Entry #1

The hardest thing about creating comics, I've found, is actually starting them. Like most would-be's and wanna-be's, I've drawn more character designs than I care to think about, mentally plotted 50-issue epics and have even written a few scripts, most of which have yet to land anywhere more exciting than my desk drawer.

However, with the exception of an 80 page piece of CRAP that I created for my college senior thesis, I've yet to actually put any finished art to paper. Go figure.

With this in mind, I've started a journal to keep myself honest about what I am doing. My thought process is, update it every week or two; more often if I make significant progress or have some stunning insight that I just MUST put to paper. If nothing else, it could serve as a warning for future creators.

To make it sound more high concept, think of it as a low-fi Project: Greenlight. Only, y'know, without Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, weekly updates on Showtime, legions of viewers and with only a dubious chance that the final product(s) will ever actually be seen by people outside of my immediate sphere of influence.

My, I'm feeling cheerful today. Can't think for the life of me why.

Oh, right. I'm still unemployed. Moving on then.

As I said, the whole purpose of this is to keep track of how things are going in my quest to become a published comic artist.

* * * *

First project: an as-of-yet unnamed four-issue collection of urban fantasy mini-comics.

I've decided to start with mini-comics because the low costs involved in the publication appeals to me. Take the final art over to Kinko's, get some copies made, staple 'em together and voila, you're a published comic creator. It also gives me finished work to toss out with my demo reel and to hand out at conventions. There's even the astronomically small possibility that I could later submit them to an actual company for collection as a graphic novel.

While I'm wishing, I'd also like Samantha Mathis' phone number, please.

This project represents something of an experiment for me. I'm planning to do all four issues completely digitally.

I'll admit it. Most digital comics are, frankly, crap. But let's get one thing straight here: this does not mean that I'm planning to follow the dodgy example of DIGIVAMPI or THE HEDG by throwing some pre-created human figures from Poser into a low-end 3D landscaping program like Bryce, slapping on some word balloons and sending it off to Diamond. I'm talking about producing the whole damned thing, from start to finish, on the computer. Until (and if) I print the finished pages out, pen shall never actually touch paper. The layouts, the drawing and the lettering shall all be done on computer, with the modern miracle of a Wacom tablet and copies of Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop.

The first obvious question, I would guess, is "Why work like this in the first place?"

Well, for starters, I suck at perspective. I suck like an alcoholic frat boy at an empty keg. I know all the rules, I can apply the horizon lines and the vanishing points, but I can never actually make it look right in the end.

This leads into O'Malley's Law #109: Those who can, do. Those who can't, learn to fake it.

I'm a trained computer animator. I think in 3D; when I'm creating animations, I have to build the sets, set the lights and position the cameras. Much like one has to do as an artist. So why not combine the two and make life easier for myself then?

Yeah yeah, cheating, not fair, other artists don't have to. Bite me. If it gets the job done, I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

I build the sets, starting with primitive shapes (mostly cubes and cylinders), and supplement these with whatever free props I can download from 3D software support sites like DAZ or Renderosity to set the scene. The simplification helps here: break the backgrounds down into their basic shapes and align them as needed. Actually making them look like buildings is a little tougher, but it keeps the small voice in the back of my head from telling me that I'm just faking being an artist.

But hey, why stop there? I also need to establish where people are in the scene. This is where programs like Poser come in. Poser is a 3D program that specializes in human and humanoid figures; they give you a base shape to work with and you apply changes to them to mold them how you like. The basic out-of-the-box figures that come with the program are ugly and don't have much in the way of "morphs" or areas that you can change; this is where sites like DAZ come in handy. Buy one of their Michael or Victoria figures and customize away. Getting back to my point, I use out-of-the-box Poser figures to help populate the panels. If nothing else, it helps when I want to establish camera angles and lighting. From there, I open up my page template in Adobe Photoshop and use the marquee tool to help determine how large I want a particular panel to be. I then take the data, return to Poser, render the scene at the appropriate size and save the rendered image. More interplay between Poser and Adobe to finish the remaining panels, and then back to Adobe for the last time to assemble them. Voila, my layouts have been finished.

From there, I move it into Painter and get to work on the process of actually drawing the page.

I love Painter. It's become one of my favorite programs to work in, just because of the headaches it saves me. I'm slowly becoming a reasonable inker. Unfortunately, the process of practice usually requires me to burn through a metric shitload of paper, pen nibs and White-Out before I actually produce anything that doesn't get set on fire minutes after I finish it.

Painter simulates drawing or painting with natural media with fairly reasonable accuracy. Watercolors without the drying time! Oil painting without the mess! Also without the nifty high you get from thinning the oils, but one has to make sacrifices somewhere. It also comes with pen tools that actually respond like real pens and brushes. Brush inking takes forever to learn, when one is practicing with the real thing. Being able to erase your mistakes (or just use the Undo function… proof that God loves artists and wants us to be happy) flattens the learning curve significantly. You still have to learn the hows and whys of inking, but being able to correct mistakes without having to completely start over makes it much easier.

In Painter, I open up my layouts and silently thank God that they've recently added Photoshop-style layers. I create three new layers; I fill one with white, label it "Paper" and lock it so I can't change it. The next two are labeled "Characters" and "Backgrounds". In a nod to Sim and Gerhard's working relationship, I find it easier to draw the characters and backgrounds separately. It makes it much easier to go back in and correct any mistakes I've made without having to worry about ruining other parts of the illustration.

Despite having detailed layouts to work from, this stage requires quite a bit of actual talent and interpretation, rather than just tracing over the figures and calling it a day. Not the least of which are the problems with Poser itself. The figures are, for lack of a better word, quirky. Often, posing the figures in certain ways causes the anatomy to break completely, causing weird deformations where there shouldn't be any, as well as any number of crinkles, bends and just plain weird results. There's also the problem of the fact that the poses, no matter how well thought out or applied, just look stiff. Admittedly, it's a minor annoyance; the figures are just there as placeholders and references to give me an idea of how the lighting will look on the people. The resulting illustrations frequently don't bear much resemblance to the layouts in the end.

Doing the art in Painter also cuts down on production time. Instead of having to pencil and then ink the work, I can move straight to inks; this saves me literally hours of time. I can then save it as a PSD file, open it in Photoshop or Illustrator and add the word balloons and dialogue, flatten the layers, resize the art and print it out full size if I feel like it.

(Of course, this brings up the question of whether it's possible to sell the originals when there ARE no originals, but I'll deal with that at a future date.)

A comic page created without ever being touched by human hands. God, I love living in the future.

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