Stick Figure Sketchblog & Webcomic Creator @ Stewped.com

I got to go to APE-CON with Urban Myth Studios as their in-house letterer a couple weeks ago. This was because I AM their in-house letterer! Boy, howdy! In the spirit of comics I drew these two guys from Marvel Comics. Wolverine and Thor as stick(ish) figures. I have a Nightcrawler posted over on deviantArt, so you’ll have to go over there to view it. That site just has more of the stuff you’ve already seen here. Re-posted comics and such. As my scanner bought a farm several months ago, I took the best pictures I could with my phone and altered them in Photoshop in order to make them look better. You will notice that I have failed. A new scanner is on the way, but I’ve heard mixed things about it. The scanner will be bigger than the one I owned before, so that is a plus.

While at the convention I got to meet the famed creator of Hip Flask and Elephantmen, Richard Starkings! It was great. He look at the lettering I did for the Urban Myth guys and said that most of it was good, except for a few dumb mistakes. Which I should have caught. Here’s a page I lettered that he enjoyed as the SFX were good. The last panel has a bad tail in it which I will be correcting soon so it can be placed into my portfolio. If the majority of my lettering work is good, the only question left is, “how do I get a job doing that?!”

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.

I’ve been messing around with FontLab and ScanFont and boy is that a lot of work. Been messing with them for the past several weeks, probably since around when the dog was injured and only tonight did I have a breakthrough. You can see in the picture above how it looks as written and then blown up to gigantic by my scanner. The middle R is after several attempts to vectorize it with ScanFont and much tweaking inside the actual font program. The 3rd R is the one I just exported. It looks all smooth and sexy! I am now officially excited to make comic lettering fonts. Now that I’ve got that part down, there’s still fixing errors, metrics and kerning to mess with…

This is the pen nib that I wrote my letters with:

Dog lovers united to have a B.C. comic strip taken down from GoComics.com because it “encouraged violence against animals” and just plain offended people. That’s quite a stretch, considering the strip contained no violence. It features the main character of the patently banal strip reading a book. If the strip encouraged anything, I would think it to be literacy. Especially if you don’t read English and attemped to infer meaning by pictures alone. I guess this strip encourages dog violence as well? Let’s blame everything on some form of media because I wasn’t brought up to tell right from wrong.

John Hart Studios then apologized for it. For creating something that made a vocal few unhappy. There goes the glorious vision of standing behind your art. I’m sure it was gone long ago, actually. This is just another nail in the coffin. I hope the apology consoled those who complained about it. They will probably mark it as a “win” for themselves and forget about it the next time David Letterman makes a joke that offends Sarah Palin.

Someone seems to have borrowed my copy of Fahrenheit 451, but I do remember that the keystone of the censorship in that world being the vocal minority. Many vocal minorities of all sorts complaining about being offended. Anything that angered dog lovers and cat lovers was taken out of schools and off of bookstore shelves. Those may be ridiculous examples, but I don’t have my copy here to reference. This is the path on the road to the end of independent thought. It is paved with the apologies and complaints of the knee-jerk masses.

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)

Rainy Day from Stew Ped on Vimeo.

I made this a long, long time ago in a school far, far away. Really, it’s like 40 miles. That’s pretty far. Especially if you have to walk. Never really thought about putting anywhere for anyone to view it until now… Shoulda done it a long time ago. Especially with the youtubes and all.

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.

There is a comic over at Chronic Malpractice. Couldn’t get it done by Monday due to Manga Studio screwing around on me. It is there now. Go and enjoy.