesome lamp that I made. On the wall there are printouts of the Comic Strip Artist’s Kit.

On the table you can see the finished artwork for About.

I finished this the other night. I might be learning a thing or two about color.

Slowly.

We bought some cookies today–because it’s cheat day!–and the sticker on the box was a giant BUY ONE GET ONE FREE!! sticker. Then, once we arrived home, inspiration struck.

Above,  I present to you the “original” sketch followed by the intermediary step before the inky final step. I say “original” like that because, sadly, there is no actual original.  I did all of this in Manga Studio, my favorite program for drawing comics. I wish they would pay me to advertise for them because it’s that good. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: go try out the demo! The trial is only for the Debut version, but every few months it seems you can find EX 4 on sale for around $200 or less. It is WORTH IT.

Kt Shy’s Sketch Blog!: Touch.

It’s comforting to see someone who can draw really well still gets frustrated with her work. Every time I get back in the groove of drawing–after making three-to-six comics it seems–I get super frustrated for no damn reason. Then, no one sees me for about six months.

Anyhooo, check out her sketch-a-ma-blog or her deviantart portfolio.

Sometime soon I will be saving up and buying Silly Kingdom, a comic by her and her brother.

*image rehosted from her sketchblog*