The Beat and How to Swing It.

Music is such a huge part of the process of creation for me. I keep forgetting that. I’ve gotten back to listening to music on a more regular basis since I got the Mac book. It’s lead to some rewrites and other ideas cropping up and that really is a good thing.
I suppose one of the earliest instances of this was Dream Theater’s album “Images and Words”. Every single series I’ve written has in someway taken an idea from the music from that album. EA and Mailbox included. “Take the Time” is still one of the most epic songs I’ve ever heard and it still makes me get all goose-bump-y when I hear it and picture action sequences happening set to the song. Another song that changed everything was “Greenman” from XTC’s “Apple Venus Vol. 1″. I’d had the idea for Errant Apprentice for many moons. The idea of a knight and magic in a modern setting has probably been done to death in one form or another, though I personally have never seen it. The problem with the series was I had no real direction or reason to tell the story. I’d gotten the title for Errant Apprentice from an Irish song I’d heard Jim Flanagan perform, but other than that I had nothing. Then I heard “Greenman”. In the span of about twenty minutes I had the whole reason for all of it. I suppose Andy Partridge deserves a co-writing credit on the series just for that.

Something else about music that is interesting is that it’s not always the lyrics. A LOT of times it’s just the flow of the song. The feeling and colors that come from it. I can see what’s happening to it. The mood effects the mood of the story. I suppose the funny thing is that all these comics are just a substitute for my inability to do an animated series. Ah well. The point is, take your brain off the hook every now and again and see where the music takes you.

PS: I’m currently absolutely enthralled with Imogen Heap’s work, so let’s see what happens with that.

Methods and Madness

One of the things my instructors at school have told me on several occasions is there are several ways to skin a cat. I’ve been discovering that over the years of working on Kota’s World and The Errant Apprentice. Originally, I was just futzing about in Photoshop. I’d just color right on the line art and pray to God I didn’t go over the lines. I started duplicating the art and setting it to multiply and coloring below it. Finally I hit on http://www.polykarbon.com. It told me how to make the line art a transparent layer. The site claims the tutorials there are old and stupid, but frankly I find they’re just as informative as always. By the time I’d hit Errant Apprentice I was doing things I was very happy with and was convinced I’d keep using it for ages.
Then they showed me Illustrator. Michelle and Susan showed me the things I could do for drawing and coloring and I decided to give it a shot. I toyed with inking on the computer, but the time it took to do a comic went from four hours to eight to ten! I’ve started hand inking again and coloring in Illustrator.

Currently my method consists of scanning my inked art at 300 DPI and moving it to the Mac. In Photoshop I adjust the curves into and “S” shape to brighten the whites and darken the blacks. From there it’s straight to Illustrator. I run livetrace and set it to “inked drawings. I adjust the path fitting to around 5 or 6 and check ignore white. It makes it all a bit cleaner.
After that I use the expand feature to shoe the paths and points. I copy the line art and paste it into a template I use from Ka-Blam and color on a layer behind the line art. The color is just shapes. I can apply effects and the color ends up much more even and is easy to manipulate.

All this being said, I keep buying these books about how to color comics. I notice that everyone keeps coloring with Photoshop. Am I the only one who’s using Illustrator like this? I know Jeph Jacques from Questionable Content uses Illustrator to completely draw his series. I’d love to see the guy work but I never really get to watch Ustream stuff. Actually, I wish I knew some other web cartoonists who worked digitally, but that’s another rant all together I suppose.