Just Like a Real Comic!

How vain. In all seriousness though, I'm getting excited because I can feel myself getting better and better, and closer to perfecting a real comic technique every time I do one of these. And I love it, I wish I could do this as a career AND make money off it AND not feel the fear of deadlines and worrying about whether I'm doing it for money or love of the art, etc. etc.
Meanwhile I think this is a worthy compromise, if there's ever such a thing.

There are a lot of "firsts" in this piece. The guy is another main character, losing control of his animal, dog/wolf going nuts at something while he tries to yank back on the leash (I have so much frame of reference on this one a la my childhood dog, Coco. I miss that beast...). I think the color and shading have come out much better on this one than in the past. Also feeling good about the clothing, which has classically been a frustration. This was also the first time I tried a different angle of perspective - I'm trying really hard to break out of the rut of doing profile shots.

I'm babbling. On with the pieces, since a picture is allegedly worth a thousand words anyway.


I. Original Sketch. Let me beat a dead horse by saying I lose a lot of the neurotically fine detail of the pen strokes and shading, but it works well enough.



II. The comic-ized version. This is why I was getting excited, I learned a lot working with Photoshop today in terms of how to do proper bubbles, lettering, word-curving, distorting, etc. I can say without hesitation that this was so much fun to make... fun enough that I stayed 3 hours after work to finish it. Because I'm a nerd.