Stick Figure Sketchblog & Webcomic Creator @ Stewped.com

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!

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.