Recently I submitted a guest strip to Calamities of Nature and it DIDN’T MAKE THE CUT. This is CLEARLY a sign of the END TIMES and we all need to MAKE PEACE WITH THOSE WHO HAVE WRONGED US and preapre to MEET OUR MAKER in these nigh hours of…oh wait, you mean it’s not the end of the world? Well, that’s OK then.

Sure it’s a bit of a disappointment that it didn’t get selected but the ones that did get selected are so good it’s hard to complain. Congratulations to the winning guest strip creators and of course CoN creator Tony Piro for having so many people wanting to make guest comics for him!

I still count the entire process as a win, though. The guest strip (which I’ll end up running on Funny Webcomic at a later date) was the first thing I’ve done in a long time that was created entirely digitally. Both Plant-Man and Funny Webcomic have some digital editing after I scan them as required (usually some typo fixes in my hand lettering or an errant slip of the pen here and there) but I haven’t created a comic from start to finish – in colour, no less! – using just a Wacom in years…and back then I was hopeless at it!

A lot of people have a hard time learning to use drawing tablets thanks to the ‘disconnect’ between where your hand is and where the image is. That never really bothered me so much. The problem I had – and even had when I borrowed a Cintiq for a short while – is I have a hard time drawing when I can’t see the entire page. It’s completely irrational but I can’t draw properly if I’m zooming in on a particular area. Maybe I just lose all sense of scale. Thankfully with the advent of higher resolution monitors this wasn’t so much of a problem this time around.

Pencilling and inking were a breeze – I loved how the pen felt making soft curves, something that was nearly impossible a few years ago when my machine was chugging and lagging with every brush stroke. Colour on the other hand was a right pain in the petunias. Coloring with an LCD monitor made it hard to get the colours right since if you move your head a lot or if I was on the laptop and the screen was angled too much. It took me a while to get the soft ‘hand painted’ look I was after but I’m pretty happy with the end result.

The strip took me about three weeks of on-again off-again work and I’m glad I did it. I still prefer the feel of making comics on paper and a piece of A4, two pens and a pencil are certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than a Wacom.

Would you want to see Plant-Man in colour? Let me know!

Anyway, that now makes three guest comics I’ve done – I just need two more to do Guest Comic Week on Funny Webcomic!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 8:24 pm 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.