The blog for the comic Barely Working

Find Barely Working on Deviantart and Blogger.

08 February 2012

Meta

Today's strip was originally a test to see if it would be easier to draw the strips, scan them and then post process rather than do the whole shindig on computer. It's not.

The comic you see is vectorized from a pencil sketch that I did. It's incredibly hard to get the proportions right on these characters. It's fine on computer where I can just modify anything until it looks natural but on paper, even with the inherent simplicity of the characters, it's strangely difficult. I honestly find it easier to draw a full human figure on paper than these stick figures.

I also had an inked version of the same comic which removed a large number of dodgy artifacts, unfortunately, it still doesn't come close to the smooth outline you get from bezier curve on a computer. Furthermore, errors on computer are easy to correct, but artifacts that come about from the vectorization processes are hard to get rid of. They generally need to be removed node by node and if you're going into that much effort, you may as well start on computer.

Lettering is also an absolute pain. You'll notice I just superimposed font over the speech bubbles, because no matter how much post processing I did, some words would come out as black blobs, and some would appear as a few sparse dots. also, even though the font is traced from my own handwriting, it is positioned perfectly by the computer. On paper, my lettering is usually variable height and due to human error, not on a straight line.

On the plus side, it only took me about ten minutes to whip up a draft of the strip, and this way, I got a quick visual representation of what the strip could look like. I might use this in the future to draft up strips before I make them properly on computer.

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