HAPPY FRIDAY! I usually only do two strips a week, if I do any, but these three were all quickly done. Monday’s was in a hotel, just sitting in bed, barely pencilled. THIS ONE was drawn entirely on the tablet in Krita. I’m still figuring it out. I pencilled it quickly in one layer, then inked it in another. The panels were a separate layer themselves. I gotta work on those – they have this kind of blur to them. It’s taking me some getting used to, I don’t want to put too much pressure on the screen and have it break! It’s built for that, right? I’m very clumsy. I used two different “pens”, one a fixed width type that’s supposed to be like a felt tip marker, or Micron pen, and then the other was a nib type. That’s what I’m trying to use on these. I did not pencil the line of people or the velvet rope or the cars in the background in panel two. I just zoomed in and worked on them that way. I used a small “watercolor brush” for the clouds.

I saved it, looked clean. I shrunk down a copy for the web in Krita and it looked off. Zooming in was very distorted. I know I draw this on a “canvas” size similar to what I have when I scan the comics (like 2200px wide) so when I shrink down to 100 dpi (and then shrink down at the same format size, 660px wide)…well, yeah the quality is down a bit, but usually there’s not some much “noise” – like added pixels that populate negative space that weren’t there in the 300 dpi version. (I scan at 300 dpi; I should probably scan at 600 dpi, but even with lessons learned in removing blue line pencils and removing other things that show up on the paper, hoo boy does it take much longer to “clean up” and the results are the same, or worse.) SO anyway I fired up the old computer, uploaded the Krita-drawn image, and then shrunk it down. Little to no “noise” this time. Weird.

This is a really odd process for me. But in the end, I think it looks like one of my comic strips. Let me know what you think. Not sure what if anything I’ll have next week – I gotta work on Coloring Book #2.