A long, long time ago, in another life it seems, I was an art major. Now that I am in web development, I rarely get the chance to pick up a pencil and draw. Sometimes, I get to incorporate some cartooning into a design. Those who have seen timches.com over the years have probably noticed the evolution of the caricatures of my family in the header of the site.
I have always admired web comic artists like Scott Kurtz of PVP online, Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade, and Scott Johnson of Extralife. Lately I have been reading up on the techniques that comic artists use nowadays for producing their strips, and have been itching to give it a try. I am pretty pleased with what I came up with:
Now for some of the process. It all starts with a sketch, of course, and sketching the drawing is probably the easiest part for me.
Tracing the image in Illustrator takes a bit of finesse, especially without the luxury of a tablet. This tutorial on Vectortuts.com introduced me to the notion of creating my own custom brushes, to get the “hand-drawn” feel, rather than the computer-perfect line-weights you’ll see in the timches.com caricatures.
Coloring really brings the art to life.
Drop in a nice background–my favorite color blue–and done!
What a cool-looking guy…
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Using Netscape Navigator 5.0 on iPod/iPhone OS 2.2.1
Awesome! I shouldn’t admit it, but I’ve always admired your sketching ability.
Using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.8 on Mac OS X
So awesome. I do see the Scott Johnson influence in the art, but that’s definitely a good thing. You should do a comic strip like once a month to have an artistic outlet. That way you don’t go insane, AND we get to see cool Kuya art.