Wow.

I don’t want to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m still sitting here awestruck that I just drew the above. I totally wasn’t planning to go crazy with the art; I wasn’t even looking particularly forward to churning this one out today (hence it was late), but as soon as I sat down, it just sort of…came out.

I started with Sarah in panel one, and right from the start she turned out exactly like I imagined, darting across the sidewalk with a sort of playful innocence and wonder. Women are pretty difficult to draw right, especially in a minimalistic style, so that was a big motivation booster right there.
Then I did all the backgrounds. I looked at two photographs for reference, but I made a case of it not to trace anything, or even copy it, I wanted to do this all by myself. So I looked at them once, taking in the general layout, and went to work. And it’s…I just can’t believe I really drew that. Everything just felt right.

This is what making comics is all about.

If you want to take a closer look at the art, you can click here to see it in it’s original size, or here for just the background art.

This is the first DD strip that was made completely digitally.
I was watching how Meredith draws Octopus Pie, and I was thinking I’d love to do it all digital like that. So I did. It took forever, but it turned out good. I think I finally got to the point where I can draw my characters just as well with a tablet as on paper. I was surprised at how good Nicole and Sarah looked on the first try. Now I just need to somehow speed up the whole process.

I also ‘fixed’ Nicole. In the past few strips she was starting to look more like a female version of Alphonse. Whenever I’m unclear on how a character should look, I refer to the cast image on the About page. I didn’t realize it when I drew it, but it’s become an invaluable reference for shapes and colors.

I’m always a little nervous when I do another Tom – Sarah comic, because there is not much ‘funny business’ to be had when writing this developing romance. There is just so much juice there, I could probably write a seperate graphic novel with all this. It might be because I’m used to writing a lot of dialog and character development for my games. Despite that, I always try to work in something that will make you smile, like Alphonse not agreeing with Tom ‘monopolyzing’ Sarah.

I had planned to make this trip two bars so I could fit all this information in without it getting crowded. But I decided to cut it down to one bar. And I think it’s a good thing, because it forced me to get creative with the panels to maintain the standard width. The 4th panel ‘bleeding’ off-canvas was literally a last-minute touch to make it pop out a little more.

I am really pleased with how this strip came out. When I sketched out the original draft, I decided to scan it in and ink it digitally. I was skeptical, but it went surprisingly well. But when the comic was basically done, I was like “…meh.” Then I came up with a better layout, so I went back to draw that, and you’re looking at it now. I think I’ll stick with traditional inking, because being the perfectionist that I am, inking digitally takes a lot longer.

If you want, you can check out the first draft here.

I’m going to have to adjust to the new strip size. I still have the measurements for the old template in my head, and I don’t know what was going on when I first inked this strip, but like every line I put down in the last 2 panels came out wrong, so I ended up having to redraw those before I could put it up.

I try to put atleast one joke in every strip, but sometimes, I just want to do something a little different. This is the first of 6 comics I drew during 24 hour comics day, and throughout those strips I’ve played around with some new effects. One was the last panel here (chosen from 2 alternatives), where I try to visualize sensations, something Scott McCloud taught me. I think it’s a very fitting description of what Tom feels at that moment.

Tom is finally making a move, and he may just have stand a good chance…

It’s getting increasingly hard to conjure up some interesting heat for these comments when the story just kind of meanders on, so let me just remark that this comic was probably the fastest ever created (at least for this storyline). Me, in my chronic procrastination, put off making this comic in favor of playing Bioshock non-stop and ignoring all pseudo-important work until 9 PM on Sunday night. With only 1,5 hour to go before the 24 finale, I had to work fast. Im also working on a little insight into how a comic comes about, so I was documenting every step of the process aswell. So I think this comic had the shortest production time seen in a long time. I love it.

And that was actually a pretty big comment.

Tom meets Alex, one of the 3 new regular castmembers.
It took me a while to get this comic done. Usually I come up with an idea, play around with it a bit, maybe sketch it out, and then often I largely restructure it to perfect the flow or punchline, and that’s the final comic. This one it just didn’t feel 100% right in the end, but I had to make it to introduce Alex, so I just tweaked it a lot until I was happy with it.

Looks like everyone is settling in nicely at Bruce’s bar. Well ok maybe not everyone. But are they aware of the looming danger? Sinister forces seem to be at work here…

It has been a while since Tom was involved in ‘ladies business’, so he’s a little rusty. And on a night like this, I don’t think you can blame him. Lucky for him it seems this girl can appreciate his quirks…

I don’t often draw realistic these days, so it’s nice to do an occasional panel like this. Coloring becomes increasingly important the more realistic you draw.