Now the “it’s complicated” news:

It took a lot longer to finish this page than I had anticipated. The original idea was to execute this story the way I did the Boulder & Fleet mini-comic last year: fast and loose, not spending more than 3 or so hours on each page. But as I worked on the pages I realized that I wasn’t happy with how they were turning out. When I slowed down and really focused on making the page the best it could be, I was much, much happier.

This will make a weekly schedule a huge challenge. I’ve got my day job as a comics teacher, and my role as organizer of Kids Read Comics is rapidly kicking into high gear. Then there’s the efforts I’m pumping into the comics initiatives at the Ann Arbor District Library, and my work at Lean Into Art. I’m also working on some freelance comics projects right now. I’m busy. I don’t know if I have much more than 3 hours per week to put into a new book.

So I stopped and asked myself what’s the point of sharing a web comic that if it’s not being updated regularly? I can pretty much rule out any chances of building an audience or turning it into a business for myself, right? An audience only shows up for the quick sharable laugh like they find on many strip-comics sites. It’s common wisdom that regular updates are essential.

Of course there are always exceptions to the rule. Aaron Diaz of Dresden Codak takes his time with his pages, and is enjoying a healthy and supportive constituency. But it’s foolishness to compare myself to anyone in this business, as there’s no “tried and true” pre-packaged method to making a living at this comics jazz. We all have to find our own way. Still, it’s useful to look at what others are doing to inform our choices.

With channels like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc, you have a good argument why one might not need an update schedule. You can just notify everyone when there’s something worth looking at on the site. I’ve made that argument myself on the various podcasts I’ve been on. I can try that!

But still! Gotta build an audience and monetize it! If the comic doesn’t update regularly, or if time stretches on too long between updates, you’ll never make it! You lose the game! I need to find a way to speed up the work and get it in front of people pronto!

But then I remembered something a friend once told me when I was rambling on and on about an approach to making a self-publishing comics business on the web. He stopped me dead in my tracks by saying “You do know your first priority is to make a great comic, right?”

Remembering that helped put everything into focus for me, and I found myself calming the heck down. Let’s just make a good comic and see what happens. However long it takes. And since I’m not under contract with any publishing agencies for this comic, I can share as much of the progress as I want. I like sharing this process/thinking stuff, so maybe that’s the point of putting it online. Maybe I’ll figure out the money stuff, maybe I won’t. But the first order of business is making a comic that I’m crazy about.

I’m going to work out a schedule starting with 3 hours/week where I’ll get done whatever I can on the comic. I’ll stream it live either on Google Plus or Justin.tv (watch here or my Twitter for updates on that). If I find more time, awesome. But at least I’ll chip away at this thing until it’s done.

The analog inks from yesterday’s page again:

But I don’t want to sacrifice quality. This comic is extremely important to me, so it has to be the best representation of what I can do as a cartoonist.

So call me crazy, but before I take another step into production on this book, I want to explore all options in regard to a production method. This afternoon I started playing around with inking in Manga Studio:

I’m pleased with how crisp and clean the inking lines are, and the vector inking allows for some really tight yet fluid lines. The vector eraser also allows me to work fast and loose while making cleanup a breeze. Going compare the speed between inking on paper vs digital inking to see if Manga Studio might not be the way to go.

It may be a situation where I just need to accept that this particular book will take longer than I had anticipated. If that’s the case, then at least by inking digitally I can easily stream the progress for those who are interested and document a bunch of the process for a possible series of podcasts later. I’d also be getting a crash-course in digital inking through the project.

We’ll see. I’m also re-naming this blog post series to make it easier to follow after the fact. Planning on documenting as much of this as I can, since this book isn’t bound by any publishing or licensing agreement (yet?).

That’s way tighter than I had been penciling on some of the style tests I did a while back. I have to admit, I was nervous about taking that first step towards final art on this story, and I wanted it to be “perfect.” But if I want to fit this book into my crammed schedule, I’m going to have to speed it up wherever I can.

The inks:

And the flats, after some digital clean-up:

Once I can get this into a specific production time slot every week, I hope to do some live streams of the book as it comes together.

It’s not quite done yet, but it’s coming along. Trying out some of the painting techniques Brandon Dayton showed me during his demo on Comics Are Great! 41. The sky and mountains are each painted on their own layer. I used a variety of chalk brushes built into Photoshop.

Here comes the neat part. With a few Adjustment Layers, I’m able to take this setting into the middle of the night without having to change any art (well, I did add some stars):

Same art, just used some Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers with Clipping Masks on each element. I also touched up the masks on the Adjustment Layers with the Chalk Brushes a bit.

With this major set piece almost done, I’m poised to start penciling the comic! I’ll share the progress and process as I push through it.

Working on one of the locations for the new Front comic. I’m a cheater! #sketchup jerzydrozd.tumblr.com/post/174536452…

— Jerzy Drozd (@Jerzy) February 11, 2012

I asked for it! I made a joke about “cheating” at my art, and it got some folks rising to defend or dispute the question of whether or not one can cheat at making comics. I give what can only be described as an affirmation for anyone who has ever been called a “cheater”, and try to explore where this misconception comes from.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Lean Into Art Cast 23 – Leveling up Through Play
• My explorations of Google Sketchup as a means for set design
• Some of my warm up sketches I’ve been doing in Manga Studio
• How to get 5 Million People to Read Your Website – Ignite Talk by Matthew Inman
• Google Sketchup

Music for this show is by Eliott Drozd.
Audio hosting provided by Ka-Blam Digital Printing and IndyPlanet Digital

Voiceover by Tara Platt

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BRAWN Pencil and Manga Studio on 8.5×11″ paper.

