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I know I always enjoy finding out how other artists complete their comic strips, and a great way to pick up new tricks for working on my MidCentral is to read others' techniques and see what I can mimic that will work for me. Sometimes I find something groundbreaking that alters the entire way I work, sometimes not. At any rate, I felt I wanted to let the curious know what process I go through to bring my strip to you, so here we go.

STEP 1: First off, I make the border for the comic. 7 inches wide by 8 inches deep, drawn with a dark blue, nearly non-reproductive blue lead (which does show up when I scan it, but its quite faint and fades easily), and separate the boxes evenly.

STEP 2: TRACING! Well, not exactly. I have one template for each character in a typical pose, and I use this template to ensure that, from frame to frame, the characters look much the same. After the outline is traced, I fill in the details.. facial expressions, arms, props and whatnot. I use a .3 mechanical pencil with B lead in this step.

STEP 3: After I'm done with that, I go over everything with a 1mm Millenium Zig inking pen, and ink everything that isn't blue. After this, I erase everything with a clik-eraser (the blue lead doesn't like to erase much at all, so I don't have to worry about erasing that), and then go over the outlines of the characters with an 8mm Millenium Zig pen. I don't color any black spaces in, nor do I add text at this point.

STEP 4: Now its time to scan! The image here shows pretty much what one of the comics I've finished looks like fresh from the scanner. Grey trash from the paper comes through quite clearly here, but that's easily dealth with.

I work with Photoshop 6.0 when playing with my images, scanned at 200 dpi, rgb format. My scanner is a UMAX Astra 1220P.

STEP 5: The next thing I do is drag guides out to cover the blue lines. After that is done, I adjust the curves (ctrl + M) and pull the bar down as shown here (you may have to reverse the direction, depending on how your pallette is set up). This cleans the grey garble from the paper right up, but it also has the unfortunate side effect of erasing my blue guidelines. Fortunately, the guides (shown here in bright green) remain unaffected.

STEP 6: The next thing I do is add the frame borders. This is a simple matter of creating a new layer, making four rectangular marquees (which conveniently like to hug the guides already set up). A six pixel stroke, deselect and remove the guides, and that's finished. Creating the borders on their own layer provides many benefits, not the least of which being that I can edit and play with the background as much as I want without compromising the frames.

STEP 7: Cleanup time! Making certain to be working on the background layer, and not the layer with the borders on it, I go around beneath the black borders, erasing anything that might have been missed previously. When I'm satisfied with the way it looks, I crop it down as near the lines as possible. Looking good so far! All that's left is to add the text.

STEP 8: The next step is to add the text for any speech or sound effects required. Pretty straightforward isn't it?

STEP 9: Text boxes. These are easy enough. First I create an empty layer, and make sure its situated underneath all of the text layers, and use the circular marquee for the balloon, and the polygon lasso tool to add a wedge to the selection, pointed at whoever's speaking. Edit > Fill with white, then give the bubble a 6 pixel black stroke, then move on to the next block of text.

STEP 10: And here we are! All finished except for the signatures and the title.

What fonts do I use? Well, I can't give away EVERYTHING, else everyone would be using my favorite font, and where would I be then?

But, for the bulk of my text, I use fonts from Blambot Fonts Of particular note, is the font I use the most, known as Blambot Custom. Blambot has literally tons of comic fonts for use, and they are, for the most part, free, give them a look, I KNOW you'll find something you'll like there!