A couple of posts back I dodged my way out of talking about the things I use to make Plant-Man a reality that you and future generations will cherish like stale breadsticks. But now there is no escape for my fingers that are right now getting ready for the epic task of detailing the tools of the trade.

Wait, is it a trade? Nobody’s really exchanging anything for anything. Actually now that I think about it the modern internet economy is about people trading their time for attention to your product, and leave figuring out how to make any scratch off that to Google and their ilk.

Hey did you know I’m really good at procrastinating?

It’s true!

A lot of webcomics are done all digitally these days, and while I use some digital tools later on I generally stick to the method I used to make Plant-Man back when it was a mini comic. That being:

A4 paper: Just regular photocopier paper since it’s cheap and easy to source. I never really got into the whole artists paper thing, never really saw the point and it’s not like my town is lousy for art supply stores.

Pencil and eraser: Any household pencil and eraser. To this day I don’t know what the hell 2B or HB or any of that stuff means. I just use these to lay out rough panel layouts, pencil in speech bubbles and do roughs of character placements etc. This is also the stage where I write the page – yep, more often than not I just make it all up as I go along. I’m a hack!

Unipin Fine Line pens: 0.1mm for fine detail and patterns, 0.2mm for lettering, 0.3mm for most of the work and 0.8mm for panel borders and thick character outlines. I never did like the idea of using a brush and again these pens are easily available from the local newsagent or corner store. In a comic like Plant-Man where consistency of line and style is important having these fixed width pens lets me concentrate on getting the drawing done instead of experimenting.

Plastic ruler: I can’t remember buying any plastic rulers, but what the heck. I just use them for panel lines. Curse my inability to just do a regular 6 panel page, everything has to be wacky and original!

So yeah, it’s all very low-fi so far.

After the page is inked I scan it at 600DPI with a dodgy old scanner I’ve had lying around the place for ages, throw it into Photoshop (Hoorah for an old hand me down copy of 5.5!) and convert the grey scale scan into black and white line art. From there I get the trusty old Wacom tablet and clean up any mistakes (not I don’t have any whiteout in the above list – I used to use that all the time but it turned into a powder after a while) and sometimes add greys or computer patterns to varying degrees of readability.

Once the art is locked down I save it as a high resolution TIFF for storage and then a 600pixel wide image for the site.

So…that’s about it.

Thrilling huh. I think my overall cost per page is a millionth of a cent.

Which is about as much as I make back on the thing! HA!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 10:26 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.