ACW Episode 110 – Wake Up Call!

Ta-daa! I know this is up a little late this morning, but look! It’s in color! Oooooooh, shiny bright color! And yes, I did this one on my iPad.

I have been doing so much drawing on the iPad, I had to try doing a full 4-panel comic on it just once. I used 3 apps to put this one together. I outlined the idea and script in Notes Plus, since I can keep a an entire notebook in that app just for webcomic ideas, as well as complete notebooks for any topic I like, and I can do very rough doodles of the panels with Notes Plus’ drawing tools. Then I hopped into SketchBook Pro to sketch out and script the panels. Each panel is a separate drawing, so I had to import the first panel into each one to keep my color scheme consistent, but that wasn’t a bother, and as soon as the coloring was done, I could delete that first panel from the layers. Then as each image was finished, I took it into Strip Design to put the whole thing together. Once all the panels were put together in Strip Design, I exported the final strip as a PNG, brought it into Photoshop to add the titles and CC license graphic, and then uploaded it to the web. Voila! Comic is done. And in COLOR!!! Shiny, bright color…

Overall, I like the way this worked. Because I walk around all day with my iPad in hand, I could work on this in bits and pieces as I went. This was especially nice when I ended up sitting in not one but two doctors’ waiting rooms this weekend (Princess is doing fine, by the way, but we have now determined she has a rash caused by a virus). That meant I could do the comic anywhere, and actually get it done pretty quickly. I also didn’t have to write the text by hand since SketchBook Pro has a text tool, although if I want to hand-write my script, I still have that option.

So productivity-wise, this really worked out. And I like the way the coloring turned out. The marker tool in SketchBook Pro works exactly the way I think a marker should, and I like the effect. Of course, I can use the hard edged brush and airbrush tools as well if I want a more polished coloring, and SketchBook Pro has brushes for cross hatching and stippling which I think I’d like to try for inking.

The down side to this? The final size of the comic is not as large as the size I normally produce when I scan in the paper and ink comics. Strip Designer only produces an image that’s less than half the size of the cartoons I scan. I have the option of just skipping Strip Designer and importing each individual panel into Photoshop if I want a larger comic strip overall, but even then I only get a comic that’s 3/4ths the size of what I get when I use pen and paper and I scan the artwork.

My only concern is if I ever decide to do a print volume, I might need to have a much larger comic. And while I have no plans for doing a print volume of the webcomic in the near future, it would be nice to have that option. I’ll have to do some research to see what size image I’d need to have to produce a decent print version.

So anyway, if you have any thoughts or opinions on today’s comic and the method by which it was produced, let me know. And let me know if you like the addition of color. I like it, but that’s mainly because I can now show off the blue parts of my hair this way! };D