Work has begun…
Okay, so I’ve finally started this weekend’s comic. I’ve got the page planned out, and sketches done. Actually – and I did this last year for a bit – I’ve done most of the preliminary work on a separate sheet of paper.
I don’t care what you’ve been led to believe: it’s hard drawing on the tablet. Parallax, and the pen’s stubby end make it difficult to actually track your drawing.
Initially, I denied these problems, thinking that I just had to adjust. A year and a bit later, I’m still having issues. I’m starting to think that the best option really IS to scan things in before you work on them digitally. Since I don’t have (or want) a scanner around me at the moment, I’ll just make do… but I have been swayed.
Anyway, comic should be up before Monday!
MJ
(Also, check out VG Cats… Scott recently put his Christmas comic up, and man is it ever heart-warming.)
edit: started the lines layer, hated it, restarted… expect delays.
A tablet is the best way to draw. Pen and paper have their virtues to be sure and I damn well wish I could paint with…. you know, paint, but I’ve had my tablet 3 years come may and sure, it’s kinda beat up. (I’ve scratched off most of the original surface thanks to my dyspraxia making me push as hard as if I was chiselling granite and the stylus isn’t too happy either) but the tablet is the best sketching device I’ve ever used. And, unless I am operating under a misaprehension you have a cintiq! That’s even better! You can use real life rulers and french curves when I have to free hand it or cobble together something together in photoshop.
Drawing on a tablet is so easy…. within an hour I can have an inked, coloured picture on deviant art from the time I picked up my stylus. I never ruin my sketches with a bad pen line, I never ruin my lines with a bad wash.
Tablets are great. Everyone should own one.
I spoke out of haste. Haste, and frustration. For making webcomics, or producing any kind of work to be seen online, tablets can’t be beat! They really can’t. With features like pressure-sensitivity and programs like Painter… there are endless possibilities for personal artistic expression.
My exact problem is the actual *drawing* bit of the work. Paper’s consistent size and texture allow for a much greater freedom in my line-art; I hate my digital drawings because the lines are so far from what they would naturally be. If I screw something up, I’m likely to zoom in to 400% to fix it. The results are usually clean… but wrong.
Tablets produce very exact work, with clear lines and a degree of polish that I don’t think can be matched. My Cintiq has allowed me to do things I would NEVER be able to do with paper and markers.
I do most of my work at a relatively high resolution, and – as a result – zooming in to 100% will only show me a tiny portion of my page… a portion too small to effectively give me a sense of scale. I have to hover around 33% to be able to see how my current cell will affect the rest of the page. From that distance, sketching characters is tedious, with fine lines appearing to be dotted. Any parallax that exists (and no matter how hard I try, my left-handedness prevents a proper alignment, so there IS parallax) is only amplified. There is constant zooming in an out, to fill in detail, but – as mentioned before – the result is artificially clean, having no natural flow.
People do amazing work on Cintiqs (and Intuos.. and.. pretty much every other make/model/brand of tablet), so I *know* I’m really just being a whiny kid… but when I look at my sketchbook work and compare it to my digital drawings, I get *very* demoralized.
For colouring, inking, layering… everything *other* than the actual line-drawing… the tablet is an essential tool that I wouldn’t be able to survive without. I just think that there are traditional methods that no pressure sensitivity feature, special pen-tip, or productivity program’s paintbrush arsenal can fully replace.
Thanks for commenting, by the way… I like discussion!
MJ
This is one reason I so enjoy Jayden and Crusader’s 6 panel set up. I can treat each frame like a page of A4, and see the whole thing on screen while I sketch.
I do notice I draw different types of things on screen and on paper and my sketchbooks are full of things I would never come up with working on the screen alone but once I have drawn them on paper to transfer them to the screen isn’t hard. Even without my scanner a rough sketch on paper can open up a new idea that I might explore on screen. But there also things that I would never have done on paper I can do on screen. My backgrounds _need_ photoshop’s pen tool for example. If it weren’t for a pen tool to make my lines all my characters would exist in an infinite, empty white void.
On the practical solution side of things…. you could do thumbnail pages on paper to get the panel layout and block out where people stand, and then go onto the screen when sketching a ‘final’ version. Try it a few times and see if it helps.
It’s actually kind of funny you should mention the whole doing-preliminary-work-on-paper technique. When I first started webcomicking, I was basically transferring pages from my sketchbook to the internet via my tablet. The quality was, y’know, respectable for a rookie. Eventually, I ran out of pre-done pages, and started working strictly on the tablet.
The result was a lack of cohesion between pages, and a dependance on things that I was already comfortable drawing. I wasn’t trying out any new ideas, nor developing my technique. After an unnecessarily long time, I saw how static things had become, and moved back to drawing on paper first, then transferring to digital work.
Unfortunately, a few pages later, I slipped back into my “I just want to draw things ONCE!!” attitude towards comics, and scrapped the whole story-boarding idea. Predictably, there was a decline in quality.
My wildly teeter-tottering patience will end me, of this I am certain. At any rate, I have – since the tirade – had reasonable success with this compromise technique, and will keep it up for as long as possible.