If anyone reading this is particularly sharp eyed or familiar with graphics editing software, they might notice that the last panel looks a bit askew. Let me do a quick rundown of the process I go through to get the vision out of my brain and onto your screen.
First off, I draw the panels on sketch paper with a standard HB pencil. They’re EXTREMELY rough and barely resemble anything close to what the final product looks like. The pencil drawings are then scanned onto the computer and imported into Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, the bare-bones version of the real Photoshop. Why Elements and not the full version? Because every piece of equipment involved in the creation of this comic has been either a birthday or Christmas present. Momma didn’t raise no fool. I’m not shelling out money for a free comic.
Once the scans are opened in Photoshop, I trace the lines on my tablet. This smoothes out and fattens up those pencil markings. Once the lines are drawn, I add color, shades, highlights, and text. The downside to this process is that the line art tends to be a bit wavy and uneven. Years upon years of playing video games have trained my twitch reflex to a point where my feeble human brain cannot hope to keep up. I’m lucky to even have a tablet, since trying to use a mouse in this situation would result in images more closely resembling a Pollock painting.
Here’s where things get interesting. Through means that may or may not be legal, depending upon the state in which you’re reading this, I obtained a copy of Adobe Illustrator 10. This powerful piece of technology is able to work with the tablet to generate free-form vector graphics. Smooth like candy! The lines are crisp, clean, and they can be resized at any time. Unfortunately, it has to be one of the most unintuitive programs I’ve ever come across. It took me nearly a month just to figure out how to switch between the line and the arc tool. The paintbucket is somewhere in there I’m sure, buried behind endless menus.
So we’ve come down to it at last. I started drawing the first two panels in Illustrator, hoping beyond hope that I’d be able to figure out how to bend it to my will. By the time the deadline approached, I abandoned the Illustrator method for the more familiar yet infinitely less powerful Photoshop technique. Not that it matters much. The writing is so sublime that I’m sure no one even looks below the word balloons. So enraptured with my literary prowess, the readers only see the pictures that my words paint in their minds.
But, I realize that some people (read: fools) just have to have pictures with their words. Such is the bane of the MTV generation: constant electronic visual stimulation. So I vow to keep practicing until I unravel the Rubik’s Cube that is Illustrator. Until next week, peace out dogs!
