C&P Filler 5 has been on pause for quite a while as a result of me not being able to draw "sexy". No matter how hard I try, I just can't create artwork that screams "fanservice". So instead I bring you this thing: think of it as a filler among fillers.
Dan's filler for july 11 really got me to thinking... i never knew the process behind the production of his strips, and so i ran into some roadblocks. some rather large roadblocks that really were quite discouraging. so i thought i'd throw up my process in comparison to dan's and watch people laugh at me:
Dan's strips are made in (roughly) six steps: sketching, inking, scanning, cleaning (general), cleaning (specific), and coloring.
Mine are made in (roughly) three steps: sketching, scanning, cleaning, (and adding text and color if i get that far).
I make mine in about half as many steps, so it should take half the time right? wrong. dan (from what i can tell) rarely takes more than 5 hours on a strip. I spend roughly 10 hours on what amounts to a single pannel. Why would that be? Look at the attachment.
Step one is a scan straight from my notebook. Notice I sketched on recycled paper with two different colored lines. The fact that I took the time to add color in pencil actually saved time later on down the road as you'll see. Also: i don't have any pens that i can ink with. I know it looks like elliot's shirt looks like its been inked, but its really just a .7 mechanical pencil sharpened by shading his shirt.
Step two sums up the reason why i take so long to do C&P fillers. I have to crop the picture down from roughly 1700x2350 pixels to something more reasonable. Then i use a nifty feature of my scanner to convert the entire thing to greyscale and adjust the contrast and brightness. Then comes the hard part. I only have MSPaint, so i have to go in and erase all the lines from the paper, along with all the grey from the grey-scaled paper from the background and from their skin. It worked out fairly well for Nanase's hair, but i had to darken, pixel by pixel Elliot's hair, 'cause otherwise it just looked funky. This all would have been easier if i could have used the color eraser to just erase all grey and have done with it, but since it only erases one shade at a time, and doesn't even get all of it, the feature is pretty useless. Probably 85% of the pixels in step two are pixels i tampered with one by one. Then once that was done, I had to realign the picture, since it got scanned in crooked.
Step three was the easiest step, since i just had to enlarge the frame so i could fit in text and the title box. This was the easiest step once i figured out what font Dan uses for text. That and figuring out how to make the dialogue boxes.
Anyway, Dan's process is the result of years of experience, hard work, nifty pens, expensive software, and plenty of talent. Its fast and the results look great.
My process is the result of Dr. Pepper fueled caffine binges, hard work, lack of hardware, lack of software, and lack of anything resembling a social life. Its slow, gruelling, but at least the result looks good DAMMIT!