Since last October (2008), I've been writing and illustrating
1PT.Rule, a thrice-weekly webcomic, at the design-entertainment site
36 Point. At the time of this writing I'm nearing 60 strips, which feels like a lot, until you look at
Penny Arcade or
PVP who have ten years under their belts.
The process of creating the comic usually takes about 2 hours, though it is longer when I add an extra row (or
five), or color. Originally the strip started out in full color, but even at only three strips a week that workload was more than my life allowed. After a brief stint in two colors, the strip settled into black and white, where it remains, comfortably, to this day.
Here's how a strip gets started:
Sometimes I will, actually, just jump right into Photoshop and start typing, but when there's time I find things work out the best when I drop it into a sketchbook first. Above, you can see my notes as I tinkered with the number of panels in the layout, eventually settling on two half-length panels to establish characters and handle long dialog over three panels, with the middle left open to draw out the timing.
The dialog is just scribbles at this point, but you can see little numbers next to each chunk. I do this when scripting so I can easily reference where each bit will go in the final panel without wasting time writing it out over and over. Then I open up my Photoshop file and start typing. I have a template file for all of my strips that I open and "Save As…" with a new number. I work at full size, 300 dpi, and then flatten the image at the end, resize to 72 dpi (900 pixels wide), and Save for Web. I always keep my high-res file, because I think all webcomics creators want to make books someday, and low-res screen graphics won't cut it for that.
Once the text has been typed in and roughly placed, I use my Wacom Intuos tablet (the 4.5" x 6.5" model) to start roughing in characters. Sometimes I get a little caught up and spend too much time here. That's great in the beginning, especially if you are trying to get used to your tablet. But if you're like me and you spend a few months drawing the same characters nine to twelve times a week, you'll tend to develop a shorthand here that can save you time. On this strip, since the characters move very little, I duplicated most of the elements in the Roughs layer from panel to panel to save time.
Then it's time to ink. Digitally, of course. I set my Roughs layer's opacity down to about 20%, or whatever feels right, so when I draw over it on a new layer titled Inks, I can clearly see which is which. In this strip, the table, Munnys, and art supplies don't change, so I duplicated and repeated that artwork from panel to panel.
Occasionally I'll be so strapped for time that I'll duplicate character art, but this is only in extreme cases of me running long for some reason, or having too much real work on my plate. Some artists get away with using "sprites," or pre-drawn libraries of character art they can drag and drop into their strips. I find that repellent — if you don't want to draw your own strip, either hire an illustrator or just write funny blog posts!
To do the inks I use an elliptical brush in Photoshop, set at about a 45° angle (about 1:30 on a clock). I hated my artwork in the strip until I started using two weights of brush, 10 pixels and 20 pixels, which you can flip easily between on your keyboard using the "[" and "]" keys. Now I use those weights for all the character work and sometimes drop into larger brushes for foreground and background items. Here's the finished inks:
