process

Today I want to talk a little about my process (if you can really call it that).  I'm not  saying this is the way one should work. This is merely how I work.

It all starts off in one of my many sketchbooks (See image for example).

I have somewhere around 8 sketchbooks. They all have different bindings, different paper types, and different page sizes. This is important for me because I find that some days I draw much better in one kind of sketchbook than another. I don't know why that is. For example, yesterday I just could not work out a panel in my 10" x 12' book. So I grabbed my 7" x 10" recycled paper sketchbook (see image) and bam! The panel came together.

I begin with a general idea of the page layout. Then I sketch each panel out. My drawings tend to be very rough at this stage. Sometimes I will dedicated one page to a panel. Sometimes I will bang out a whole page on a tiny note-pad, and sometimes I will go through half of a sketchbook trying to get one action pose just right. There is not really a cohesive system for this. I will often have each panel for a page in a different book. I am in no way organized. But I can somehow remember where I drew each thing. My biggest problem is that sometimes I lose track of the sketchbook itself. It will typically appear right in front of my face 3 hours later and I am left to ponder how I could have missed it. (I do not recommend working this way. I hear organizational skills are a good thing to have).  The image below is a prime example of just how rough my pages can be. This a small note-pad.

I then scan everything into my computer at 72 dpi. I bring those images into a 300dpi Photoshop file and re-arrange each panel until I am satisfied with the layout. Sometimes this will match what I originally had in mind. Sometimes it becomes its own thing. 

I then create a finished drawing of the entire page. This is the point at which I will grab any photo reference that I might need. I have found that my work gets very stiff I start out with reference. I try to figure things out for myself first. If I really cannot figure it out, or I do not have knowledge about it, I look it up. For example, I do not have enough knowledge about cars to just pull a corvette out of my ass and throw it on paper. I would never try. I would draw a car-like thing as a place holder, and then pull reference and re-draw the car like thing as a corvette. I am fairly comfortable drawing things I am familiar with without reference. (Illustrators tend to have very strong feelings about use of photo reference. I feel stifled by it, so I try to avoid using it. I would rather try to logic it out or look around and draw from life. I do this frequently with hands. I will sketch a sketch of my own hand before I will look up hand images on google. That being said if you like photo reference, use it! Use whatever tools will maximize the quality of your work.)


To finish a page, I paint it digitally, throw in some texture, and drop in the dialogue and sound effects.  Here are two examples of a finished piece. PLEASE NOTE: These images are not from the comic. These are just two examples of my work.

Breakin' it DOWWWWN!

I found a comic I made a while ago while I should have been paying attention in Biochem

It's been quite of a few weeks since I've shifted from strictly writing the comic, to blogging and creating the website. In this interval, I've discovered some aspects are coming along far more easily. I'm certain a more computer-literate person would probably run into less difficulty. However, I've only ever taken one course that involved some degree of computer competency, and have been pleased to learn nothing further. Subjectivity established, I've gauged the difficulty of each task from 1 to 5 (1 being crotch-punchingly difficult, and 5 easy, perhaps breezy even):

Creating and updating a blog: 5

-A blogger account can be created and updated in just a few adjacent clicks from your gmail account. Images are pasted with fairly good resolution, and the posting application is almost a clone of MS Word.

Using a Twitter account effectively: 1

-I'm certain Twitter can be utilized to our advantage, but so far I've only used it to tag blog updates. I've begun following people of interest, but I get to nervous to actually comment or retweet anything. More or less, I need to use or more aggressively than a casual dalliance. 

Choosing and purchasing web space from a provider: 4

- If you do your research, this is actually pretty easy and painless. After comparing and contrasting a few different providers, I chose iPage and was able to register our domain and webspace within minutes. The only complication occurred when Wordpress would not recognize our URL. Luckily, iPage has an awesome support page and it was resolved overnight.

Editing and customizing a new web site: 2

-Wordpress is a great bit of software, but sheer inexperience is making for slow progress. Plugins are pretty necessary for experimenting with themes without screwing up the current web page. It's come to a point where I'm chipping away piece-by-piece every night work, and I'm hoping this will be a "3" by the end of the week.

Sadly, I have a day job.

This is the hair I would have if I would not get fired for it (Please note that this image is NOT representative of myself. Please see the header for an accurate representation of the artist). Unfortunately,  I would. Get fired, that is.

Anyway, I came to the interwebs to discuss comic-related matters today.

I would be delighted if I could somehow dedicate all of my time to "After" and not find myself homeless. I have a day job. I need a day job. I have learned to work around having a day job. I pour all of my free time into this web-comic. 

Time management, like everything else associated with this project, has been a learning process. If anyone reading this happens to be interested in making his or her own comic on the side I would like to give you the following advice: Do what you can, when you can, as often as you can without becoming burnt out.

A key to keeping myself passionate about this project is making sure I know when to STOP. Quality is very important to me. I don't like doing a half ass job. I especially do not want to do a half ass job with this comic. Every time I sit down to work I keep this mantra in mind, "No wonky panels." I repeat this to myself over and over again.

I do not want to present something to the audience that looks fucking off or odd. Knowing when to put the "pencil" down is  crucial to achieving this goal. If you are feeling frustrated or tired when you are working on something, how much are you actually considering what you are creating? If you are like me, the focus becomes pushing the work out. When I work this way I am not working intelligently. I make mistakes and the quality of my efforts suffer. I prefer to work when I am into it. I stop when I begin to question my own decision making abilities.


