Comics
This is another piece like Sloth Darts, where the journey matched the subject! For some reason I found this comic a tough nut to crack but I stuck at it. One challenge was that I wanted to fit it onto one page. While I could’ve done this by just having the stones and the puddle with some explanation, I felt that characters would help give a personal connection and make the comic more of an encouraging illustration rather than just an instructive metaphor.
There were several attempts at the comic before hitting on the final one, the main contender getting quite advanced before I abandoned it. I started the earlier one with a really rough layout, which I made some equally rough changes to (the three layouts reveal a secret about me: I’m left-handed! I usually work from right to left so my hand doesn’t cover previous art). I combined these in Photoshop.
I thought I’d try out MyPaint so I did the linework with it, designing the characters as I went. Then I shifted to TwistedBrush for the colouring, where I hit a road-block; I couldn’t seem to picture the background! A pro would probably make something up without even blinking, which I can do sometimes, but not this time. The result? I abandoned it entirely (I also gave up on MyPaint. I liked the feel of it but it was lacking some important tools and the brushes were weird when scaled up. It’s changed since then, though).
An environment came to mind along with an altered layout. I experimented drawing the final linework on paper (again designing the characters as I went along) with pen and then with pencil (which I haven’t shown here because it’s just more lineart), gave up on that, then scanned the mixed results into TwistedBrush where I retraced the line art and coloured it. The rest (such as speech balloons and text) was added in Photoshop. There are things I wanted to adjust further, and I like some parts of the earlier version more than the later one, but I decided to combat my perfectionism by calling it finished.
This comic page was done in late 2008. It was drawn on paper and coloured in Photoshop. I actually drew it back to front initially. I’d read that it’s good to see a mirror image of art to help reveal flaws. Good advice! My way of applying it wasn’t so good: I drew the page layout on the computer, flipped it horizontally, then composed my rough comic page based on the reversed layout. Then I turned the page over on my lightbox so that it was back to normal and drew the clean line drawing on the back of the rough! It was a brain-bender and didn’t seem to help much. I recommend sticking with the occasional mirror check!
In stages from late 2007 to the first few months of 2008, I worked on some art for a Bluetooth ‘phone game called “Click Tac Toe”, a clever cross between Tic Tac Toe and Battleship. You can actually try the game for free; in fact, I believe it’s totally free for a limited time. I’ve worked for this chap once before and both experiences were very positive.
Both the ’splash page’ and the instructional comic were drawn on paper first. They were later redrawn in vectors in Adobe Illustrator in order to give better file size options. The splash page shown above isn’t the vector version; it was painted in Photoshop, and was designed to be cropped into different compositions to suit different phones.
“Safe Landing” was put together as an entry for the International Christian Comics Competition 2. It was made digitally in Photoshop (mostly Photoshop Elements) with a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet and pen. I got third place in the professional section, which was pretty cool! Another Aussie got second. “Safe Landing” got printed in colour in the competition book, along with my other entry “I Love My Cat”. I’ve edited “Safe Landing” slightly to make it more legible on the computer screen.
This little comic was made for an Australian Christian comics anthology called “Pulp Crucifiction”. I also entered it in the International Christian Comics Competition 2. It didn’t win but it got printed in the competition book (in black and white). The art was first drawn in pencil, then later I decided to add some digital colour. The cat was based on a real cat named Solomon.
I’ve posted my other entry, “Safe Landing”, which won third place in the professional section of the same competition.
Update – A couple of sites have shown that they like this comic, including: