September 2, 2005

This strip was particularly difficult. It took me a total of 4 hours, which is over twice as long as it usually takes.

The writing took a while. I needed to think up a situation where Andy would be talking to Jenn. This sounds easy, but with full-body shots, it's a little tricky. Normally, I can just put both characters in the frame, showing from their chest up, and the reader never wonders where they are. But with full body shots you HAVE to have a "set" for them to be in (or they'll look like they're floating in space). Fortunately, I remembered that they're neighbors, so talking over the fence works.

The art took a while. Full body-shots are hard for me to draw. And I needed to use a finer tipped pen than I was accustomed to, because there was too much detail for the size I usually use.

Postproduction took a while. After a fair bit of work, it became clear there was no way for me to composition all the talk bubbles to have them be read in the right order. So I had to take the rather drastic step of horizontally flipping each frame, putting Jenn on the right (she's on the left on the original). In addition to all that, the various pictures of Jenn were horribly out of scale to each other, and one of them had such terrible body porportions that I had to distort transform it with photoshop. That's an adventure in itself.

Proofreading took a while. I belatedly realized that the shovel disappeared after panel 2, so I had to draw a shovel in photoshop and place it in the scene for subsiquent panels.

Text-Bubbling took a while. It took me a really long time to find a way to indicate that the "Thanks for saving our kingdom" was coming from the other side of the portal. Using a normal talk bubble arrow just made it look like Jenn was saying it. Or possibly the portal itself was talking. Then I tried the "curvey" pointer and it seems to work. But that took me a while to come up with.

Though I do like drawing my characters in non-standard outfits. :)

-ATW