Originally published March 22nd, 2010.
Well Spring Break is over, so that means returning to class, homework, and comics.
Since I know you all care about my comic making process and stuff I'll tell you about this one. So my friends went to St Louis Wednesday-Saturday for a little vacation and Tuesday night I realized that I needed to have this comic finished because I wouldn't have time when i got back to get it done before the deadline. (For those of you who don't know, for anything to get printed in the newspaper, it has to be submitted the day before (obviously) so my deadline days are Sunday and Thursday by about midday. I like to have them done the night before that so I don't have to worry about remembering to email the comic on time). So there I am Tuesday night, no comic ready at all, so I put aside everything else, pull out a sheet of paper and get to drawing.
I still have not got my comic process streamlined enough to not have any snags. Somehow when I got the file into Photoshop and arranged it in the correct 4 panel format, it was like twice as big as it was supposed to be. Normally, I clean up the drawing in Photoshop, then add the lines and dialog onto a separate layer. Both layers get separately exported as gifs into Illustrator. Since the drawing was twice as big as normal, the lines and text (which are a constant size/width) all seemed twice as small. So I just exported the drawing, made it all nice in Illustrator and brought that file back into Photoshop as a pdf. Illustrator's LiveTrace function seemed to work better the larger the lines are, because the bigger the image, the better it looks when its shrunk. I'm finally figuring out that leaving it big, LiveTracing it, then shrinking it is the way to go.
So ANYway... very long story short. My comic process is by no means a smooth-sailing ship. I have basic steps that I try to follow but sometimes I gotta be flexible and just roll with whatever happens or else I'd never get anything done.
BTW, this comic from initial concept to final comic took 4 1/2 hours. It's the first one I did from start to finish in one sitting so that's my first true estimate of work time for these. Penciling it and cleaning up the LiveTrace are what take the longest. Only practice and repetition will cut the work time down.
Emily (apologetic about the long post)
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