Photos and Letters

So I picked up a copy of Photoshop. One of the nice things about working for an institution of higher education is the academic pricing. I saved a couple hundred dollars, but it was still about as much as a car payment.

The good news is that it is worth it. I've already got my layouts worked out and have figured out how to do titles and speech bubbles better than Comic Book Creator 2.0 ever could. For $50, though, CBC 2.0 is still a great deal for what it does, so I can't say too many bad things about it. If it were just a tad more versatile, Adobe wouldn't have my money.

Interestingly enough, I did some research on how the pros put down their panels, and it looks like inDesign is how they set it up, affordably priced at $199 for those of you in academia. My sense is that you can waste all your time building up tools and never make a product, so for now Photoshop will do.

The funny thing is that this has nothing to do with a-zombie. Single panel storytelling doesn't need a layout. What I'm working on is still zombie related, though, so I might as well post it here until we get more artwork.

I've been checking a great site on webcomics at, surprising enough, webcomics.com. They do strips, rather than pages, but their process carries over. There's a video on how Sheldon is created which is fascinating. Check it out.

Learning to Letter

I'm having a tough time getting art done. Mostly because I've been trying to do it myself. The biggest problem stems from the fact that the lines I put on the page do not resemble the image in my mind, and when I change the lines, the image in my mind gets corrupted as what I've drawn on the page looks more and more like a train wreck. Unless I'm trying to draw a picture of a train wreck, in which case it looks like a pile of crude blocks.

Fortunately, there are endeavors which don't require mad rendering skills but are still necessary for production. These are layouts and lettering. I've been dabbling with Comic Book Creator 2.0, and although it is a schizophrenic mess of features (animation? sound bites?), I thought there would be enough functionality there to produce something. Sadly, it won't let you easily change or create layouts, but perseverance and a little investigative work unlocked the secret of their XML-like layout language. Or at least enough secrets that I could produce a page that had the panels where I wanted them.

The real show-stopper came with the lettering. The word bubbles do have some flexibility, but tend to consume excessive space if you're using a lowercase font. Trying to get a bubble to cut itself off in a corner is impossible. And just to drive home that it's really amature night, visiting PlanetWide Media's tutorial on "Word Bubbles" gives you a video that has nothing about it, instead the actual tutorial appearing under "Using Your Own Pictures".

I guess I'd better save up my money and get Photoshop after all.

Learning a new trade is fun!

Well, it looks like we're not going to be putting up new artwork this month. In the meantime, I'll post on the progress of some other projects.