ZX Post-vitum 1 : comic plastic surgery

I've been going over the comic many, many times after I did the last few pages and I've been keeping meticulous notes of what I'd like to fix per-page. Some pages are fine as they are, some need just lettering fixes (good god, the sloppy, amateurish lettering!) and others need full fledged redraw-the-panel overhauls.

On one hand this is because in the last 10 months, I have grown not only as a comic artist (well, a little I guess) but also as a digital comic artist (I now have complete mastery of Manga Studio, and if I make any money off of this comic, I'm going to be buying a full license, they deserve it and it's good karma too). So now I see things in earlier pages that look alright, but could be done much cleaner and simpler by using all the tools of Manga Studio. I have decided however, to not go into fixing such textures and effects because it's disingenuous; Let the comic reflect the process I went through. Besides, there's something pleasing about how it starts of fairly minimal-looking and then towards the end becomes fuller and more nuanced in the inking. An interesting unintentional 'inking as commentary' effect.

On the other hand, some changes have to be made because the character's faces are either distorted or have outright changed from the beginning to now. Like on the very second page (crop pictured above) the original Stephan looks way more morose and severe than I needed him to look in the opening of the story. I had to change his face to a more neutral, innocent tone, because I expect some readers will finish the story and then turn to the beginning and start over. It won't do to go from the last-page-Stephan to the first-page Stephan to find him looking so fatigued and weary. I kind of liked how he looked to the reader in the original version, a sort of knowing look, but let's not be too clever, he's unaware of what's going to happen so I changed his eyes to look to his left. Also the black eyebrows were changed to the lighter-colored ones that became the default in the continuation of the comic. Check out the newly added Greco-Roman nose job too! That's what you get when you start a comic without having done 20 pages of character studies to get their look down completely, right? But consider the upside: if I had done 20 pages of character studies before I started this comic proper, I would have never finished it. I know this now. This is the only knowledge I have to offer other struggling comic artists: start drawing, now. Fix lazy mistakes later, have the comic in your hands and then you can afford changing whatever. Don't bother with too much foundation work. You are not an architect. You are a poet. (or to be more precise: if you find yourself unable to go through with building your comic after you've laid all the meticulous foundations for it, then you're the poet type. If you can manage it however then you might be one of those fabled poet-architects that achieve amazing success at anything they set their mind to do. Congratulations!)

Many small such fixes occur in the first 15 pages of the comic (that's how many I've gone through so far, today I'll do the rest) but for the reader the changes will not always be discernible. This is not because they are not major changes sometimes (some faces have been completely redrawn, for example) but because what the faces signify has rarely changed so the reader's memory will improvise with the new data and not worry the consciousness by sending it signals that stuff has changed. Only in two panels so far have I changed the actual expression of the characters to better convey their emotional status. I count this as a minor victory, it means that although I've struggled to draw people right in this comic the problem was with where their eye or nose would best be situated, not with what emotional expressions they held.

The other big thing about the comic is fixing the lettering. Because it was the last job I had to do for any given page of these, it's the most rushed, awful thing. Especially in the English version of the comic, at around page 8 to 20 it's a mess. Complete re-lettering has to occur and I'm not looking forward to it, oh not at all. I hate lettering. I'm now fixing the Greek versions so I can show it to publishers in a reasonable reading form in the upcoming Comicdom Convention, but straight after that I'll be spending two awful, tiring days re-lettering most of the English version too, so I can e-mail samples to the various publishers.

Although that's a bit of work if you think about it, my brain doesn't count it as such. It feels just like spring cleaning, moving a few furniture about. The comic is finished, now all that's left is to finish it.

-Helm
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Mandy

Below the jump we will discuss old paradigms of adventure gaming and even older computer hardware, attempt to update a decidedly botched portrait and pry underneath it, at the concealed humanity of it all.



Before your PC could show you thousands, or millions of colors on the screen at the same time, it could only show you 256 colors. Some of you remember that technology having the name of 'VGA'. Some even older computer users that are reading this remember that before the VGA 256 indexed colors on screen, we had even less on personal computers (at that ancient time called 'IBM compatibles'). We had 16 colors on screen maximum on an adapter called EGA. Let's not get bogged down in the technical details of why and how, just setting a scene here.

Those 16 colors, most of them very garishly saturated and bright were not initially selected by the hardware designers with video-games in mind. They were selected so they could stand out against each other for word-processor and spreadsheet programs for which personal computers were meant to be used. However, like any computer technology the wide public ever got their hands on, they appropriated the machinery for entertainment. EGA was certainly a step up from the older CGA hardware that only allowed 3 colors from a very limited selection on the screen at one time. And even with CGA people attempted detailed graphics on the screen, most to sell computer games. Let's forget about CGA right now though and focus on EGA.

