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Goody! In this section, I, your friendly neighborhood Yvette creator, will show you how I create the comic strip. Yes! You, too, can pick up a pen and draw comics! Isn't this exciting? Isn't this what you've been waiting for your whole life? |
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Oh, really? Well, tough luck, because you're going to sit this one through! Let's take things step by step: |
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STEP 1:
After conceptualizing, doodling and finalizing the plot of the strip (I always do this before any final drawings), I roughly put down the basic figures of the characters as they would look in each frame. I don't put much detail into anything except the faces at this point. I use a whole sheet of paper for this. The past strips of 2001 were each drawn on a half sheet lengthwise, but I've changed my style since then. I might write some dialogue here in pencil simply to remind me, but with this example I didn't. |
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STEP 2:
Using a thin brush dipped in technical pen ink, I go over the pencil lines slowly and carefully. This is the time when my hands decide to start wobbling uncontrollably, and also the point when I sometimes get the random urge to giggle like a little girl. That said, I'd just like to say that this is the most difficult and time-consuming part of the process. Boy, I hate inking. I average about one dip into the ink bottle per character. I always close the bottle tightly after every dipping, too. I've had bad experiences in the past. I don't use a brush on the smaller details, by the way. I draw the faces and hands with one of those cheap Pilot technical pens. Hey, I have a whole box sitting here in my desk. What else am I supposed to do with them? Finally, I erase my pencil lines with a kneaded eraser. You know, one of those clay-eraser things? Fun fun fun! |
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STEP 3:
Next, I scan the ink drawing on my Acer 620P flatbed scanner. Isn't tech talk exciting? I open my ready-made template (empty boxes with the Yvette logo on top) in Paint Shop Pro and simply cut and paste the chunks I want in each box. Some image resizing is usually done here, too, just because I want to. This is also the time when I use PSP to clean up some manual errors, like an overlapped ink line, or (God forbid) a drop of drool that managed to escape while I was concentrating on steadying my hands. I don't drool much, though. Forget I said anything about this. Don't go looking through every last strip in my archive wondering which one I drooled on. Dropped sandwich fillings and the like are also erased at this point. If you're sharp, you noticed that the third panel has been mirror-imaged from the original drawing. Aaaah, the wonder of computer technology! |
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STEP 4:
I enjoy this part so much that I gave it its own "Step." This is when I put in those little gray things you see in the background of Yvette strips. They might be straight, slanted or curvy, but aren't they cool? Take note that I never fill in any shades of color on the characters. Yvette, for example, has black hair, but I don't bother filling in her hair in the strip. I think the little curvy lines thing has its own style, don't you? Besides, without definite boundaries in the characters' faces (you can't see where Debbie's face ends and where her hair begins), it would be hard to do on my part. Okay, in short, this is when I add the artsy-fartsy stuff using Paint Shop Pro. |
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STEP 5:
And finally, I add the most important part (arguably) of the strip: the text itself. The dialogue text is usually size 8 Lucida Sans, and I rarely put in any kind of font variation. It's a bit non-comic that way, but I like things neat, clean and uniform-looking. Sometimes, I suddenly get the inspiration to change a certain line a character says, and the whole thing ends up having a plot quite different from the one I originally envisioned. Oh, well. Life goes on. I also put in the strip's date and my signature, which I simply cut and paste from an existing file because I'm too lazy to sign each strip myself. They're both in the lower left corner in this case. So there we go! The almost-complete process of how an Yvette strip is created! If you did read through every word on this page, consider yourself...uhm...blessed. Congratulations, and I'll see you next time! Comments or suggestions about my strip-creation process? E-mail me or leave a message in the forum! |
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