Stick Figure Sketchblog & Webcomic Creator @ Stewped.com

Don’t get too excited, but I made a comic in less than 3 hours. It’s the only way to do it. And this site, as you know, is for the ‘behind the scenes.’ What little scene there is of course. So here are the 2 sketches I did before laying down the digital ink on the latest atrocity over at Chronic Malpractice.

So I’m just posting panel one of the comic that will probably take 8 hours of my life to color. I’m surprised I can even draw, it’s been so long since I even opened up the drawing program on this computer. I started this comic over a year ago. Looking at the properties for the Manga Studio file, it was created 6/20/09. Another 10 days and it’ll be the comic’s anniversary! Congratulations, little comic! A baby takes less time to bake than a 4 panel color drawing that your creator doesn’t even find amusing anymore. Maybe someone on the internet will love you.

Anyway, here’s the first panel. Make up your own ending until I get it colored. Or pay someone to do it. With hugs.

Here are a bunch of sketches. Most of these were doodled at “work” while waiting for something or other to load or crash or load and then crash, thereby making me look like a slacker as I drew more stuff while the computer takes even longer…

Help me understand something. When I am just fucking around and doodle at work I produce all kinds of awesome sketches. Everything except the last image up there (the one with the red and green on it) was doodle at work and either pasted into my sketchbook or just stuffed into the back. I love every one of those sketches! Look at the last one. The stuff with the green circle around it was drawn while I was wanting to be creative. Really working at it. And it looks like barfed up garbage barges. The stuff in red though… oh, boy. I ripped that off of the rest of the paper and taped it in to my moleskine. Instantly. You just want to kiss that half of the image. I don’t mean to brag, but wow.

The left half, however…blugh.

(if you look close, you can see some horrifying notes in that last image)

I had heard about Brushes a while ago. I saw a painting over at Starslip and I wasn’t too impressed. I thought that was probably as good as you could get with it. Then, Evan linked me to some drawings by Jhonen Vasquez. Damn, I thought. So I downloaded it and made this atrocity.

What a disaster. It’s been so long since I painted anything I had no idea what was going on. Your finger covers the brush if you are doing detailed work so it takes a lot of getting used to. I gave it a second go and made this much better looking monstrosity. I need someone with a Mac to make me the video files of this. Lupo, I’m looking at you.

!!Update!! Video below!

Got a video from the brushes file and put it here for you to enjoy. So enjoy it already. Special thanks to Lupo.

smile from Stew Ped on Vimeo.

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.

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.

The saddest fish, that’s really a whale! He can talk, he can kinda walk.

Here are a few sketches of Isaac Asimov for a comic I am working on. Just needed to get something that would shout “Asimov” to the reader. Mainly, those enormous chops. Wolverine has nothing on Asimov.

This here is the sketch for the comic up over at Chronic Malpractice. I’m very happy with the half-tone shading on it. It looks like it was placed right, but something slipped. It looks the way Meg Lee Chin sounds.