When EGA adapters were relatively novel, there was a flourishing computer game company named Sierra. They effectively had created the genre of graphical adventure games. Games in which the player's reflexes were not taxed but instead they were confronted with curious - and often sadistic - riddles which they were required to solve using collected items together in improbable ways, in order to be rewarded with a storyline, characters and hopefully a degree of pathos . Some of you reading this are more or less familiar with what I'm talking about. For those that the description doesn't spark any memory, perhaps a few pieces of graphic will:









All these games used the EGA palette, as you can see. Middle tones were faked by dithering in a checkerboard pattern between two colors. The effect is really noticeable in our sharp monitors today but back then they were much more inexact and blurry, there was a lot of pixel color bleed that they took advantage of to fake the appearance of so many as 64 distinct colors. In essence these games looked a bit more realistic back then, at the expense of crispness and sharpness. I prefer to see the dither patterns, personally, there's something charming about what they're attempting and the separate effect they're achieving in sharp monitors, which is of a curious grainy texture where pixels never let you forget they're pixels.

I grew up with these games and their art style informed everything from the stylization in my own comics, to the mostly calm 1-point perspective camera angles I use down to my selection of color. Furthermore besides a comic artist I am - perhaps it's fair even to say predominantly - a pixel artist. I draw graphics in restricted modes with few colors, preselected palettes like this EGA one or even more restricted ones, I revel in the power of the single pixel and the perfectly formed pixel cluster. My passion for this sort of odd digital art is difficult to explain to laymen, so excuse me if I don't go out of my way right now, the purpose of this article is different.

I help run Pixelation which is a critique art message board specifically geared towards helping people learn the craft of pixels so that they can help themselves discover the artistry of them also. At Pixelation, it is common for a person trying to help to edit the work of another for purposes of demonstration and for a visual aid in explaining what could be fixed and how. The edits are not taken by the original artist as they are and used, they are encouraged to use the edit as a reference point and help themselves to better their original version. An edit by a kind-hearted peer is the most useful piece of constructive critique an artist can get. I owe the few things I've accomplished as an artist to being exposed to the internet critique community and especially Pixelation almost 7... 8 years ago, as a teenager then. A very crucial age for getting your head out of your ass. It helped me swallow my pride and forget my rationalizations for when I made mistakes and just roll up my sleeves and get better by iterating my artwork, getting critique, doing it again until I was happy and the people that helped me ran out of 'crits' (which is lingo for pieces of critique). I'm not as reliant to nitpick critique today as I was then because I aim at more holistic effects with my artwork as a 25 year old than then as a 15 year old, but to get from there to here my bible scripture was CRITIQUE.

We're going to do a bit of critique on the blog today, I hope the readers that were hoping for a comic will not mind. I think the analytical process will be fascinating for most of you if you give it a chance however. I will spare you the really technical jargon, instead we'll be looking at the aesthetic aspect of a picture that belongs to one of these old Sierra EGA Adventure Games. Here it is:



This image belongs to the game 'Codename : Iceman'. It is one of the lesser known titles that even those of you familiar with Sierra Adventure Games might not be familiar with. You can see how it plays here. Please for the purposes of this text, do take 30 minutes out of your time and watch the first few episodes of that play-through on youtube. Especially the third one (I think) which features the girl above. If you haven't played a Sierra adventure game before it will give you a familiarity with both the mechanics and aesthetics of the games of that era. It might not be a terribly good game but it does convey these things successfully.

I tend to find the art in it very hit and miss. I think a couple of my favorite Sierra graphic artists worked on some backgrounds and sprites in Iceman (the same that made the top image from the selection of game shots above, with the tree. That's from Quest for Glory, my favorite computer game on the whole). Some of the art is of a high caliber. Other bits really are not, like the image right above which we'll be dissecting.

I'd like to mention here that this dissection is not meant with any disrespect for the graphic artist that made the original image. There are various considerations that we should take into account that would explain its various shortcomings, least of which is the possible lack of talent on behalf of the graphician that sat down to do this. Think about how limited the tools were at the time this was made, think of the memory limitations (at the time even using many of your 16 colors at the same image meant it took more memory), think about the time pressure to get it done and move on to the next asset in a decidedly graphics-heavy Sierra adventure game. I do not intend to mock the artist for his bad image, I sympathize very much. The purpose of the edit I am going to attempt below is to reach the potential inherent in the image and then discuss that potential in earnest. Furthermore, my edit doesn't invalidate the original because there are other merits in what could be considered a clumsy or ugly image. It could be said that by looking at ugly art people learn the most about themselves.

Let's look at it again and steel ourselves, though.



It's very clear this was an image made from photographic reference, though the end result is probably not very similar to the photo its based on. I would expect that the photo comes out of a fashion or swimsuit catalog in the early 80's. It's not a trace, as there weren't any digitizers at the time, at least affordable to Sierra. Perhaps a tracing grid was used but I doubt it because there's some extremely odd eyeballing mistakes like the thickness of the neck that could only be explained by using a very wide grid.

The image was probably made in the background editor in the Sierra SCI interpreter. This means that it wasn't made pixel by pixel. Instead try to think of this like very early and limited vector assembled art. In order to save floppy disk (remember those?) space, full-screen graphics (as opposed to the moving sprites and placed objects in the rooms, which were made pixel by pixel) were made with triangles or straight lines filled with a flat color, or a dithered combination of two colors. What was stored was the trigonometrical data of how the engine would recreate these vector graphics on the fly, when you entered a new room. Some explanations here(scroll at the bottom and check how this emulator is reusing the vector point data from the games to rebuild the graphics at a higher resolution than the intended one). As any of you with an inclination towards understanding technology would have guessed, it's much handier to store and compress basic math procedures that set up a room than it is to store the 8-bit color value of every pixel in a 320x200 screen (that's 64,000 pixels on every screen, folks). The drawback is that the background image pixel art, *as* pixel art, is unrefined, geometric and little attention is paid on the pixel level, which is after all where the magic happens.

