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How to Draw a Daily Comic, or Die Trying

Submitted by Chris Watkins on August 3, 2009 - 14:06

What follows is an abbreviated version of a post-mortem I wrote up after recently completing my 30-day daily comic challenge. I hope the things I learned about my own process are useful to others out there. You can follow the chain of posts I've made about this challenge, starting with the first, followed by a second day update, and a mid-point update.

As I worked my way through the second half of the challenge, I found my discoveries for improving speed and efficiency plateau--maybe inevitable--but I also found myself backsliding a bit as I grew acclimated to the schedule. I wound up working five or six hours a night several times during the second half, while the first half typically saw me finishing in an average of three.

I was thrilled to be getting the work done, but there were a couple times I nearly threw in the towel simply because I could barely stay conscious. Knowing that I had made my challenge public, and had great folks cheering me on, was pretty much all that kept me going at 2am, when my head was bobbing like those guys from Night at the Roxbury.

Aside from the techniques and process improvements I've learned and blogged about already, I've also gained three truly key learnings:

  1. I can, when needed, successfully juggle my strip on a daily comic schedule with a very busy family and a very busy day job, but
  2. It's not sustainable, unless I want to sacrifice my health, my safety (sleep-deprived driving is not good), or my family life (there's only so long you can skimp on quality time before it has negative consequences).
  3. I must not take the time I have for granted. Given the delicate balance I've just described, every minute counts. It's all too easy to get complacent, and let things slide (I have all night, I can take my time...).

I could also say:

  • It's vital to have a rest day. Saturdays became more valuable for the extra sleep I could get than the time I could spend updating the site, etc.
  • Character design and careful selection of art style can make a huge difference in speed, although
  • Nothing beats day-after-day repetition to make the drawing flow.
  •  
  • When working digitally, one should invest in RAM! Nothing killed my rhythm more than having to wait five minutes for a file to open or save.
  • Artist Drew Baker had a tip for computer overheating on a tablet PC: Create a custom power profile that leverages most of the settings of "power saver" mode, but with screen brightness turned up.

I thought it might be enlightening, or at least entertaining, to outline my working process today, after the challenge (and highlight how it's changed):

  1. I keep a notebook, as mentioned in a prior post, for collecting all gag/story ideas whenever they arise. I've settled on a hardback Moleskine notebook as my master note repository, and a small flexible notebook (thanks, Samantha!) I keep in my pocket for capturing notes on the fly, which will later be transferred to the master notebook.
  2. During lunch at the day job, or in the early evening, I refine the gag in question and pencil the strip on notebook paper (and actually in ballpoint pen, since the inability to erase helps me avoid overrendering, and the black lines show up better in the scanning step). Previously, I handled penciling directly on my tablet PC, but I've found doing it on paper gives me better ability to see the "big picture" while drawing, and allows me to make better use of pockets of dead time for the task.
  3. Once I'm ready to dig into the meat of the work (late at night during the challenge, but now early mornings) I "scan" the pencils (actually taking a photo with a digital camera and transferring to my PC, right now).
  4. Next, I make any changes to the pencils in Photoshop, and letter the strip (with a homebrewed font and hand-drawn balloons, which I've found best for speed and flexability).
  5. Finally, I start inking, usually at 50% zoom (balancing my ability to see more of the picture with closeness to counteract Photoshop-tablet jitter). When I plan to have gray lineart in a background, I'll draw it on a separate layer (see the next step for why). This is my longest single step, and hasn't changed much.
  6. I fill in blacks and grays next. I try to restrict myself to a max of two fill grays: 40% and 20% (and if I've made some gray lineart, that goes 60%). I used to handle grays by filling with black and changing layer opacity, but now I use a Color Overlay filter, so that I can control what happens when gray overlaps gray.
  7. I'll grab a copy of the black inks, the grays, and the word balloons (Copy Merged helps consolidate many layers in the source file to three here) and paste them into a new file which I convert from Grayscale to RGB mode (no sense in working in RGB mode before this, where it would just slow the computer down), so that I can change the gray layer (via another simple Color Overlay filter) to sepia. My prior process was, in a nutshell, more manual, and hard to describe, since I was still feeling my way through it.
  8. Last step is saving out the strip large, as a TIF (for future printing), and small, as a GIF, for the site. I tried, under good advice from reader "sktiZoman", to set up Photoshop actions to handle both this and the previous strip, but I haven't figured out how to make it flow smoothly without getting caught on the more manual parts of the process. I'll keep trying.
  9. All done! 

I thought I'd intuit more technical tips for speeding the drawing as I worked through the thirty strips, but the reality I had to accept was that, given the style in which I've chosen to work, it takes as long to draw these characters and settings as it takes. 

Does anyone have tips or stories of similar experiences to share?