Back in the olden days, when the only good thing you could do with a PC was run Wolfenstein 3-D, I made this comic the old fashioned way. Pencil and ink to lay down the image and then add whiteout to make corrections or, if no whiteout could be found at 3am, I’d cut out a piece of paper with corrected art on it and sticky tape it over the original. (You can kind of make out some of the sticky tape marks on the originals if you go back through the archives!)

But now it’s a bit different. Thanks to Photoshop being the final step in the process I’m finding that I’m leaving a lot of mistakes on the page for me to fix up later. Spelling mistakes are the big one (I really need to stop lettering while listening to people talk) and there’s a lot of times where I flub up the art (draw an extra line on someone’s neck, or get the eye positioning wrong, or more often the case stuff up the HANDS AAGH HANDS). These days I just go “oh I’ll fix that in Photoshop” without really worrying too much about it.

This kind of kicks me in the butt later when it comes time to scan and fox things because what should be a twenty minute job suddenly turns into a two hour job because of all the mistakes I didn’t fix until now. It also has the problem of leaving the original art full of errors. I don’t sell my originals at the moment but one day I might, so that’s going to end up kicking my butt again later on.

The lesson is: don’t try to save time now, and always keep a bottle of whiteout ready.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.