Look at the image again with this knowledge. The strands of hair are line-tool straight lines, no attempt is made to use intermediate colors in the 16 color set palette to smooth them towards the black. The shadows are either flat triangles of brown on top of the lighter (and pretty garish) skin color, of they're triangles made of 50% dither of these two colors. This image was made with vectors, it was made fast and then the artist moved on on whatever else he had to do that 12 hour crunch day.

To put this in context here's some women from the Leisure Suit Larry series:


This is vector mode too.



As is this. The artist took the time and care to place single pixel level detail in the speculars. All of these are photo referenced but you can't underestimate the craftsmanship here now that you understand the tools involved



Scenery is vector mode, girl standing in awkward sports illustrated pose in front is sprite mode, because she animates. You can spot sprites in Sierra screens of that time as opposed to vectors because they animate, because there's usually little to no dithering on them and because there's a lot of single pixels placed on them, most of the time.

As we can see the tools, though difficult to work through do not mean the art has to necessary look like the girl from Iceman (let's call her Mandy for now). So back to our image:



There's so much wrong here and EGA so underused it has been crying out for a revamp by a pixel artist with more time on his hands than the Sierra artist had for a while now. So I went ahead and edited this extensively, first for anatomy, then for color usage and finally for characterization and ambience. Keep in mind I worked pixel by pixel and not in any fake-vector-mode so this image would have a hefty memory cost in an original Sierra game of the time. Whether that would be worth it or not is up to the developer's discretion.



I stress that I am not using hardware capacities they didn't have available at the time in my edit. This is the exact same palette, only I'm using all 16 colors and dithering and mixing as required.

In the process of touching this up I started to wonder about the story involved in the making of this as I'm given to being a comics artist and all. The game Codename: Iceman is a pretty base experience of being a secret agent, perhaps a bit on the pedantic side, not so much James Bond as you'd expect. The atmosphere it's going for is that late eighties Tom Clancy cold-war zeitgeist. Shallowly thrilling and action-oriented while deeply puritan and conservative, not to mention completely politically hypochondriac, bankrupted by the internal pressures of the paranoid cold war-game that was going on at the time.

As such the game plays out in a very telling two-scene format. At first you're just relaxing at your vacation, you play volleyball, you swim, you dance with and then sex up this girl that hits on you (that's our Mandy right there) who COVERTLY SLIPS YOU A MICROFILM IN HER EARRING. Then it's all spy thriller baby. You suit up, pump up and go pilot a submarine around the world trying to rescue a president US ambassador from some vaguely defined terrorists. It's worth watching the play-through linked about in youtube just to follow the zeitgeist.

This woman, Mandy, then, is completely disposable not only insomuch that our protagonist has sex with her and then never sees her again but in that she's explained away as a secret agent, herself playing you with the microfilm business. No awkwardness there, man. It's all part of The Great Game. Anything potentially human and ambiguous is swept under the rug for cold war certainties and decisive-action-or-people-die.

Then I thought of the woman the Sierra artist was copying off of from. A model, probably, from a fashion or swimsuit magazine. I thought about how her smile is stilted and how her eyes are tired, how she probably had to hold that pose for minutes until some fashion photographer extracted the desired amount of misanthropic style out of what is, on her personal time, a human being. I thought of these things as I was editing and my piece started to reflect that subconscious process, I started making her eyes deader and I emphasized the kitsch even more than the original in its simplicity did. With the benefit of hindsight, the 80's were a very strange time. The garish EGA palette does kitsch almost natively.

Not only was I done trying to pretty this up (which was the original impulse), I was then actively trying to make it reflect the theoretical humanity in the original photo-shoot that was tossed aside in all this business of making a spy thriller adventure game and getting to the submarine and solving an international crisis. It became about the model and how much she wanted to be done with this gig and go home and eat in front of the television, deeply discontent yet working, working yet deeply discontent.

After I was done with the still image, I decided to go the extra mile and animate some minute aspects of this photo-shoot context in order to satisfy this internal storyline I had by then constructed in my mind.



Look at this for a while. Furthermore, look at a crop of just her eyes:



She isn't smiling. Hold that pose but don't hold that thought, when will this be over? When will he be satisfied? I feel ridiculous but if I accept what I feel then I've wasted my life. What am I doing here?

The header of this entry, before the jump is the frame when she's flashed in the face mid-blink, her eyes closed. It's hot and white outside, but it's a cold, lonely war inside. At that exact moment, I wonder what she was thinking.

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Anatomy

Click on the image for full sized version. Preferably on a different tab than the text below.


This is the work process that I went through. The initial reference was this:



But as you can see I didn't trace it or follow it too much, actually. I just wanted to reference a real space to avoid specific issues of depth perception that would reduce the effect of feeling like you're actually in the back seat, I didn't want to fake a higher skill level than I actually have.

Generally, tracing an image is in my opinion bad form. However there are exceptions. The next shame image I am going to do is going to be a full-fledged trace of a photograph. I will discuss why it's not alright generally and why exactly I did it when that image is done and on the blog.

