Phew, guess it was just Browny that they heard outside.

Or was it…?

I could’ve split this up into two seperate comics, but this is a scene that just works better when you throw it all together.

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.

I enjoy getting a little philosophical sometimes, and it’s something that I want (harhar) to convey in my work more too. I’m a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes & Cat and Girl who both employ similar writing techniques. It’s hard work, but very satisfying.

I don’t know if that is actually an expression in English -the title I mean-. In Dutch, we say “duidelijke taal”. I guess it means unambiguous.

The ‘sketch edition’ thing is a bit of a joke. I just didn’t have time to ink and color it, so I just put it up as is.

Whenever I want to get real simple with the colors, I always end up trying something new or just spending way too much time on it. I wasn’t going to color this strip at all at first, but it didn’t sit well. It’s not really drawn for black and white, it needs color. I didn’t want to go grayscale so I tried out SinTitulo’s coloring style which I really liked. The panels aren’t set up very well for it, so there are some blending issues, but overall I like this palette. I gave the balloon outlines a brown color aswell so they wouldn’t demand too much attention over the art itself.

Concerning the storyline, I have no idea where it came from. I was going for something else before (and struggling with it) when this popped in my head. It was probably a combination of good weather, lingering story ideas from Ted’s Caving Page and The Mothman Prophecies, and listening to too much A Fine Frenzy.

Tom likes nature, and comes to the park to reflect sometimes. Not sure if Gavin enjoys it as much.

I was inspired by a drawing I saw a while ago, and so I decided to draw in the entire park background with my tablet, instead of simplifying it with inking or using a photo background like I did way back when. It took a good while, but it turned just like I wanted. I’m proud of this one.

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.

If you’re not familiar with the LOLCAT phenomenon (and if you’re on the internet, how could you not), I suggest you check it out. I get my fix from icanhascheezburger.

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.

Everything seems to be back to normal at Big Daddy’s Diner.

Color! Yay, it’s back. I enjoy coloring the strips with my tablet now, although it takes a little bit longer than usual. But I think it looks better, I just have to stop myself sometimes from putting in all kinds of little details and advanced lighting and such.

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.

Tom and Gavin brood on a new mission to thwart the new diner’s plans. Will they be able to save Daddy’s Diner? And is it too late for Alphonse?

The rivalling diner’s business plan becomes apparent.

This is the prelude to the big storyline that will start in January. I didn’t work on DD for a while because I had to come up with a good start for it, and the other day this came to me, so I was pretty motivated, which is why it’s also in color. Thinking about it now, I kind of set myself up by placing it in the evening. If I don’t color the rest, I’ll atleast have to add some greytones to keep the illusion of darkness. Damn virtualphotgrapher and it’s fancy color filters!

I’m getting the hang of this real-life adaption thing. Now that I’ve graduated highschool, I’m out looking for a job aswell. Now that Tom has been unemployed for some time I decided to let him go jobhunting aswell. I also switched the format around from drawing straight-up A4 -like I used in the midsummernightmare series- to landscape A4. This works out better, especially when drawing 4 panel comics.

Part of the Midsummernightmare storyline. I had trouble focussing and getting things done because of the weather, so I decided to mold that into a story. This series of comics is probably the silliest yet.

For Christmas 2005, I felt like I had to do something special. It’s been a while since any comics came out so I decided to make a big storyline spanning multiple comics up until christmas day. Sketched ofcourse or I would never have finished it in time. The whole storline was drawn as 3 A4 pages, but I decided to break it up so I could release it as a series of seperate bars, rather than one(or three) big posts.

For Christmas 2005, I felt like I had to do something special. It’s been a while since any comics came out so I decided to make a big storyline spanning multiple comics up until christmas day. Sketched ofcourse or I would never have finished it in time. The whole storline was drawn as 3 A4 pages, but I decided to break it up so I could release it as a series of seperate bars, rather than one(or three) big posts.

At this point I decided to only sketch the comics to save time. This one worked out extremely well. Again I love the way Tom’s mimicry worked out.