S M F G · A Counter-Clockwise Trip Around The World

It’s been a while since I last posted here, but with reason: I am designing the new web site that will be on line—hopefully—at the beginning of the new year.

The other news is that I bought myself a graphic tablet! As usual, the producer (Wacom) does not make drivers for free men’s operating systems, but they do provide technical information to the open source community (unlike most other big firms). I downloaded the sources and compiled my driver by myself. On my second attempt everything was working as charm (at least the things I need, I really don’t know if I am missing some feature).

Here below you have my first try (actually is the third one) at drawing a comic with the tablet. This is kind of rough, but I still have to figure out the «right» way to use it. It took me around half an hour to make the drawing, and a little less to colour it. Compared to my usual work flow it is amazing!

This is the work flow for the other comics, just for reference:

1. draw with pencil on paper
2. mark the edges
3. take a photo of the result
4. import the photograph in my computer
5. set the threshold so I have a two-colours bitmap (black and white)—this is especially though, since I had to do two or more passes on different lit parts of the photos to have all of the details visible. Sometimes I had to do an extra step drawing the borders with a thin marker before taking the photo
6. erase all the white part to make it transparent
7. filter with gaussian blur to get rid of the imperfections
8. filter with unsharp mask to get back to sharp edges
9. colour (on different layers)
10. add the text
11. publish.

Not to mention that if I want to change or add something I use to draw it separately, going back to point 1 all over again, eventually inserting the new part as a new layer on the previous drawing after proper scaling (this is especially hard for the thickness of the lines, since I have no control on the scale when I take the photo).

The new work flow is now:

1. draw the black and white (including text, for now, but I think I’ll revert to adding proper text)
2. colour
3. publish.

With all this you can imagine why I did so few comics! I hope that henceforth I’ll be more prolific—of course my main problem is still that while I am more or less able to draw, I am really not good at writing, so if you have a story please don’t be shy and let’s make a comic! :-)

That’s all for now, here you can enjoy(?) my second attempt at tablet drawing. See you soon for (possibly) the last post on this journal!

This post is filed under Europe, Italy and tagged Art, Qonjt&Fqr, Work.