I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.

[dolari]

For the first time in many many many years, I've changed the way I draw comics. Normally I pencil in the image, ink it with a ball point pen, scan it in, and color with Paint Shop Pro.

Thanks to Erin, who introduced me to and helped me into Illustrator, I'm now just pencilling on paper, and the rest is all Illustrator. I guess if this was a CD it'd be ADDD instead of AADD now. :)



Here are the original pencils for today's comic. Normally I draw a more detailed pencil, because it's easier to ink and threshold those lines than faint sketchy lines, but since I'm doing a new inking method, the pencils don't need to be so detailed.



Inks are done with the Calligraphic Brush tool in Illustrator now. Makes the lines smoother and flowier than my usual style (I kinda like the scratchy raw style and try to emulate it here), and I can keep the lines antialiased (and vectored!) while adding color on another layer.



Here we have the color layer in Illustrator. Using the (unecessarily complex) Live Paint tool, I've managed to (for the first time) doing an entire layer of color on it's own. Makes it easier to preserve the line work this way, than when I was inking by hand, then scanning and thresholding.



Anyways, here's the final product, with the inks overlaid on the color. I think it really comes out nice, and is a LOT cleaner than my usual work.

Today's comic marks the first time I've NEVER used Paint Shop Pro to make a comic. :)

(Please ignore the little color glitch at the top of the color comics...won't see that in the comic :) )