(or something equally snooty and pretentious)
First must come the idea. Usually I'll happen upon a good idea for a joke during the course of my daily actions, which I scrawl down somewhere for safekeeping. This is very important, because five minutes later I'll know I had some killer idea but I'll rarely know what it is. I'm just spastic that way. Then I laboriously plot out the course of the storyline -- usually I have an idea of what will happen, but I tend not to know how things'll end when I first start out. With strips as infrequent as they are, I figure that each one had damn well better be funny, so I try to work in an idea that I have scrawled down previously. Sometimes I have to bend the storyline a little for this to work, but it does in the end...usually.
Next I sit around with a pen trying to break up a prospective comic into panels: who says what when. Once this is achieved, I tend to have some idea of what the panels will look like -- the perspective, composition, etc. This rough draft is quickly scrawled onto some handy paper; it's never very fancy (sometimes i use stick-figures), as I'm more interested in the dialogue at this point.
Note the spilled energy drink in the upper left corner, and the writing in the right-most panel. This is some important note (unrelated to the comic) I left to myself on the back...I guess it scanned through.
When I'm sufficiently hopped up on caffeine that I can pencil an entire comic in one go, I set mechanical pencils to some Bristol paper (cost-effictively liberated from a lost-and-found) and produce a pretty little pencil drawing. After much erasing and re-drawing, lo! the pencilled comic, in all its sketchy glory.
Next comes inking. I use pigment liners (Sakura Pigma Microns, of course) to draw the panels, the backgrounds, and other tight and tricky areas. They also come in handy for writing in sound effects. The characters and are outlined using various over-priced brushes and Speedball brand India ink. Occasionally I use steel pens for nifty effects like cross-hatching. While I like using brushes and ink and everything, this part always makes me nervous. I tend to screw up horribly, mangling my well-pencilled comic. A bottle of Pro White (the six-dollar white out) comes in very handy here.
Those weird ink lines in the last panel are from my use of an x-acto knife to cut out the comic that was drawn on the preceeding sheet of the drawing pad. They caught the ink and it bled into them. No more x-acto knives. Ever.
Pretty dirty, huh? There's still hope: I 'edit' all the mistakes out with Adobe Photoshop 5. Now why not give me some money and bring me closer to a shiny new copy of Photoshop 7?
Much better! Now I can color it with my mad Photoshop skills.
A little dodge-and-burn with Photoshop adds light and shadow. Someday I'll try other coloring methods...like that kind where you only use block colors (the color, a lighter version of it, and a shadowed version)...eh, I'll do it later.
Sometimes I'll need to add special effects...glow or lens flare or something. Not this time, though! Just boring old text. I use the font Kid Kosmic, from Blambot.com.
You'll get to see the finished comic when it comes out in October.
It's done! w00t! At this point I usually give the finished comic its true name, a numerical designation that tells Keenspace when to post it. This replaces the comic's working title (in this case "casinoroyale") which I use in the short term to remind me which comic is which.
That's all, yo!
PS. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the textual explanations on this page. I wrote this very, very late at night. Very. The main purpose of this page was to show how cool I think my comics look when they're pencilled, before my horrible inking mangles them.
