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!

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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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.

Here’s a big close-up of the hand lettering that I did for Thursday’s Illustrated Thesaurus. I still have lots of practicing to do on the hand lettering, or traditional way of doing it, but I really enjoy it. The slant is still all over the place and I haven’t played with big bold letters enough, which shows. However, digital lettering is equally as fun, but in a completely different way. I love being able to throw down all the word bubbles and rearrange them at will, if needed, while selecting just the right font. I couldn’t pick which way is may favorite at this point in time, but it sure is nice to have a physical piece of artwork with the complete comic and word bubbles on it.

If you haven’t checked, I ported everything over to ComicPress on the Illustrated Thesaurus site and even found a ‘related posts by tags’ widget plugin. That’s what I really wanted! That way, when a word like abnormal comes up, you can see links directly to any related or synonymous words like aberrant! I’m so excited. It only took 6+ years for that idea to finally realize, as it was not obtainable using the old comic system I was using. Once there’s a few hundred words on there, that feature will really come into play.

I have made a comic for your perusal. I also tried to make a time lapse of me drawing it with my camera set to 3- and 5-second intervals, but the battery died before I finished the final panel. I don’t have premiere or access to it, so I’m going to try to export what I do have–about 1400 images–from iMovie on this old Mac and see what happens. As I see the images get imported to the computer, I can tell that you can barely see what is going on in the actual comic. Ugh. That means that the next time I do this I will have to find a better place to put the camera or change the lense. Or just zoom in. Dammit.

If you like that sort of thing, keep an eye on this site, and my youtube channel, because I will be posting it there(and then here, from youtube).

You will get to see me:

• Get confused!
• Try to figure out which paper I’m using
• Compare the size of old comics to the new one!
• Letter the comic!
• Drink some rum!

Anyway, here is the final result. I don’t want to spoil anything but the first panel for you.

If I’ve done everything correctly, a new comic should show up at the illustrated thesaurus site next Friday.

I just realized that the 30th is not Thursday. You have to wait til Friday now to see my amazingness. To tide you over, however, I have provided you a panel from the 3-panel glory that will be the comic “abominable.”

So I made another horrible comic. I want to tell you, but if I said anything, it would spoil it. In order to spoil it in a different way, please enjoy these amazing sketches! Because I am amazing! You know it, I know it, the monsters under my bed know it. That’s why they let me live. The first image shows the sketch to almost completion! Oh, no! How will you see the completed comic? By clicking on the LAST IMAGE. Or clicking earlier in the post on that horrible comic phrase because you are apparently completely impatient and can’t be bothered to read WORDS. You’re awful. The second picture in the series below is me trying to work out the third panel of the comic. I had to show him hanging, but also show the note he left behind. Tough stuff.

Hey everybody that loves me! I made a comic! Without any swear words even! Haha, just kidding. There’s a great big fuck in this one.