So uhm, yeah. I really loved this game. And it’s so much fun to draw this kind of stuff.

josh

Last Thursday, Katherine and I decided to spend the day at the Columbus Zoo.

In the middle of February.

It ended up being a great idea, as we literally had the entire zoo to ourselves for the whole day. We saw maybe two other visitors our entire visit, and the quiet and still zoo was a massive departure to any zoo experience I’ve ever had. (And I live pretty much five minutes right down the road from the Columbus zoo and am a frequent visitor.)

An added, and unexpected, bonus was that all the animals were relaxed and more than ready and curious to greet us at almost every exhibit and enclosure. Most of them came running the moment we entered the area.

This large Amur tiger immediately came over and tried to rub her head against mine through the glass. An immensely impressive and beautiful animal.

So for $12 dollars total, we essentially rented out a zoo for a day.

One of the first animals we saw was this pair of orphaned brown bear brothers that were enjoying the snow by wrestling all over their enclosure.

You can find more pictures on  my flickr.

josh

I have been meaning to do a blog post about how I work for quite some time now, the only problem being the fact that it seems to be constantly changing.  This will simply be referred to as my “current method”.

Up until recently, I worked 100% digitally, but I have since evolved backwards into the world of pen and ink on bristol board and am finding it an incredibly enjoyable experience. I don’t have a drafting table and instead work at my computer desk. The comics are small enough that it’s not an issue.

I draw the comics on 300 Series Strathmore Smooth bristol. I take a 14″ by 17″ board and cut it in half, making two 7″ by 17″ pieces. It works perfectly and easily fits into the already established dimensions of my strip.

I tend to not do thumbnails and end up drawing right on the board. I also don’t pencil too tightly, as I am fairly comfortable drawing these characters and like to leave a lot of it until I ink.

I ink with brushes and Faber-Castell Pitt pens. Lately this has become my favorite part of the process. I love the imperfect look of hand inking.

Once I am done inking, I scan them in as 600 dpi bitmaps. By scanning them as a bitmap, it reduces the image to straight blacks and whites. It creates a very clean image and is integral to my coloring process.

I import it into Photoshop and place it under a pre-made border template. The gutters are on a separate layer and I can slide them around to fit the panel sizes.

The line art layer is set to “Multiply” and I color on a new layer below it. Because of the clean black and white file, the colors show over the white negative space and under the black line art. I select the areas with the magic wand and have a pre-made Photoshop action set to “expand + fill” mapped to a key. I can then very quickly “flat” the comic. Most of the Photoshop work is done with a Wacom Intuous. I used to draw and ink the comic with it, now it is just used for coloring and drawing backgrounds.

Now for shadows and highlights. I make a new layer, above the “flats” layer and set it to “Overlay” 50% opacity. I return to the flats layer and go to select > load selection. This loads all my colors as a selection. I then return to the overlay layer and then fill with black. Now I essentially erase out my selection to make my shadows. Because only the color areas are selected, I can never go outside the lines. If I need some highlights, I simply paint them in with white on the same overlay layer.

I make yet another layer underneath all the previous layers for my backgrounds. I’ve been just doing a lot of general shapes and shadows for backgrounds to keep from distracting too much from the foreground images.  A nice hi-res desaturated texture file set to “overlay” helps to keep it from looking to Photoshop-y and perfect.

Finally, I letter it on a new layer above everything else. Here is the previous tutorial on how I do my word balloons. It’s remained relatively unchanged since I wrote it.

Ta-da! The final completed strip. I flatten and resize it to 900 pixels wide and upload it to the web. The whole process can take me anywhere between three and six hours depending on my mood and how much distracting stimuli I may have around.

josh

Instead of making resolutions at the beginning of a new year, I frequently find myself looking back at all the changes brought forth by the previous year, and what I would like to accomplish in the coming one.

2009 was, for this comic at least, quiet an interesting year.  Being that Strange Gods is still so relatively new, I am often surprised at it’s continuing evolution. Looking back at the first comic of 2009 really hammers that notion home.

January 2009

December 2009

For me, personally, I find the difference in those two comics shocking. I am still surprised that my art could change so much over the course of a year. I am not a cartoonist, and am more or less figuring out how to be one as I go. This comic was started as a small side project, just as artistic outlet to give myself something different to work on once a week. I never imagined that it would continue to evolve, or that I would end up loving working on it so much.

2009 was the year I began producing the comic three days a week, making it officially, in my mind at least,  a “real webcomic”. Within the last few months of the year I left the world of digital inking, and returned to pen and Bristol for the comic. Inking with real pen and ink has lost me my safety net of infinite undo’s, but in return, is forcing me to be a better artist.There is something very rewarding about having a finished physical comic in front me when I am done. I suppose the only downside is the stacks of comics accumulating all over my desk and bookshelf. At this moment though, I honestly cannot fathom returning to digital inking. I am simply having too much fun.

This year also saw the introduction of Dogu the groundhog. Surprisingly enough, he was actually one of the first comic strip characters I ever created. He was one of several characters whipped up years ago for a comic that ultimately never materialized. I would occasionally doodle him and debated whether or not to add him to Strange Gods for quite a while. But here he is and here he will remain.

I hope that 2010 will see the same continued evolution of both the comic and my art. And I thank everyone that stops by to read, regardless of how frequent, or infrequent, those trips may be.

josh

Figured it was about time to post some photos of my recent vacation to Nova Scotia.

More photos can be found on my flickr

josh