As has been laid out before, the process of bringing Glockblob into glorious four-color majesty is as follows: I buy a sketchpad specifically for this purpose. No lie. To make cartoons of my doodles. After years of not getting sketchpads for perfectly legitimate, artisticky things. And then, I buy a freakin art pen and a decent pencil. For Glockblob! Ridiculous. But anyway, then I sketch in pencil and line in ink, and I get a decent comic. It has no straight lines, sound effects, narration or dialogue at this point. (What the crap, spellchecker? Dialogue is a word.) NOTE: YOU'RE GOING TO WANT TO STOP READING NOW. At this point, I scan in the notebook and load into Pixen (poor man's Photoshop) and start building layers. The actual page is the lowest layer, then I take another one up and go over the border lines between panels in white, fill in the backgrounds, etc.; then I move up another layer and start tracing. The trouble comes in here. Nothing scans so cleanly that I can color it without a lot of gray muck messing up the fill. So I have to trace --by finger-- the lines on the lowest layer. Needless to say, I screw this up all the time and it takes hours. Even in the end, it's still shaky and bad. Then I work on colors and fills, then I add another layer if there's any half-transparent light or wind effects to add in.
Pencil sketch with hard lines:
Traced and colored:
Final Comicified! page
Ink on pencil on paper (different page): spoiler alert!*
I'm not sure if I should stop penning, or stop tracing, or what. Basically they're the same thing, except that penning is smooth and nice and tracing is on the computer (and thus doesn't have to be retraced). The trouble is that I'm actually kind of liking the effect I'm getting out of my penwork, and I feel like I'm making it worse, not better, by tracing it in and coloring it. The effect of the fully colored pages made such an impact on me to begin with that I have a hard time leaving them behind so soon... I'm just not sure what to do. If this ever becomes a regular deal, I might end up doing color covers and Sundays or something. The even more tedious-to-explain problem is the Comicify! effect that gives Glockblob its nifty four-color look. While I loved this initially, it makes coloring really difficult... I work really hard to get the right shades then they get Comicified! right into a giant gray blob. As counterintuitive as it seems, I use a lot of subtle colors in Glockblob, and I don't like watching them go to waste.
I just hope I can think of something besides buying and using watercolors, which keeps popping into my head as a possibility for some reason.
* This is probably not as universally hilarious as it is to me.
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