Oh hey everyone,
Welcome to our Wednesday blog post. I thought I’d start off by showing some of the sketches for this week’s comic and talk a little about what goes on in my head as I work (besides my usual rage and blood lust).
Obviously, I’m pretty sloppy with the first pass. At this point, I’m just trying to work out the basic action and overall layout, so I don’t feel the need to draw very coherently. If it’s a simpler comic (like the one last week) then I usually skip this step altogether.
Next I do a second pass where I attempt to make sense of my earlier scribbles. In this particular comic, I changed the second to last panel before inking it. The perspective was not nearly as effective as I wanted it to be, so I went back and fiddled with it until it was right.
After that, it’s inking and coloring, which are pretty straightforward. I use Flash for drawing and Photoshop for coloring, although most of the earlier comics are done entirely in Flash. I’m toying with other software, but as I’m currently both lazy and poor, I don’t know if I’ll end up changing my methods at the moment.
AND, in case you don’t give a shit about any of that, here are some of my music picks this week:
“Heavy Metal Drummer” –Wilco. My taste in music has gotten significantly wimpier since college.
“Massive Nights” –The Hold Steady. One of my favorite bands. Apparently Craig Finn is working on a screenplay based on a Chuck Klosterman book.
“Animal Minds” –Radio Lab. So it’s a podcast, not music. But if you consider yourself the least bit nerdy, then you’ll probably like it. “Animal Minds” is the latest episode, there are a ton of others and they’re all free. Click here to download them.
I also wanted to thank everyone for their continued support. Mike and I have lots of plans for the comic this year, we’re very excited about them and you should be too. Oh, and if there’s anything specific you’d like me to write about, please let me know. See you guys Sunday!
xoxo,
Dana
Wilco is great band, and Heavy Metal Drummer is definitely one of their best songs. You should definitely check out more of their music.
Yeah, I like that whole album actually. I have some of their others but haven’t listened to them all the way through yet. If you have any other recommendations, let me know because I’ve been completely out of the music loop lately.
If anyone wants to see some pictures from the guy’s adventures in that podcast, you can see them here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxa6P73Awcg
Dana’s post appears between two older posts on the front page. Shouldn’t it be on top?
Grant, I’m not sure what you mean. On my browser, it shows up after the comic blog post, but before my older, nonsensical news posts. Are you saying it should appear before the blog post connect to the comic?
If so, that is certainly a valid suggestion, and I’ve very grateful for your imput. That’s something that Dana and I will definitely be talking about when we start the next round of touch-ups on the site. I don’t know if there are that many functional alternatives to our current blog/post setups, but it’s definitely something to consider.
I was wondering about this also. At first I erased the comic completely from the front page, which was.. not my intention. Comicpress still baffles the shit out of me.
Like Mike said, we still have some work left to do on the site so hopefully we’ll figure it all out soon enough.
Right now the blog is appearing as intended, at least by comicpress’ current coding. Grant, were you thinking of some kind of setup like this: Check out PVP’s news columns, with the comic news appearing to the left, and the blog appearing center?
Yeah, that’s it; I didn’t realize that comic news was different from regular posts. They look pretty much the same, except for the easy-to-miss thin horizontal line (which I only noticed when I went back to look for it).
Maybe the two post types should be better distinguishable from each other? Maybe a background color difference or something? I’m shitty at graphic design, wish I could come up with a better suggestion. (PVP seems to have solved it well. If it was my site I’d probably try extra hard to do it differently than them, because I’m stubborn. And it would end up sucking anyway.)
No worries Grant, I really appreciate you pointing it out. It’s actually a big help. Dana and I have so many things on our minds, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks. Especially stuff that we didn’t devote a ton of extra throught to, like where the blog would live. Thanks for reading and lending a helpful eye.
This is great
Me and my friend are starting our own comic, inspired, of course, by Lead Paint’s awesomeness, and this has lent us a little insight on the subject of comic-making. Thanks for posting!
That’s wonderful Sarry, glad to be of help! If you have any questions along your webcomic road, don’t hesitate to send us an email. If we can’t help, I’m sure we’ll be able to point you in the right direction.
This is the kind of dvd behind the scenes extra stuff that I love. Getting to see the process always amazes me. Keep up the great work you too. I do have a question though. How do you come up with the panel shapes or decide when and where to put the panels, i mean some of them are not boxed out? I have always been curious about this.