QUALITY has been the most FRUSTRATING part of creating a web comic. I have pages of work that I created many moons ago that the world will never see (and that I will soon have to redraw), because the quality of the work is not acceptable to me anymore.

I am getting better at this as I go along. It is very difficult to look back at work that I did a month ago and say, "Yes, I still want to use THAT!" I know better now than I did last month...let alone months ago. At some point I have to say, "If I keep re-doing it I will not get anywhere!"  Still, my laundry list of what needs to get a fresh coat of paint seems to be growing all of the time.

I should probably leave something to be said in future posts...Thank you for visiting our blog. Please  continue to follow us. Our comic will be out next month. If you would like to contact Bryant or myself, please e-mail us at After.comic@gmail.com. Thank you!

WE'RE NEW AT THIS!

I need a haircut. Badly. My head more or less looks like a small family of ducks nesting (as they are wont to do). I've put it off for quite some time because, having had my mom cut my hair exclusively up until this point,  I've never gone to a hair salon. Yesterday was open enough that I could have easily had that taken care of, but my efforts fell tragically short.

My Sundays are usually scheduled for getting things accomplished, but lately that has kept left me too nervous to leave the apartment. Agoraphobia is far too strong a term, because somehow I did find the stones to get out a look for a hair cuttery. What I feel is more of a lingering dread for figuring out something I'm unaccustomed to. The feeling is weak enough in that it allows me to leave the house, but strong enough to imagine walking into a hair-cuttery and witness everyone inside screaming "You have no idea what you're doing!" at me. Suffice to say, I bought a bottle of wine instead and went home to work on the comic.

The reason I'm bringing up this weird anecdote is to present the idea that Katy and I don't know what we're doing with our comic. To clarify, Katy obviously knows how to illustrate, and I have a reasonable enough grasp of the English language to write coherent sentences. In terms of combining those elements in order to make a webcomic, however, we are mostly inexperienced. Very mostly inexperienced. For example, this past week I've been shooting emails out constantly asking how to correct issues I've had with Wordpress and smoothing over details of our Comic Con tables (Side not: iPage has a very useful and expedient system for troubleshooting your website; and if you want both persons involved to sit at the same table in Artist's Alley, you need a FULL TABLE.)

So far, we've been throwing a lot ideas at the wall, and through luck and tenacity a lot of things have stuck and progressed. Simultaneously, running and website and networking for a product are two big things in which we're still feeling around in the dark. NYCC itself is thrusting us into totally uncharted territory, in that we are going to have to push our comic onto relative and/or complete strangers. On account of being new at this, it's also imperative that we try and glean whatever wisdom we can from adjacent artists who have likely been at this karaaazy game much longer than us. Regardless of our diligence, we still have loads to learn.

We don't know what we're doing, and that is more than ok. In spite of our relative inexperience, we've created a work of which we are very proud. After is still in its infancy, but already is encompasses so much of the style and storytelling that I feel are unique to both of our whimsically macabre brains. Had Katy and I simply stuck with repeating what we know how to do, none of these ideas would ever have been brought to light. There is an appreciable comfort in repetition, but moving forward involves breaking the equilibrium and embracing the horror of pioneering the unknown. God, I need to get my ridiculous hair cut...

Cat-a-Clysm!

Its interesting that, as time goes on with a project, there is an increasing amount of complexity as your idea takes form. Currently, I've spent more hours than I'd ever care to trying to figure out why my Wordpress page can't find itself. The day-to-day work for the comic is now a series of updates and emails. It's a sign of progress, because creating a webcomic was at first very, very general and intangible.

Weirdly enough, the bulk of the comic's groundwork was laid during a car ride from Mt. Laurel to Hoboken in late December. If you recall New Jersey during the winter of 2009, it had snowed to a point beyond reason several times. The result of which were road conditions that we had no business driving in. However, we were close, but more so broke friends who needed to take advantage of a carpool back home after the holidays.

Sometimes you get locked into a situation wherein, no matter how well you know the person, you're stuck together for so long you can run out of things to talk about. It's important to take advantage of these moments. Rather than rot on our butts and play the lethargic fiddle, Katy and I talked about the comic for nearly a solid two hours. It had only been a few weeks since I had written the original comic script, but we were both so ridiculously zazzed an entire volume of plotline shot out of our minds and brains.

A year ago, a chattered idea between two friends has become enough illustration and dialogue to exhibit a full length table (we upgraded to a full table!) about which we're running. Less than ten years ago, Lous C.K. and Marc Maron were unduly uncelebrated comedians that were no longer on speaking terms; and yet tonight I died laughing watching both of them portray themselves on Louie. Longer ago still, people had to crowd around a black and white TV at a specified time to observed miraculously grainy images of man's first skip on the moon. Now, as of yesterday morning, we can few hi-res images of the Martian landscape at our own convenience. I've never been fond of the idea of irreducible complexity. As I see it, your mind just has to be open enough to acknowledge moments when there was so much potential for change.

Unrelated doodle, and related news

Good news, everyone!
We have officially upgraded to a FULL table at NYC comic-con!
Bryant and I have been very busy lately. We are getting ready to launch our site and we have been preparing for comic-con. It has been a little bit of work, but this experience has been very rewarding. I have learned quite a bit while working on this comic. Stay tuned for next week's post to discover what I have learned!