Heel!

Art has been my outlet for a long time. It helped me survive three years of cancer treatments by poking fun at my situation ( and myself ). Recently, I started a new job and I’m finding that it’s helping me cope there as well. Some days are good, some days are … well, the comic speaks for itself here I think.

I have a lot more work related comics in the pipe, too, but given the circumstances – mainly not wanting to have an uncomfortable conversation with human resources ( or get fired for that matter ), I’m not sure when these ideas will see the light of day. It’s a shame, too, because I’m really happy with this one, not only because it cracks me up, but because it’s the first one I’ve created using a new process.

You might have noticed that I haven’t posted a lot lately. Well, that’s because I’ve spent the last few weeks rebooting my process for drawing comics.

First, I pruned. I have a whole backlog of ideas, some so old they’re not really relevant anymore. I tossed those. Wanting only the best, I axed the mediocre ideas, too.

Second, I started putting more effort into design. Now, rather than trying to churn stuff out comics as quickly as possible, I spend more time upfront on character and background design – even if I had drawn the stuff before. I draw the designs using pencil and paper, too. Seven years into this and I’m beginning to realize drawing digitally has as many cons as pros. While being able to erase and redraw to ad nauseum made me sloppy, the ability to zoom in to a pixel made me obsessive compulsive. Go figure.

Third, I now try to stick to 2-layers. Basically, a gesture and rough sketch to hammer out the shapes, followed by a “finished” pencil sketch.

Lastly, no ink. I used to spend hours inking over pencil lines and was never really happy with the outcome. Pencil is way more forgiving and, unlike ink, the lines can be tidied up much easier.  The best part? After I colored everything the difference was negligible. Disney used a similar process in the development of “101 Dalmatians” way back in 1961. They took the hand drawn pencil sketches created by their cartoonists, ran them through a Xerox machine to copy ( and darken ) the lines onto a clear transparency, and sent the sheets to their paint department for finishing. In prior movies the lines were all painstakingly painted by hand. The Xerox process supposedly saved the studio by making it much cheaper to produce feature length animations. Hey, it it’s good enough for Disney, it’s good enough for me.

Here are the designs that I created for the above comic. I’m planning on following the same process for future drawings. Hopefully you’ll even be able to see the next one.

Take care. Stay healthy. Live life …

-Scott

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#characterdesign #clipstudiopaint #workcomic #comic #badboss