NEW STRIP :: The Under-Achiever!
This week's strip was originally published in black and white as part of Wide Awake Press's "Ancient Age" anthology and Free Comic Book Day thingie. I thought that coloring it would be super quick, and I could re-present it here as a week's strip and thus get WAY AHEAD on some longer-format stuff I'm working on. WRONG, DHARBIN! Coloring this took me 1,000,000 years, not because it's super complex or anything, but because I kept shooting myself in the foot trying to keep 4 balls in the air at once. I try to do all my strips as if they were going off to print immediately, so for all the color strips you see there are high quality print versions socked away on my computer as well, complete with high-res bitmap top layers for maximum scrumptiosity.
But this strip, originally 8 black and white pages (2 panels per page) is mainly stitched together from different pieces of art, which in itself was originally a labor-saving device. "Why, I could just draw one background and then Photoshop in a bunch of little dudes! It'll take no time at all!" Oh man. The number of workflow mistakes I made on this are pretty humbling, just one after the other; it doesn't help that the art is 8 months old now, so of course all the actual artistic gaffes I made are super obvious to me as well.
I'd originally thought when starting this post that I might go through and enumerate some of the more glaring errors in my coloring process on this thing, both to set them in my mind for future avoidance AND in case they'd be edifying to anyone else. But now the idea just fills me with sorrow. Plus today is Hourly Comics Day, so I need to get things done so I can get out of the house and do things worth hourly-comics-izing about. I think I'm going to go to an art museum and try to fall through something valuable.
But anyway, you can read this week's strip right here!
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