Using an image just as visual reference however, is as important as the artist feels it is for the viewer to directly recognize the minutia of a scene as apparent, fitting objects. Had I not used a photo of an actual taxi as reference and just went from imagination, I'd have probably completely forgotten about the voicebox, that is I think even a stronger visual confirmation of 'this is a taxi' than the running meter. However as you can see I wasn't shackled to reality here and I enlarged and simplified the meter and put it in a place where it would contrast white against darkness so as to drive the point home. Hopefully not many viewers has problems realizing this is a taxi, and the character we're going to be following is in the back seat of it.

Here I am trying to diffuse certain problems in the first small shame image where some viewers did not realize the thoughts were coming from a viewer on the street and not the sitting man himself. On the street it's difficult to implicate the viewer simply by having a vantage that befits the normal height of a human being (as I did in small shame part one) because viewers are used to these vantage points in movies all of the time and they certainly not always mean 'you are looking from the first person'. In the taxi situation however, almost all movies and comics and other visual media that employ this shot convey that the protagonist is in the back seat. So here I hope I've been more candid about what I'm going for than in the past image.

On A you can see how I space and sketch things out. Recently I've sorta abandoned working with broader, freehand brushes when setting up a scene. I have come to dislike the ambiguity of where a final line will be when you have a fat thick brush stroke that means 'here is an edge, somewhere'. There are too many potential final lines in a big fat sketch stroke, and it seems to affect my spatial relations between my various objects too much. And perhaps even worse, it seemed I had began to ink with too fat lines on the computer as compared to my hand-inked work to try to follow these ambiguous sketches, which I didn't enjoy. So I've sorta 'devolved' into working with straight, thin but strong lines for setting up a scene.

On B you can see what effect A has, with the two layers overlaid. I made various mistakes about judging the eye level of the driver and position of the steering wheel that I had to fudge around with. I'd prefer if in the future I didn't make these sort of errors, they just waste time and diffuse the clarity of the piece. On other parts of the image the inking remains very close to the sketch version, which is for my intents, a good thing.

On C we have the final inks, before I put on any gray tones. I debated leaving this piece at this level as there was something appealing about the way forms were dictated by smaller or bigger lines according to how close things were and I knew I would only hurt this effect when I laid on the gray tone. However, as you will see two steps below on the final image, there was an emotional effect that I wanted to convey that was worth the damage to the linework.

On D you can see the first layer of tone and grain. Again I could have stopped here but I felt that the scene was lacking a bit of weight and layer clarity so I added more dark grain in specific places to separate the levels. Note that I removed the insignia of the car brand on the steering wheel. I feel that any benefit the work would enjoy by using brands - in that the viewer will immediately feel this is a realer place because they recognize them - is offset unfavorably by propagating the mentality that brands dictate a realer world. They do not, the whole marketing mechanism in fact rests on the assumption that if the buying public (for the term 'people' does not occur in their lingo) integrate brands into their daily lives on the instinctual level they would be more successful in peddling their shit. There is a lot of semiotic dissonance that occurs for every human being that has to suffer through this process just in daily life, getting from place A to place B while under constant attack by brands and I'd rather not encourage it further, even if it hurts the realism of my work somewhat. The merit of the work will survive and I'll sleep better.

On E, the final image, the emotional effect I had to add is now hopefully apparent. The white glow of a beautiful day is bleeding through the edges of the glass, onto the spectral speech bubble of the driver. I can't exactly explain why this effect was so important but it came to me about midway when working on the inks and it really felt important to include. A strong separation between outside (bright beautiful and promising) and the guilt-ridden thoughts in the inside, conveyed in black and grain, the apologia of the letters in startling contrast, sharp against the forgiving blur.

One fear I have about the final image is that I might have described the car just a bit too much and instead of functioning on the emotional level the image looks a bit like a car commercial. That's ironic given my rant about branding, but I couldn't think of a different way to convey this shame without very very clearly showing a taxi in naturalist detail.

Also, I forgot to add arm hair to the taxi driver. That's probably a bigger hit on the intended realism than anything else.

-Helm
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Moon Tarot (A Wayward Process Post!)

Alright. And now for something a little different. I have uploaded a video capture of my working on the above image:

You may download it directly (~50 megabytes) by clicking.
If the video doesn't play, it may be you're lacking the codec I used.
It is the Techsmith SC codec, which you may get from here.
It is tiny, just a simple exe installation and then run the video again, it'll work.

If that all sounds like too much hassle, you may instead watch the video on Vimeo, here.
But at the expense of definition, size and quality. Such is life.

It took about 2 hours to draw the image, it has been condensed at 10 minutes by being sped up. The music is the track First Narrows by Loscil, from the same-titled album. The program I'm using is Manga Studio EX 4.0 which I'm truly sorry Techsmith, I stole from you. If I ever become well-off I swear I'll buy it for real.

I like time-lapse videos of people drawing because it pleasantly removes the period the artist employs between thinking of a concept and actually rendering it on the paper. It also removes minor backtracking errors or undos (you can catch a big undo where I use the spraycan on the big rock and the remember "oh wait, it'll be a tattoo, you can't use this sort of grain!") so the end result is wonderfully automatic. In the future with our chemically augmentated reflexes and brain power, this will be how we will draw. We shall think it and behold, there it shall be.

