#803 – Wonderful Life…
Kids, if you ever wanted to post your webcomic REALLY late, I’m going to give you a quick, easy-to-follow guide on how to do so…
Step one: Make sure you DON’T have a buffer of any kind.
Step two: Record a great podcast with the Webcomic Alliance gang.
Step three: – and this is the MOST IMPORTANT step of all…
Make sure you have a two hour Skype conversation with Dawn AFTER the Webcomic Alliance podcast ends.
And that’s all you need to do to make sure YOUR webcomic is post EXTRA LATE, kids.
Now, on to something a little more serious…
Let’s try something fun…
I have this idea… I don’t know if it will work but I think it might be a lot of fun to try. I want to have a few “Ask Capes & Babes” strips.
Here’s what I want to do:
I want you all to come up with a whatever questions you would like to ask about Capes & Babes and I will have the CAST answer those questions in cartoon form. AND… I want YOU to be in the strip as well, asking the question.
I’m thinking I want it to be like a talk show kind of thing where you stare in to the camera (first panel) and ask a question about anything concerning Capes & Babes and then tell me whom from the cast would you like to answer the question.
Sound like a lot of fun?
Good.
So start sending me in your Capes & Babes questions. I will go with the questions that are either the most interesting or that may provide the most humor. In any case, I look forward to reading your questions…
-Chris
Late? it is stunning, you’ve outdone yourself on this one.
My question is (remember you asked for it): how do you DO it? Now that I own a CF original, I can say it is a joy to behold. Printing blue line on Bristol? Hardly any discernable pencil, just ink?
Microns? Scanning? Photoshop coloring? I’m baffled and impressed.
I realize this may be a narrow question that only appeals to a few, but it is my recurring question about your workflow.
Ahhh Tim… I was looking more for questions aimed at the strip of the characters… not necessarily questions about the making of the strip. 🙂
In the second book, I have a breakdown how I create the strip. I think I also have that particular “Extras” section in PDF form. When I get home tonight, I’ll look for it and send it to you as it has some great pictures and lots of details for each step I go through to creating the strip.
But to break it down, yeah, I created an Adobe Illustrator template that measures approximately 16.5×5.5″ and has my lettering guide lines in place too. All the lines are 100% Cyan but with the opacity turned down to 29%. This makes it easy to print these strip templates on bristol board sheets using my Brother jet print scanner/printer.
The Brother printer looks very similar to this one (but has a slightly different product number):
http://www.brother-usa.com/mfc/ModelDetail.aspx?ProductID=MFCJ6910dw#.UIFDdK5CN8E
The 29% cyan prints great and allows me to sketch and ink the strip and then scan the template with none of the cyan lines showing up.
From there. it’s just clean up in Photoshop and then coloring the line art.
For this week’s strips though, I got kind of in a time crunch and tried something a little new. I did a rough thumbnail sketch of the strips for this week on regular copier paper in pencil, scanned it in Photoshop, used Photoshop’s Channels to turn all my pencil work into Cyan lines, imported those cyan lines into my Illustrator template, stretched the thumbnail out so it would fit the template, made the 100% Cyan lines 29%, printed it out and then inked the blue lines.
For the most part, I really liked it although I need to continue practicing this technique as I thought some of my lettering was “off” so I’ll have to fix that if I do this technique again. 🙂
Corsetto does this occasionally over on GWS.
Roni, what do you see in Roy?
Cool question, Charlie. Now can you send me a picture of yourself so i can do a caricature of you asking this question? 🙂
You can e-mail it to capesnbabes [at] gmail.com
Roy, have you ever experimented… you know… with your sexuality? Not judging. Just asking. But I may have follow-up questions.
LOL! Good question, Jennie. This has soooooo much potential for the answer(s). 🙂
How dare you have a regular life outside of working hard for little to no money providing us with free entertainment! Shame on you for considering yourself and your social life before the lives of thousands of anonymous strangers! 😀
Regarding the “Q&A” this is a great idea especially with the snark and humor that we know we will be getting from the big three!
I was hoping someone would end up asking how Roy’s life changed after he became a werewolf since he doesn’t have much of a life to speak of now…
Is that your “official” question (it’s a good one)? If so, I need you to send me a picture of you so I can add it to the list of caricatures I have to draw for this arch. 🙂
Thanks for accepting the question, I don’t own any photos though. The best I could do would suggest a caricature of a tall, fat guy whose face and head are out of frame or some generic caricature 😀
i’m going to throw a curveball in here and ask mine as a character from my comic. cat from business casual asks bob the barber, “Bob, how does it feel to be on the cast page of a comic strip but hardly ever in the actual comic itself. I’m going through the same thing and was wondering how you cope.”
brilliant crossover.