Process

I've been having a bout of writer's block on these comics for the past couple weeks as better explained in Tanked! For today's post I thought I'd show what my drawing process is, cuz I think it's cool when other comic artists do the same.

My art style is incredibly simple, and my dog characters have been drawn and tweaked hundreds of times since about the 7th grade. It all started with a series of hand-drawn comics on notebook paper between my friend Tressa and I, making fun of each other and harming each other's characters in silly ways. Her character was attacked by a rabid doberman, and thus Puppy was born. (I couldn't think of what a doberman looked like on the spot back then, so he's anatomically incorrect but the breed and design of Puppy stuck for years.)

Puppy appeared in the margins of all my homework and even evolved into a fairly large clay sculpture in a high school art class. I developed cats and dogs that resembled my friends and made a few hand-drawn and stapled "comic books" out of them. I have no idea where any of them are now, but those old characters are the bases of Ares, Orion, Brutus, Jack, and Onyxia.

I try to keep my characters breed-specific while remaining cartoony. Not all coat markings make it onto characters if I feel they're "too much" or take away from the character. Here is a sketch version of Ares, who has the most breed-specifics about him.

Sketches are always sloppy and they always start at the nose (I dunno why that is). Ares is a purebred Keeshond, and while this sketch doesn't show it, when I do side-views of him, I try to keep the stop, or the sudden dip in his forehead, that is specific to his breed. In this sketch he could be any kind of furry dog, so the Keeshond-ness will have to come in the coloring.

After I sketch a panel and am satisfied with it, I ink it. Things are still sloppy here but this is where I add in the toes, fur lines, facial expressions and eyebrows, etc.

The next step after inking is erasing. I'm sure there is an easier way to go about this whole process via layers but I can't figure out how to create layers using this Corel Sketchpad program. Not to mention the program crashes about every 15 minutes or so, so things have to be quick. I've tried others like Paintbrush but I just don't like their setup. If Corel would update so the crashing would end, I'd be in heaven.

I zoom in on the drawing and erase as much as I can of the pencil from around the inked bits. Dogs like Jack and Brutus are quick and easy to draw because they're black, or mostly black, so the sloppy pencil is covered up except for around the outside edges (and Brutus's brown patches).

Now comes the coloring. I keep zoomed in and color in Ares based on what he looks like in real life. All of his markings aren't shown because it would make him look too busy. But I try to keep the breed specifics that show he's a Keeshond and not a husky. Keeshonden have "spectacles" around their eyes, which I show in the dark circles on his face. They also have a black tip on their tail. The rest is just shades of gray.

This particularly fugly version of Ares is not only a reminder to spay and neuter, but also shows how his colors are stacked before the finishing touches. I use the marker tool, and what's annoying about it is while the color coverage is nice, I can't pick up the pen because the colors overlap. On his mouth I colored over the inside of his mouth twice. The red doesn't show too well, but there are a few overlapped gray spots. In order to have a uniformly colored dog, like Orion's reddish shade, I have to hold the pen down the entire way across his body. Any big messups that can't be erased result in hitting the undo button, and I have to start over. Same for program crashes. Crashing while coloring is a huge factor in how long it takes for these comics to be done.

Now that he's been colored, I can finish him up with the blender tool to make him look more flowy.

All of the dogs get the blender tool in some form (except for Jack); Brutus gets a shrinked size blender to soften the edges between his black and brown patches, and when I remember to, Orion gets the insides of his ears blended and the black on his back, but recently I've just been making him straight-up red.

After all of this, I add in the words, and then go from panel to panel hitting Print Screen and pasting the pages into Paint. I crop around the image I want and save each panel as it's own document.

Once I'm finally able to post, I arrange them in order in this blog and off to Facebook it gets published!

This whole process takes about 5-6 hours for a multi-paneled comic; the last comic in Tanked! about Baradin Hold took about 3-4 on it's own.

Hopefully I'll be out of this writer's block funk and will be up to speed on regular comics soon!