OK, so I talked to Dave and neither of us had nothin’.  We kind of blew our collective wads on the earlier Tuesday updates with behind the scenes updates and what not.  So I decided to try something a little fun and different and ask for sketch suggestions via my friends on Facebook.  This one came from Matt “Savage” Dolins.  Radioactive, homicidal squirrels.  He may have also specified weapons.  I don’t know.  I was short on time.

I’m thinking this will be a fun Tuesday filler if I have nothing else to post.  So check Facebook to see if I’m trolling for suggestions, but don’t expect anything spectacular; I won’t spend more than 30 minutes on the sketch (because I’d rather be spending that time on the strip).  This is just for amusement.

So…BE AMUSED.

I’ve thought about redoing the strip on and off for years.  I always get stopped by something.  Writer’s block, lack of motivation.  Mostly, I sit down to draw something, and I struggle, and I hate the way it comes out, and I quit.  There are a lot of strips that are up on this site that, frankly, I’m embarrassed about.  I don’t want to feel that way again.

Recently, I decided that one of the best ways to dive back into the strip, would be to redesign the characters so that I could draw them more quickly.  I always struggled with the art style in Towne Pub because much of it was cartoony and simple, and much of it I tried to make look complex and comic-booky.  In order to produce a strip on a regular basis, I’d like art that looks good, but isn’t overly complex, and is something I can recreate quickly and easily.

So I decided to redesign the main characters of the strip.  Phinn was the first, and unlike most of the stuff on this site, I decided to generate the artwork 100% digitally and color it myself.  I opened older strips colored by Dave to grab color samples, but otherwise did this in a couple of hours using Adobe PhotoShop and a Wacom tablet.

Trebarg is probably my favorite of the redesigned characters.  As longtime friends/fans of the strip probably know, Trebarg is based on a character created by Towne Pub’s own colorist, Dave Grabert (which is why Trebarg’s name is “Grabert” spelled backwards).  Unlike most of the characters in TP, Dave made Trebarg a lot more like himself than the other creators.  It’s one of the reasons why he is perhaps my favorite TP character: because he’s a normal guy stuck in an absurd universe, and he takes everything in stride.  I’ve always felt that maybe the design of the character was unfair, particularly to Dave.  He was always this oafish, fat, squishy guy.  Easy to draw, but not very nice to look at.  I’m pretty happy with the way this concept came out, and I’ll probably stick with this design if and when I start producing new strips.

Here you can see the process I use to create art digitally using Adobe PhotoShop and a Wacom Intuos 3 drawing tablet.

When creating traditional pencil-and-inked art on paper (or in the case of the old TP strips, on bristol board) I would follow a fairly simple process:

1. I would do rough thumbnail sketches on scrap paper or in a sketch book to lay out the individual panels.
2. Once I was happy with the thumbnails, I would sketch out a rough layout for the strip, to decide on the size and placement of individual panels.
3. Next, I would take a clean sheet of bristol board, and use a ruler to pencil in the panels.
4. Then I would pencil the artwork, based on the thumbnails, into the individual panels.  This generally involved a LOT of erasing, redrawing.  Often I could not recreate exactly what it was that I liked about the thumbnails, which is very frustrating.
5. Next, I would use pens to ink the entire strip on the bristol board.  This is the most dangerous step of the process.  One mistake (and I generally made way more than one) would create a permanent problem.  One of the reasons I did very little hatching/shading on the strip is that it could ruin the artwork if I didn’t get it exactly right.
6. Once the inks were complete, I would ink the borders around the panels, erase the pencils, and scan the strip into PhotoShop using the “Line Art’ setting on an HP flatbed scanner.
7. Once I had the digitized version of the strip, I would use “Select -> Color Range” to isolate the blacks from the white background (and the gray aliasing artifacts from the scan).   I would then copy and paste these into a transparent layer, in a new blank document.  This would allow Dave to do the coloring on separate layers beneath the line work, but there was some loss of detail resulting in sharp, pixilated, jaggy lines.

In contrast, the above image illustrates the process that I use to create black and white artwork completely digitally.  There are a number of tremendous advantages to doing the artwork this way, and the process is a lot simpler and more streamlined.

1. First, I create a new image with a white background.
2. Next I create a new layer with a transparent background and label it something like “rough pencils.”  I use a standard brush set to 9 pixels and 50% hardness. I use a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet then to roughly sketch out the basic shapes in much the same way that I would when doing the thumbnails in my older process.  The result is what you see above on the left.  One thing I really love about working digitally is that it’s very easy to erase and redraw over the same parts of the image.  In the above image Trebarg’s left leg was way too long, but I was happy with the foot.   To fix this I simply erased a chunk of his lower leg below the knee, selected the foot, and moved it up, redrawing that part of the leg in.
3. Next, I set the opacity of the current layer to 50%, which makes the brush strokes appear light gray and makes it easier to draw over them.   I create another layer with a transparent background and label it something like “pencils.”   I set the brush to 3 pixels, and create new, tighter pencils right on top of the rough thumbnail.  The result is the center image that you see above.
4. Once I’m happy with the pencils, I set the “rough pencils” layer to be invisible, and I adjust the “pencils” layer to 50% opacity.  I create another layer with a transparent background and label it “inks.”  I use a combination of 9 and 6 point brushes to ink on top of the tightened pencils.  The final result is on the right above.

Working in layers digitally with a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet allows me to very rapidly produce high quality line work without the drawbacks of working on paper.  Mistakes can very quickly be fixed, erasures are permanent and don’t leave “ghosts” behind on the canvas, and inking is no longer “dangerous” because the original pencils are unharmed and anything can be undone.  This new process combined with the redesigned characters should allow me to produce high quality strips very rapidly.  The only major drawback is that there is no real, tangible output from the artwork that I can hold in my hands and, if necessary, rescan years later.

My least favorite of the redone concepts.  Probably because 1.) it looks almost exactly like Savage from the old strip, and 2.) his right arm looks…broken?  At this point I was having so much fun coloring, that I half-assed the line work.  Still, Savage was probably the best, most completely designed character from the old strip, so I wouldn’t expect him to change much.

I was the first of my circle of friends to purchase Left 4 Dead, and I immediately fell in love with it.  Of course, the core game play of L4D is co-op, and playing alone with 3 computer controlled companions isn’t nearly as fun as blasting through the levels with 3 real friends, so I immediately became a Left 4 Dead ambassador, extolling the virtues of the game on message boards, in other games (like WoW), and on Facebook to try and get as many of my friends to buy it as possible.  And, to my surprise, it worked!  I group of 8 or 9 other people picked the game up, and we started playing several times a week.  Whenever one of us wanted to play, we’d send a message to the others that simply said “Zomg!  Zombies!”  It didn’t take long before we just started referring to the game as “zomg zombies,” hence the caption above.

When I got my new Wacom stylus after the first one broke, this was one of the first things I drew with it.  I actually found an old picture of Uncle Sam on the internet, threw it on a background layer set to 50% opacity, and painted this right over the top of it.

This would have been the next strip in the old “Salad Days” series that killed the strip.  No kidding.  It became so unenjoyable to draw those strips that I just couldn’t bear to do it anymore.  Which is sad, because this was the chapter where things were going to start getting good.  As you can maybe see here in the last panel that ends with a horrific explosion.  Yeah!