STRIPS 4

It's been a busy summer break for me in comics but I'm doing a pretty good job staying on track.  I got my third draft hard copy of Public Education and I think I'm happy with the book now.  It's far from perfect, but it is as good as it will be getting.  When I begin working on P.E. as school starts back up I'm going to focus on lettering a little more clearly.  The other thing I'll need to work on is making sure my inking is thick enough to not be lost when scanning them into the computer.

Awful Lot has gone live as planned, and I've got a fairly safe window of 8 finished strips ahead of my weekly schedule.  I've scripted ahead a good twenty pages and plan to spend some more time building a little more of a safety window there.  The farther out I can script the easier it will be to tie together loose threads and keep everything tonally similar. 

I've done next to nothing on plotting next years project, I need to start collaborating more with Timothy on those plans.  He's finishing up work on issue 5 of Third World and soon I'll be starting the editting and printing process of that collection.  Also on the horizon for Third World is working through issue six's script and giving that one more ironing out before Tim gets into pencilling that issue.

So lots of work has been completed and there's always more to do, I'm starting to learn that's comics.

-Jon O

This weeks Comic Curve was going to be about something else, but today I just want to focus on how fun it is to ink.  I watched a great video on inking by Francis Vallejo  that was really inspiring.  He used a reference of a woman in a kimono and talked through his inking process of said woman using a nib, brush, and then an ink wash.  I learned quite a bit from the video, but the coolest thing was just to watch a better artist than I work through their process.

The video came at an opportune time, as I am close to behind on my summer schedule for Awful Lot and needed to get a page inked tonight.  I've been working on my inking in Awful a lot, and seeing a pro was a real kick in the pants to get even better with my work.

I also finally finished a character sketch of Shock Watson I did for another aspiring comic creator Neil Cambre.  You can check out his webcomic here.  I tried a few things with low levels of success, but I had a great time working with someone elses character and just trying a big pin up style picture. 

My biggest problem with inking the Watson picture was thinking of how the lightning from his hand would effect the shadows on his body.  I'm a complete noob at lighting, I think the legs work ok, the arms are super wonky, and the helmet works decently well.  The torso doesn't look too bad to me either but there I used the blacks more for definition than a true cast shadow.  Maybe that should be my focus when spotting blacks starting out.  Or maybe I should address the acknowledged lighting problem.

There's always a dozen new things to work on.  Until next time.

-Jon O

I got in my rough draft of the printing of Public Education and for the most part I'm pretty happy.  Yes I am going to be doing another round of edits, but there was nothing I did that was book breaking for the first printing.  That's a step up from my first printing of Mera.

I enjoy the layout of the book and pages, 9x7 was definitely the right choice.  The book feels weighty and takes a good bit of time to read.  Each of the pages seems reproduced well, aside from one strip that I knew had some problems (water damage on the original).

I am going to be changing several things in the book though.  There are a few little things throughout the book that need to be fixed.  The dedication page came through a little digitized and I need to figure out how to fix that.  I'm going to do one more edit of the foreward and afterward.  The strip "Night Pickles" showed up on two different pages somehow and I need to switch that out for one of the other 3 panel pages that got kicked out.  A couple pages have a bit of the comic strip title off the page, and I need to lower and shrink those comics.

There are a couple other little things I'm going to change just because I think they'll bother me if I let them remain.  A word here or there that I think should be changed.  A few teaching tips that I've since rewritten and will hopefully be more enjoyable.  And a panel or two where I want to change a little thing.  For example in "Pinworms" the boys pupils are facing toward the mud puddle, I'm going to use a little white out and move those to face his butt.  I don't think the joke is clear until the Jonny is more clearly looking at his butt.  Just pointing to it is not enough.

It still feels great to be so close, I'll have this book done before we know it.  Thanks for reading!

-Jon O