Sunday, November 25, 2007

A milestone: 10 comics

The last 3 were easy to make, (<2hrs each probably), but the poor craftsmanship shows. Welp, at least I'm churning them out. That's the important thing.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Wherein a regular update schedule becomes difficult to maintain

The latest comic (#7) took probably over 30 hours. The 2 before that took over 20 each. Clearly, I need to reevaluate my strategy and figure out a more efficient way of making comics. I mean, at this rate, the comic will need to be viewed 10,000 times before reaching par. I think for the next couple, at least, I will try to keep it simple. We'll chalk the past 3 comics up to an experiment in shading. I mean, I like the way it looks, it just takes too long.

By the last panel, I was pretty sick of the thing and just wanted to finish the stupid thing. That's why there is a difference in quality. I think I actually did a fairly good job with making things look shiny in the first panel, and somewhat in the second panel. I didn't even try in the last panel. The rain is made with a simple gaussian noise + motion blur.

I couldn't make any more comics until this one was finished, and I would just never want to work on this, hence the long absence. The first panel was finished a month ago (before school started)! With this roadblock out of the way, perhaps we can have another run of weekly updates.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Plodding along...

Total project time for #3: 5.5 hours
Total project time for #4: 6.5 hours

I want to build up a buffer of finished comics but I can't seem to churn out more than one a week. I always put it off until Monday because I know I can finish it in 2 days. Anyway, I'm starting to play with variable line width to make my art "less boring". It's difficult to get this by varying the pressure I use on my tablet, so I cheat and simply block in the shape with several strokes (using this tutorial). I think I kind of overdid it, though, but it does look nicer. Next step: shading!

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

I am eating a bowl of cereal at 1:48AM I am so goddamn hungry

There's no hope left for #1, but starting with #2 I'm going to record the total project time for each comic. This one took about 7 hours in all. I thought that once all the drawing were done, it would only take like half an hour to put everything together, but it took more than an hour. I guess there is a high amount of speech text. There was also a lot of resizing and stroking (because once resized, line widths get thinner).

Starting with #2 we are also using new comic size. #1 was 750 pixels wide and I think that's not big enough. Now it feels a lot more spacious and I have more real estate to work with. I picked some special dimension because I am oh so clever.

Saturday, July 7, 2007

First post!!!onehundredeleven!!

I couldn't figure out how to do rants with WCN, so I had to start a blog elsewhere to act as the rant space for COMY. For some reason, comy.blogspot.com has already been taken. WTF? Who uses that? What does that even mean? WTF is a "comy"??? Weirdos! Anyway, so I snagged this one, which should be just as good. It's more typing, but it's not like anyone actually types in urls these days, what with search engines and the latest bookmarking technology. We sure do live in amazing times.