So, about the piece. My friend Blazej Dzikowski has decided to get a second tattoo. I usually don't accept offers to do tattoo drawings. It is, as I'm certain readers who also draw will testify, something of a regular occurrence to be asked by people that barely know you to draw them something inane like a big Sepiroth from Final Fantasy rocking out on the electric guitar to get tattoed on their lower back. Shallow judgments aside (for all I know Sepiroth might mean a lot to them! Also, their lower back!) I am primarily not keen on the implied responsibility involved into making something another person will carry on their skin for a long time. However I do not have a lot of friends like Blazej so I asked about the details of the piece.

It's that Moon Tarot card. Here's some reference we dug up: 1, 2, 3. The prevalent themes are of course the naturalistic environment, the high tide water (along with the variable crustacean), the two towers (signifying distant judging civilization or perhaps bygone subservience?) and the dog and wolf, the one housebroken and trained, the other fundamentally wild, giving into their instinctual urges. When Blazej explained to me what the image means to him I told him I'd try to do a rendition, because most of all I felt I could understand the point of it (or to be exact I could understand his understanding of it and how it differed from my own complentary one). The one on top of the post is the initial version. His concerns over readability and relative sizes of the forms led me to alter the image in the following way:

As this would wrap around his arm. I think the distant dual towers also probably capture the underlying meaning of the card better than the fancier pillars of the first version. He seems happy with this image and I'm happy that he's happy, it's a fitting gift for him, just now a father. Responsibility coupled remembrance of internal desire, yes.

Best to you, Dominika and the child.

-Helm

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Memorybot Part 1

More ZX romantic adventures! Page 1 out of 4.

I made this for the 'Free Your Line' fanzine, for its third - and best, in my opinion - issue. It was done in very late 06, in fact around new years eve if memory serves. Ptoing was around, as were other friends, I was visiting Germany I think. God, how can my memory of things be so much like an old man's?

If you note something different about this comic, something vibrant and rich in hue, that's Ptoing's fault. He did the colors. I really like them, most people seem to too.

As I had 4 pages to tell a story that could possibly be told in a single page like those of the newspaper, and as a sort of cleansing from that sort of format, I took it very slow here, mostly establishing setting and mood, letting smaller things do the talking than my usual verbose narrator who is sadly a necessity if you want to tell a story with a lot of plot in very small space. Therefore the pacing is very deliberately slow. Note how I use the right wall in the first panel as space to place a story title and such, luxuries one doesn't usually enjoy in single-page format due to space. The eye traverses lazily through the opening shot, playfully diverted by the separate-perspective point cobblestone. A vague sense of futurist Europe somewhere (in fact half-way inspired by Stockholm and Thesaloniki). I never understood why the near future needs to be all SUPERPIPES AND FLYING CARS... well, the flying cars I can understand, what I don't see is why when the 'FUTURE' is here, everything old is to be immediately discarded. So I didn't. This comic might take place in the future sometime but I still left in streetlights and free press vending machines and the tired stones of an 'old city center'.

Furthermore, as before, I do not treat the abilities a robot very much like a robot... somewhat half-way. He has an internal clock... but he has to roll up his sleeve to know what time it is, heh. I like that middle space between magical realism and just flat out nonsensicalness. I'll get Ptoing at the end of the comic to talk about his color choices and such. Let's look at the black and white one as well:



First of all I made the mistake of inking this on hard bristol board (because that is what I took with me in Germany. I am really ghetto as far as tools and means go, as I've mentioned before). So all the lines I've put down are with generally bigger tipped markers than I enjoy just so I didn't get lots of break up. It turned out to befit the color a lot more than my usual more flimsy lines.

Note on panel 3 and 4 how I use guiding arrows to help the reader along. Most experimental comic artists would scoff at such'medium breaking immersion' tricks as naive but I kinda like comics going 'hi, we're comics! :D' a little sometimes, if they're kind about it. I could have used some other visual clue as to how to read such a panel configuration (usually with word balloons or the actual things in the panels being drawn in such a way as to visually flow up and then downwards) but I had to juggle a few other considerations that kept me from this. Namely, I wanted the fast motion. I wanted the first two panels to appear to take a considerable amount of time between them but then when he checks the time to see if his date is late (she is, by 8 minutes) I wanted the action to be abrupt. This works by keeping the art in the repeated panel pretty much the same (eye discards same information and just reads the different parts, much faster than the whole scene changing. Combine this effect with small panels and you can have a comic where the reader feels compelled to read 3 panels a second). So the pacing is sloooow and then an abrupt peak, and then again slow on the fifth panel (low shot always seems to take more time than eye-level because the reader has to visualize the pan that got the 'camera' that low, and how it'll also take some time to reposition. We think spatially, like ground animals) and the last two panels are again, fast after that bit of hesitation. These are pretty much cinematography tricks, but hey, comics are a smart medium and should take whatever becomes them from elsewhere without having delusions of being anything they're not. Vague line there but I'll pretend I'm safe from making 'movie comics' for now.

I'll post the next page in 3 days or so. Take the intermediate time to praise Ptoing for his wonderful coloring work.

