If you’re like me, you love to get a peek behind the curtain of how comics are made. I like to see the process of my favorite artists as much, if not more than I enjoy seeing the finished work. So I decided to write up my process for creating As the Grass Grows.
The first step is coming up with the idea. I’d love to say I fart ideas for these strips but honestly, more times than I’d like to admit, it’s a struggle. I’ve found that I’m a better writer if I have a storyline to work with. Gag strips are much more difficult for me – it’s easier for me to pull a joke out of a strip if I have a framework of a storyline to work within. I keep a text file on my computer with a list of ideas that I can use and every now and then I’ll just brainstorm a bunch of words or short ideas and write them all down. Then later I’ll come back to them and try to come up with gags or storylines around them. Sometimes I’ll just do some random sketches of Gnorm or Jack and they’ll turn into something. For this example, the strip we’ll be looking at here is part of a storyline that was actually born out of this strip… which was born from a sketch of Gnorm sleeping. Strange how these things come up, sometimes.
Once I have an idea, I’ll type out the dialogue while I imagine the images in my head. From there I take that dialogue and re-type/re-write it in a program called Celtx, that’s a great, free script writing program. I try to make a point of rewriting it because I usually come up with something better the second time around and tweak little things (mostly cutting down dialogue). I break it down into panels, but I don’t describe the actions going on, because I want to keep them fluid in my head.
Next I open up Adobe Illustrator and layout the strip. I usually duplicate the file for a previous strip, so the width is already set up. If I’m going with a standard 4-panel strip, there’s not much structural work I need to do. I’ll then paste in the copy from my script and arrange it so I know how much space I have to work with for the drawings.
After I have the lettering in, I drop in some illustrator basic shapes to get the layout of the figures where I want them. This helps me to keep the proportions at least close to what they should be. If the characters are interacting with the background, I’ll sketch that out first, but otherwise I leave the backgrounds for later.
I’ll then sketch out the strip on the sketch layer. I usually keep the sketching pretty loose. I use a wacom tablet to draw in illustrator. I’ve heard people complain that they don’t like how illustrator corrects their lines or doesn’t do what they want, but I think I’ve found brush settings that I’m pretty comfortable with. And the ability to grab a point and drag it if something doesn’t look right makes it perfect for me.
When the sketch layer is done or good enough, I’ll start on the “inking”. I create a new layer and lock all the others so that I don’t accidentally put ink lines on the sketch layer.
Next I duplicate the ink layer to create the color layer. The reason I duplicate the ink layer is because I use Illustrator’s live paint bucket to fill in flat colors. In this process, I just have to make sure all my lines overlap at some point (which sometimes means moving the end points but since it’s going to be color only, it doesn’t matter). I have a swatch library of all the colors I generally use to color the strip. I purposely limited the color palette. At first, it was a time concern. I knew I wanted to color the strip when it went online. At the same time, though, I didn’t think I had the time to do a full-blown color rendering of every strip. So I decided to compromise. When I was playing around with different color ideas, I really started to like the limited color palette design and now I don’t think I would change it even if I could spend more time on the colors.
When the coloring is done, I’ll move on to the backgrounds. I’ll admit, I have a few background images that I reuse a lot whenever I can. It really helps speed up the production of the strip. That’s also another great thing about using a vector application like Illustrator. I can resize a background, flip it around and even just grab pieces of it if I need to without any loss of quality. I don’t have to think ahead about what size I might use something for in the future. If I decide I like a tree that I’ve drawn, I can just grab it out of one strip, resize it, distort it, etc. to make it fit in the background of another strip.
When the backgrounds are done, I then finish the lettering by drawing in word balloons. I do these freehand because I like the slightly rough shapes, rather than perfect ovals.
And that’s it. When the lettering is done, I just save out a png file, shrink it down a bit , optimize the file size and publish it to the site. You can check out the final strip here.
