I thought it would be fun to share a bit of the process of the creation of today’s Thanksgiving themed comic. To view the pictures, you can click them to enlarge.
The Idea
I had yet to do a holiday themed comic this year. I had written a long Halloween story arc for Life…after Death but with exterior forces halting the completion of the “Order and Chaos” storyline, I decided to push that idea back until October of 2014. I assure you, I will complete the current LaD storyline. You know..life happens.
I really wanted to do at least a one off for this holiday and I was a dry well. Nothing was coming to me. I lacked a bit of creative juice, well a lot but I am starting to fill the well again. I was thinking about Thanksgiving and I was having a conversation between Corndog and Egg while in the shower this past Sunday. Some of the best ideas come from the shower and if you let them just ramble some odd things follow. Most of them were too wild and I believed this was one of them. I finally decided to write the kernel of the idea Monday afternoon. Yes, sometimes this is my script process (actually mostly).
Tuesday rolled around and I completely dismissed the idea. There would be no Thanksgiving comic this year. I received a brief but nice email from a friend of mine that night and I felt a spark from my muse. And by Wednesday morning I was determined to have a comic up for my friends to enjoy. I broke out the iPad, opened up Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and thumb nailed and idea.
When I know the dialogue might be a bit wordy, I go ahead and drop it into the Comic Book app and do a run of the script. This process takes a bit because the application is not very forgiving and crashes often. I actually had the whole storyline for the Battle of Plymouth Rock in my head but there was no way I would have enough room to fit the entire story in so I decided to steal bits of what Corndog says and just use those. I decided to cut all of Egg’s dialogue and dropped a few sentences out of Dave’s reaction. Yes, Dave. Initially, I didn’t want to include Roger because while the current story is progressing on the website I did not want to use him in any other story. Ultimately, I decided that he is easier to draw.
If you notice the word balloons in the first panel don’t match the characters and that is because after I decided to cut most of Egg’s dialogue, I needed Corndog to be in a position closer to Roger as to not obscure Egg while he was speaking so I shifted Egg to the left position.
After that the process became easy. Just re-sketch a bit then do a layer of solid ink.
This is the color layer. This is actually a combination of about eight layers but unfortunately with Autodesk on iPad at 1536 x 2048 you are only allowed to have six layers open at a time so once I completed the base color layer I would have to drop the next color layers immediately on top of it.
The next layer is the Shading layer. The layer isn’t really necessary but I like how it looks on my style of art so I use it with everything.
I drop all the layers together and go back and grab my standard Corndog and Egg back ground layer and combine them.
At this point I go back to the Comic Book app and refit the word balloons and do a bit of revision. I also pray that the balloons are still active and have not deleted themselves when I exited the app previously, which happens often. At the last minute I added the “Grandma” bit and then saved that and sent it back to Autodesk and opened it at 768 x1024 to clean up the tails of the word balloons and do final touch ups on some of the colors.
I started this comic at about 5pm and finished at 10:30pm. Granted, I do take a lot of breaks so I wasn’t working the entire time. I hope you enjoyed the process and you can also see the final product below for comparison.
I hope everyone had a happy holiday or just a great day in general. Let me know if this behind the scenes look was enjoyable. I would love to hear your thoughts.
C. A. Ostrout 