There are many things to do here. Please be aware that most of them--in this part of the tree--are PG. But I swear a lot.
If you're here by mistake you can always go home
It would seem that, with so much bad art out there, it's an act of madness to encourage more of it. That is, it would seem like madness if anybody were charging for it.
At no time in history has there been more people trying to express themselves in more ways and have been more accessable by everbody else. Was that last sentence gramatical? Who cares. You get the gist of it, and I got to use the word "more" three times in a sentence, which is what I was going for. And all these lunatics are doing it for free.
I have never been more thoroughly entertained than I have been in the last five years. By lunatics who are giving it away! And they are all united by one thing: Cafe Press. No, that's wrong, I didn't mean that I meant to say Keenspace. No, I didn't mean to say that, either.
They are all united in their desire to tell a story. Once Upon a Time. It might be steampunk elves, freaked out gays, magical girls, inept space captians, more magical girls, cruel dudes with fantastic powers, even more magical girls (c'mon, guys, give it a rest), college students, turn of the century vacationers, or Just Plain Folks.
So what's my excuse. I have a story to tell, and I figure it's my turn to "give back". Create some "content". Cast my bread on the waters, or my swine before pearls, or whatever.
I've been testing what I've been laughingly calling my "art" on my sons and my brother. I think my sons are interested in an academic way ("ah, so *this* is what the Old Man does when we're with Mom. Gee, Dad, don't you think it would be more healthy to go out and get hammered every night..."), but Brother Rich knows where I'm going with this. I think.
So the Story of the End of Life as We Know it begins further up the Web Tree, at the Index. I am going to keep notes on techniques and effects.
I have a very small collection of VR and RL tools. The most important of all of them is time. The next, is patience. The last is experience.
Throwing this sucker together takes time. More time that I had ever thought possible. Once a week updates now seem heroic in my eyes. There are madmen out there who do this every stinking day. For free. Madness!
Patience, for an arogant son of a bitch like myself, does not come easy. Things come easy to you when you're in the top 98% percentile. And I spent most of my high school years hunched over art paper, churning out picture after picture of robots, spaceships, cities, and planets. Then I let it all lay fallow. For about twenty years.
It may seem disingenuous on my part to suggest that experience is important. When you're pushing 50, it's easy to say that experience is important. All I want to say here is, experience is important no matter how old you are. Write what you know about. Sure, you might have a character who's an Orc, and who's experienced an Orc? But we've all experienced a bully. So what do you want to say, from your experience, about this bully/orc? You're not writing about rocket engines here, you're talking about how it felt to be pushed down in the schoolyard. By a big kid with no hair, green skin, and long, cruel tusks. You get the idea.
I was getting to that. Here's a list of Real Life tools that I use:
For those who are interested, here's a short list of the software that I use:
The comic creation process, traditionally, breaks down into four steps:
The step that's the most fun, of course, is step 1. Inking and Lettering, from what I can see, is soul draining detail work.
There's a whole industry built around step 4, so we won't go into it here.
So I don't do step 2 or step 3. Not the way their traditionally done, anyway.
Professional comic artists will pencil a page, put down tracing paper, ink over that, and then apply the lettering to the tracing, and then scan the trace. Then they continue to fiddle with the image once it's scanned.
Madness. It's like nobody ever heard of "layers" before.
Once I'm satisfied with the penciling, I scan that sucker in. From there, I either go to the Gimp or Inkscape to do the "inking". Putting the scanned image in the bottom layer, I go over it again on a second layer. This gives me an "undo" capability that you just don't have with a pen and tracing paper.
So...when do I use the Gimp, and when do I use Inkscape? I use the Gimp when the image is in it's FINAL SIZE. I use the Gimp for shading and lettering. I use Inkscape when I'm not sure what the final size of the picture will be. Vectors allow me to make the image arbitrarily large or small with no loss of detail (within limits, of course).
Look no further than these guys for your lettering typefont needs. I use their free "Gorilla Milkshake" font for most of my lettering.
This is going to take several tries to get right, so please bear with me. The probelm is not with the Gimp, it's with my technical writing ability.
If you don't know what a layer is read on. If you do, you can skip to the next section.
A layer is a piece of transparency you can draw on. You can have as many as you want to, and you can stack them in any order. You can make transparencies "invisible", so you can see it's effect (or lack thereof) on the transparencies above and below it. You can do other things with transparencies, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
If you don't know what a path is, read on. If you do, you can skip to the next section.
A path is a series of points, connected by lines. A path can be open (e.g. a line) or closed (e.g. circle or polygon). The important thing to remember about paths is you can convert a selection into a path, and a path into a selection. You can also stroke (i.e. run a drawing tool along) a path.