Learning To Dream, Chapter 4, Page 5

I’ve discovered something during this little experiment. I love shading. I know it sounds weird, but it’s by far my favorite part of this whole process.

1. Check script for what I thought might be a good picture for this panel.

2. Oh, yeah! Dinosaur! It’s one of the animals I can draw that look halfway good!

3. I don’t like the dialog, have to redo that.

4. Aw, crap. That messes up the next page. Well, I’ll just make something up.

5. Huh. Dinosaur toes look funny.

6. Inking. I dislike inking. It’s like a magic amplification wand that picks out all the worst parts of my lack of skill and saves that, then does away with anything I might have done kinda well.

7. Scan it in, clean up all the ‘artifacts’ from the process. Who the hell keeps putting fractile patterns along every line I make? Why do my straight lines (that I used a ruler with and everything) suddenly bend? And why, dear god, do all my heads which don’t look so bad in real life, suddenly slop over so are horribly lopsided?!?

8. Clean it up more. Dear Spaghetti Monster, I missed that part. Run blur and cartoon filters as they hide some of my worst sins. At least they save me some time.

9. Begin with assembling panels. Find other things that need to be cleaned.

10. Once page is more or less layed out, begin colors. Find yet more things that need fixing. Decide ‘fuck it’ at this point.

11. Dialog and word bubbles.

12. Shade and highlight. Ah! It’s amazing how something so simple makes things look SO MUCH BETTER! I end up putting this on it’s own lair, just so I can turn it off and on. “See! Look how awesome that makes it look!”

13. Run blur (if needed), Cartoon, and softglow (if in dreamland) filters.

14. Save the whole thing to PNG. Run PNGgauntlet, which proceeds to crush the crap out of the files.

15. Upload to flickr and post up here. Hoorah! I’ve done it.

I’m sure that I’m doing it the hard way. (I’ve often considered changing the name of this to “Doing It The Wrong Way”.) It’s all a learning experience.