- Helm


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DER PROZESS TEIL ZWEI

Hello. I'm going to track the thought-process behind the drawing of a panel for a yet-inexistent comic. This panel:

(click on all images in this post for proper sized versions)

I am working completely digitally here. My brain is digital too. I am made of nothing but cables and microchips.



The very first thing that has to be considered when one sits to pencil a page of comics is what it's going to be about. As this isn't a page and is in fact, a wordless panel, I need to let you know what I am going for emotionally and in terms of storytelling beforehand so you can tell if I succeed or fail. I stress that though the rest of this comic is only in my head right now, I drew this thinking as if it existed and I know what page goes before it and what comes after it. I stress this because drawing pretty pictures is meaningless in a comic if they don't emote something, and they don't do it in sequence. Leave the single-image-life's-work-masterpiece stuff to the painters, guys. Of course I may say that because I have a short attention span and could never put 40 hours in a single image like they do.

Anyway. Here the story is that this scoundrel swordsman in this pulp fantasy harbor city has it conveyed to him that a dancer in an ill-reputed inn has lost 'a valuable piece of property' of vague definition and is will reward the man that recovers it. So he sets off to meet his to-be-employer and inquire as to what exactly this property is and more importantly, how much to get it back. This is the panel when the swordsman barges in on the dancer's private quarters, startling her somewhat. I want the human figure to convey both a small shock, some apprehension and the dawning realization that this is a man here for the job and not for some other purpose. I also want the woman to be a somewhat tired person, for other reasons.

So I fire up the Cintiq and put down 'blue pencils' in Manga Studio Ex 3 layer. I use a 1200 dpi a4 page format as a default. The way I work is like so: I make the main desktop screen have a full view of the piece I'm working on and zoom in with the Cintiq to work on detail. This way I can always check if what I'm doing works on the macro level without ever having to zoom out too much from the micro level. It's a relatively fast and precise method. Manga Studio has page-rotation and other handy things that make the Cintiq a joy to use, especially if one maps useful shortcuts to the sidepanel keystrokes. I usually only map 'UNDO' to one of them, but I'd map a whole lot more if Manga Studio and Cintiq didn't sometimes mess each other up and totally forget their respective settings. Just having to bind 'UNDO' a lot to the same key has wore me out, as far as extensive Cintiq customization goes.

That strong hori line is the line of sight of the barging swordsman with whom I want the viewer to relate for this event. Naturally there'd be a panel before this with his hand on the door or whatnot so the narration works, but imagine this for now. We can see from this that the swordsman (and the viewer) is standing upright entering into the room where this woman is sitting down. This creates an immediate effect of dominance over her which is useful if you want to set an emotional mood for an encounter.

I used to be pretty mad about drawing accessories in 'establishing shots' like this one in the past. I guess it was mostly an overcompensation for my skills as an artist. I'd put everything in that shot, but I now think just a few items of importance make a more balanced view and they do not clutter the flow of reading as much. The box with the candle on it plays a part in the story so it's useful and it's excusable that it's rendered as much as it is. The bit of table we see is good because it tells us the person in the room was recently eating, and therefore on private time. The hint of a mirror and bed in the background just flesh out a living space a bit more. Believe me, I could have made this to be much, much more busy if I wanted to show off, but showing off is for illustrators that only have ONE panel to tell a story. For example I'd texture the carpet with something like this which is just... not something a sane human being would attempt.

If you're wondering why the heavy rendering on the female form for such a preliminary sketch, it's because I suffer from this condition called can'tdrawomenitis and it pays to be more careful than with anything else in the scene. I didn't use reference for the pose and though this will hurt the quality of the physiology in the final piece, there is a return for it: a bit more individual style, a bit more 'wrong' that I am comfortable letting in there. If one uses photo reference too much all his drawings will tend to look like fashion models in 'perfect' poses. I heavily dislike 'perfect' poses because they're calculated and held for the photographer. But here I want an 'in-between' not a 'key-frame' (in animation terms) because simply the woman was interrupted. She's trying to put on her 'seductive allure' face but not quite there yet.

Here I've blocked out the lights much more and finalized the crop and the topology in the scene. Usually for an establishing shot one should use proper vanishing points and whatnot but this is such a 'close' shot that I feel I can fake it without too much SCIENCE. I don't want the place to look too sterile anyway. I've dressed (sadly) the girl, though barely so (happily) and worked on some preliminary texturing to know what I want to achieve with the final inks.

Now the exact way I go about texturing a part of an image usually is more impressionistic than anything else. Meaning I don't always try to texture a rug with a naturalistic ruggy texture or flesh with flesh-friendly crosshatching and whatever. I go for an emotional effect first. However here, because this is a process post and a process picture I tried to stand mid-way between impressionism and application. I'll discuss this more in the next few paragraphs.


Here for example I am mid-ink. Check out how much I've deviated from the underlayer in the construction of the girls' face. I don't usually do this, but it's me, drawing a woman. My disease, I hope you don't think worse of me.

You can see here why the time-honored practice of tinting the pencil layer blue is useful for inking. The blue shows below, but the ink registers to the eye clearly on top. Though a remnant of the 'the penciler pencils, the inker inks, the colorist colors' production chain American Mainstream comics method era, I am quite partial to it because it allows me to focus on what I want to do on every step. I mean, when I pencil - to paraphrase Dave Sim - I am a penciler. When I ink an inker and when I letter a letterer. I do not want to be thinking about pencil art judgment calls when I am inking, nor do I want to think of what I am going to change on the inks when I put the lettering down. Whereas overspecialization is for ants, thinking like a specialized craftsman when you do something as specific as inking helps.

