Exploring Webcomic Workflows: Part 2

I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up to my initial post of webcomic workflow for some time now. It may be that I over-complicated my task and hand, and I’ve been so busy because of it that it held up writing this post!

In a nutshell:

  • Illustrator is out of the mix: It quickly became apparent there was too much back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator, and this sucked a lot of the fun out of it. Part of the crutch was that I was enamored of Illustrator’s Art Pens, and the pressure sensitivity of my Wacom Intuos4 (see my YouTube review here) was a good match. I needed to force myself to draw better in Photoshop as well as…
  • Ink more completely the hand drawn, traditional paper layout to minimize the computer drawing time. Vague and sketchy layout has given way more complete pages ready to scan. This is nowhere near where it needs to be to sell the originals which provides a major source of revenue for select webcomic artists who work this way. At this point, it is not a pressing concern for me.
  • Somewhat related, I blogged a while ago about upping the publishing schedule by offering single panel-type gags a la Gary Larsen. I decided against this; I would rather make the main strip the best it can be – besides, others do this particularly well, like WebDonuts Webcomics and Spudcomics. I don’t know if I have anything new or unique to contribute to that style of comic.

In closing:
In the words of Teddy Roosevelt Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…”

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