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Showing posts from June, 2012

Drawing Boards

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I'm not sure if I mentioned very well, but when we got the first batch of Calamity comics in, there was a sizing error. Or at least that's what I thought was the problem. Of the initial ten we ordered (basically proofs before we made a big order), there was shifting in about six of them when they stapled and cut. Which is normal- well... normal for a printing company we can afford. Essentially, the last six of the ten comics we ordered as proofs were printed very off center. The comic's 24 pages, and of those pages, maybe 10 pages or so were very, very off center. To the point of the panels being against the cut on the side of the page.  I checked the setup file that the printing company sent me, and it seemed correct. So for the first few days I thought the problem was on my end. I couldn't shrink the image on the page, because I can't resize the tones without starting from scratch (something I learned pretty early by resizing a few toned illustrations that

Mustache Edition

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We got in the first small batch of these, but due to a sizing error, these ones are useless. So I have a stack sitting around that I'll never do anything with. The error was fixed and a new order was put in for another small batch.

Small Fix

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Here was a quick fix I did this morning before breakfast. For some reason the other dirty clothes bugged me. Where the bottoms of the torsos don't blend well with the background- that's something else I'd like to fix, but that's just the program. There are just some things it can't do. I'm sure there are ways to get around it's inefficiencies and ways to trick it into doing what you want, but you just have to do it and learn along the way. Especially with a kind of crappy, obscure program that there aren't ten thousand tutorials for, like photoshop. (it's easy to be good at photoshop because anything you could possibly do with it, there are at least five tutorials for doing it, you just have to google for them) Alright, that was the last time I'm gonna mess with that image. It's dead to me now. I'll be reviewing the script, editing and rewriting. And maybe editing again. Hopefully won't take more than a day or two. I started cob

Everyone

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I did this to be sure that everyone would work the way they were designed. And, to try out a larger sized pen. I learned from the last comic that the pen size I was using was too small. Specifically, too small to be reduced and printed. It was fine for detail work to be printed, but not reduced and printed- the lines are too small, or, they're so small that when they're reduced & printed the lines break up altogether. So, I had to bump up a pen size and I was worried about it. It doesn't sound like much, but I've been using the same pen size for maybe 4 or 5 years. Also, I was running through/ruining pens way too fast. I guess I have a tendency to press too hard, and it drastically shortens the life of the pens (a few days to about a week was what I was getting out of them). I think everybody on this turned out okay- this being a dry run and all. And for basically testing out a new pen size.

Drawings

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 I thought this was misleading about the story. So I did this one. This probably captures the spirit of the book more accurately. When I layer the tones in photoshop, before I bring the lines, sometimes there will be interesting abstractions in the tones.

Shirt

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Boy, that shirt's gonna be a pain to have to draw. I'm on the fence; photoshoping like that is easier, but it's totally cheating. I'll try it once both ways and see how it goes.