You'll notice I'm shading the flesh with horizontal strokes. This is an emotional effect. I've found that parallel lines for shading people makes them appear mid-move. Also if the lines are close-knit (as are these) and especially if placed on the face, they give the character a sort of tired look. Vertical lines are the best for this effect, but I preferred horizontal lines here because they unbalance her more and they accentuate the light-source.

Also, for kicks, check out a surreal Platoist zen space midway version.

So let's look at the final piece for a minute:


Click here for computer shattering big version.

As you can see I try to create a pure binary bitmap copy for printing (binary bitmap means in computer lingo just black and white, 1, 0 per pixel, no shades of gray in between) which at this day and age isn't very needed because even the cheapest digital black and white prints you can get are grayscale. However I do this because a) it pleases me and b) when you have to print comic tone, it really still matters if you want to avoid moire patterns. I didn't use any comic tone here, though. I used ink pens and the airbrush for the noise patterns where applicable. I try to take special care to 'bridge' between the airbrush and the inkwork because I don't want my art to look like two different things pasted on top of each other. You tell me if it works or not.

As you can see I skewed the rotation on the goblet-holding arm to signify a bit more shock. I wanted to also put some tendon tension on the neck (as the body does this when you're surprised) but the lighting conditions didn't react favorably to it so I took it out.

So how different it is working digitally to real life penciling and inking? Once you get the hang of it, not very. The biggest - and sincerely most important difference - is that you have a very easy way to apply WHITE on BLACK, not just the usual reverse. This makes you work looser without fearing you'll place a line that will just destroy the piece (the benefits of undoing on computers taken into account) which is for all intents, a good thing. Secondarily, if you work at a large enough resolution (like m e and my crazy 1200 dpi) this also means you can zoom in at a crazy degree and do one-pixel detail work that is pretty impossible to do in real life, unless you work at a huge canvas and/or have the steady hands of surgeon. Speaking of this, you should know that most comic artists work in canvases two or three times bigger than the printed result. An a4 printed page's original is a3 at least most of the time. There's two reasons for this: one is that this way when you shrink down for printing, details become minute and errors cannot be seen anymore. Most artists like this effect (I like it too). The other is more psychological: the original for an artist must be BIG so you can hang it on a wall or sell it and it must look like a real piece of art. I don't get this psychological effect and I don't really think my originals are amazing pieces of art worth a million or anything. I have them all stacked on one shelf in my bookcase. When I am in lack of time for a project, I have been known to work at print res (meaning, an a4 page will be printed as a4) and I don't think my work loses anything for it.

But this is a problem in digital art for me, because I can zoom so much I never know when to stop detailing. This picture for example, is a bit overdone perhaps. A good thing to do is to decide internally before you start working at a picture at what the smallest pen size you're going to use will be. This is made with pens all the way down to 0.5 which is overkill for any print version for a 1200dpi image, heh. A good place to stop is 1.0 or even 2.0 if you're not doing an establishing shot panel. Remember: from one point and onwards, not even the sharpest eye can see the detail work you did nor will they even care to try.

So a few words about comic tone, which I use a lot sometimes, and not at all at others, heh. Manga Studio is great for it, it's one of the biggest selling points, I guess. As this piece doesn't have any applied I'll show you how I handle it over a drawing eric did:



And here's the tones I put on it:



Again this is quite overkill but I was trying to help eric with options for toning. Again though this might seem like a regular grayscale pic at 72dpi that internet images display, it is made out of pure binary bitmap black and white at the original res and will print perfectly without any gray tones and/or moire patterns.

A lot of people prefer flat tone that says 'comic book'. I really like rubbing out white from a flat tone to shape volume better, it's the funnest thing for me and I'd do it professionally for other people's tone if they hired me, heh. Though it's usually a big no-no to put one comic tone over another, I really couldn't care less. Pile it on, I say!

So that's that as far as 'how does Helm draw with his Cintiq' goes. Would you like to see more Process posts? I could do one about a full page, with all the formal considerations that go in making a sequence of events flow, now that I've sorta covered the actual craftsmanship of drawing. Your voice will be my guide.

-Helm


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DER PROZESS

Click click click for huge privacy-shattering version!

This is where the magic happens!

I am easily the most ghetto comic artist I've met in Greece. I don't even have a proper drawing table. That's right, I draw hunched over a pad I place on my lap, sitting in that torn chair. It's a hilarious story, I'm sure I'm going to laugh my way to the hospital for back surgery when I'm 45.

Pay no attention to knives, they'll be explained later on. Let's treat this like a mid-90's FMV adventure game and just click on that toolbox hotspot right now.


(if you actually clicked there for real, I applaud your instincts!)