And here’s the original sketch on copy paper:

I started with the sketch of the building in my thumbnails:

And while I’ve never backed away from a difficult perspective piece, I realized that this particular building would be pretty time consuming to take on in multiple panels. So I opted to build the thing in Google Sketchup, a free and relatively intuitive 3D drawing program:

Once I set the perspective how I wanted it, I exported the image as a TIFF file, opened it up in Photoshop and converted it to blue lines. Here’s a video on how I do that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdHeuQbq7ZE

I printed the blue lines out on bristol, then inked them with my Rapidograph pens. Here are the inks, mistakes and all:

Then I scanned the inks into Photoshop, and using the BPelt plugin I made short work of flatting them.

Now I plan to paint the building using some of the techniques Brandon Dayton taught me during Comics Are Great! episode 41. Once I have this painting complete, I’ll be able to re-use it throughout the comic (where appropriate) and make it look unique through different minor edits and layer adjustments.

But since this building is now a 3D model, I can easily rotate it to whatever view the story calls for, and go through the same process.

Some kind folks pointed out to me that I could import my 3D model into Manga Studio for digital inking, and I thought about it, but I finally opted for hand inking. Not only am I used to it, but I think it’ll add that last little bit of analogue imperfection that I like in my work.

Looking forward to painting this!

RED RANGER Pencil and Manga Studio on 8.5×11″ paper

It came as a surprise to me that the brush’s density and size depend on the speed at which you draw the line, not the pressure you use on the tablet. The faster you draw, the smaller and less dense the line becomes. I guess that’s kind of how a brush works, but I couldn’t find out how to also add pressure sensitivity to the tool. Since I only give myself 20-min for these warm up sketches, I didn’t take the time to investigate those settings. I just needed to get the drawing done. I’ll look into it later, or wait for a generous soul to comment here with the info.

And in case you’re curious, here are the pencils I did for the piece, on regular copy paper:

Last November or December I got Manga Studio EX 4 for $60 during one of those crazy 15-minute sales Amazon holds every once in a while. At that price I wouldn’t feel quite as bad if it turned out to be something incompatible with my style/workflow. But after a simple test, I’m happy to say that it looks like I might be able to use it for digital inking!

I did a quick pencil sketch of Dick Kourage of The Front:

I scanned this pencil sketch and imported it into Manga Studio, and inked it using the pen tool on a vector layer:

From there I exported it as a PSD file, and colored it in Photoshop:

And from there I made this cute iPhone wallpaper out of the test (tap or click to open the full-sized version):

Observations: I noticed that the faster I worked, the better lines I got. I was inking using a Wacom Intuos 4 on a OSX Lion iMac, and I was impressed by the speed of the software. The ink lines kept right up with what I was doing (Photoshop can sometimes suffer from a 1-second lag when digitally inking, at least on my machine).

Inking on a vector layer gives you the added bonus of using a special eraser tool that will delete intersecting lines with one stroke (check out CAG 46 for Stephen McCranie’s demo). This came in super handy, as the pen tool in MS tends to taper your lines on both ends, regardless of how fast you draw or how much pressure you use. I found that if I just drew the line out farther than I had intended and intersected it with another shape, it was easy to delete the unwanted portion with that eraser tool trick.

The lines were also super clean, which made flatting using the BPelt plugins a breeze. When I color my pieces inked with a brush pen, I often have to run Image Adjustement>Threshold on the lineart layer in order to clean it up enough to not have little bitty artifacts after using the plugin.

Just as I used my warm-up sketches to learn the brush pen, I think I’m going to start doing warm-ups in Manga Studio to teach myself how to use it. Even without a Cintiq it was the most pleasure I’ve ever had digitally inking.

First up is a discussion on drawing digitally in Manga Studio with Stephen McCranie, who leads a demonstration of how he draws his comics in the program while Paul Storrie and I watch and comment with baited breath.

We’re then joined by Sharon Iverson of the Ann Arbor District Library and David Carter of the University of Michigan Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library for some great book recommendations and some talk on Mini-Comics Day in Ann Arbor, March 10.

Links mentioned in this episode (thanks to Eric Klooster for collecting them!):

• The Mal & Chad contest!
• Stephen’s Doodle Alley essays on sustainable creativity
• The Parable comics anthology
• Mike Maihack
• Dave Carter’s Ignite Ann Arbor Talk, Awesome Comics You Should Read
• More Ignite talks on comics
• The Watchmen prequels
• Jeff Smith
• Eric Orchard
• Dave Gibbons’s webinar on using Manga Studio
• Ghostopolis
• The Wacom Cintiq
• nemu*nemu
• Matt Feazell (check out his appearance on CAG 23)
• Suzanne Baumann
• Sean Beiri
• XKCD
• Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School

Comics and Book Recommendations:

• Lunch Lady Comics
• Cross Game
• Orange Road

Upcoming events:

• Mini-Comics Day at the Duderstadt Center, March 10

Here’s the video from this episode’s live stream (audio player at the bottom of this post):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-KiDF0XG1Q

Live streams every other Wednesday at Comicsaregreat.tv!

Audio hosting provided by Ka-Blam Digital Printing. This episode was recorded live at the Ann Arbor District Library.

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