This is all the comic artist needs in my humble opinion. Let's see, we have an antique chess piece cardboard box that belonged to cartoonist dad for Karma boost. Rubber erasers (4). Mechanical plotting pencil and extra bits. Whiteout for erasing bad inking judgment. If you cannot see it, it never happened. Itty bitty nosed Faber Castel pigment markers. These are pretty much my sole tool when I do traditional comic work. Yes, every curvy, variable-width line in all the comics I've posted so far had been faked with a .01 pigment marker. That's just how my brain works. Or worked, as it were, since then I've bought the beauty next to it, a wonderful little Pentel Indian ink brush which serves me well. Also pictured are replacement inks for it since I go quite heavy duty on them. Last but not least, a screwdriver. Men are not men if they do not have tools, and I am a man, hence I have tools.

I will cover the digital end of making comics much later on. I am nowadays pretty much all digital. All of me, I live in cyberspace and I am made out of (50) bright Greek polygons and/or wireframe depending on the processing power of your 8-bit computer.

How I work is this. First I do nothing for a few days and wait for an idea to come. Surely, it does, usually when I am half-asleep or in the shower. The idea can be really simple, usually one line. Let's go with the very first comic, Babis. The idea was 'man is outmoded by creepy pursuers, they go after his uncle inexplicably instead'. Then without touching a paper yet, I try to exhaust in my mind the bits of interest that could be the dressing for this central idea. If I don't have about 4 or 5 of them, the idea then is thrown in the 'perhaps a three panel strip instead' pile and I wait around more for a better idea to come.

Oh wait, let's instead go with spaceman since I happen to have his doodles scanned already.

So when I think the idea is worth it, I brainstorm the jokes and make a little thumbnail of the page and divide it into strips/panels and try to work on the rhythm. This is pretty much how one looks like:


As you can see sometimes the panels don't end up even so some restructuring has to go on. Also pictured are doodles of the head of the protagonist. I was struggling with a coherent style at the beginning of making these as you can see.

Then comes the most important step I've found in making a humorous comic page: I tape this to the wall next to the computer and I just wait a few days. I look at it and the more I look at it the more I realize where the errors in pacing are. People might think I'm lazing around not doing my job in these couple of days but I am, I really am (lazy)!

After the minor corrections I pencil the page on a big A3 board on cheap printer paper (I never found use for glossy, expensive paper. I like seeing the grain in my inking, personally). Again, this gets taped to the wall and stared at for a day. The pencilling takes anything from 4 hours to 8 hours, depends how much work there is to it and how many errors and therefore backtracking, are included.

After a day, and probably rapidly approaching the end of the week's deadline, the inking starts. I don't have any examples of penciled but not inked work from that era for a very simple (ghetto) reason: I don't use a lightbox. I ink right on the pencils, and then I erase the pencils. Madness, heresy! Don't you even love your own work, Helm? I hear the cries. I do, but I'm not obsessive about it. I don't care to leave penciled pages since I never really planned to showcase the stages or sell them or anything. I believe the 'pencil page, then inked on lightbox' is mostly the result of the industry process of American Superhero comics where the two people are different. As an indie creator I don't see the reason to get a boner over my own pencils, so erased they are once inked over. I do have a lot of pencil only pages from when I started inking digitally, but nowadays I do even the pencils on the computer so there's not even much of that left. I will post a few examples later on in the blog's life anyway.

So, the inking. It's pretty much the least interesting creatively and most zen part of the process. I know what textures and effects I want to achieve most of the time so there's not much of me sitting around stumped going on. If I were a professional in America in the mid-80's I guess they'd hire me as an inker most of all, as I believe it to be easy and mechanical a process. It just takes a long time. About 6-8 hours depending on content. Most times I spread the inking out to two 4 hour segments over two days. The reason is simple: after about 4 hours of artistic work I find my brain turns to mush and I no longer am able to make sound artistic calls. As I said in inking not a lot are included, but then you go and try to improv ink a face you had left vague in the penciling stage and... the result really illustrates what I mean with 'brain mush'. Reach for the whiteout. Erase. If you can't see it, it never happened.

So optimally this whole process is done about a day before deadline. I then do the lettering, which I find boring and unrewarding work since most of the time the comment I get is either "why don't you use a computer to do the lettering? Sometimes I can't make out what you're saying" or "why do you use lowercase and not just ALL UPPERCASE LIKE I AM USED TO FROM READING COMICS WHEN I WAS 8 YEARS OLD. I FAIL TO SEE HOW THIS LOOKS LIKE THE CHARACTER IS SHOUTING ALL THE TIME". *sigh* I guess it's also underwhelming for me because I make a lot of spelling errors (even with spellchecker and whatnot) and it's very amateurish to see these go to print. Blame my editor for not uh, bothering to read my pages! Anyway, all spelling errors to these have been fixed for the greek paperback edition.

I then scan and digitally fix whatever I messed up in the inking stage. This is usually relatively painless and amped by the nearing-competition excitement. I then at last turn the page from grayscale to an one-bit bitmap. I do this by running Levels on the page and settling the left sensor to 136 and the right one to 138. Nice and clean, no grays left. I preview the page with auto-AntiAlias by photoshop at 33% zoom and if it all seems okay, I send it to the e-mail address of the editor. No need for personal contact, I don't even have to leave my home. Paper comes out, nobody reads my comics, repeat from the top!

So that's it! Do comment and tell me if you'd like to see more behind the scenes stuff on the blog later on (like how it is to draw completely digital on Cintiq and how it is to use a black cat under the table as a heater for my legs (pictured in the first one, if you pay close attention)!

-Helm


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