Zombiesplode! My guest comic for Hijinks Ensue is now live. I thought I'd post a bit about what went into making this, warts and all:
I had a flash of inspiration immediately after Joel asked me to do a
guest comic, one that involved a three-page story about the whole HE gang (Denise included, to make a team of four) fighting off a
horde of L4D zombies to a full-length zombified parody of "The Night Before
Christmas" and almost escaping by helicopter as dawn breaks... then
Joel wakes up and realizes it was all a dream... except that Josh has
respawned in the closet and no one lets him out. I'm kind of glad that
idea got rejected, because I'm pretty sure I would have gone insane
trying to draw it. (Overenthusiastic fangirl, much?)
My usual modus operandi is to pencil by hand, ink by hand, scan the inks and then color in Photoshop (which is what I did for the JoCo T-shirt). I decided to try inking in Photoshop this time, using the basic pressure-sensitive brush (I have a Graphire 3). It's probably a lot faster with a Cintiq--I like the results but I feel like it took me way longer to ink on the computer than it would have by hand. But then again, scanning hand-drawn inks also involves cleaning up artifacts. Jury's still out on that one.
Below you can see I moved the Infected mob to accomodate the panel size. I did something stupid here: rather than drawing this whole thing in one go on a big piece of paper, after I did thumbnails I drew all of the panels separately and assembled them during the coloring process. Don't do that. Bad things happen. Psychologically, it makes you feel like you have six comics to finish rather than one. I think it was at this point in the week when my Twitter updates started to get kind of incoherent. I totally had large-ass paper I could have drawn on but for some reason I didn't use it. I got around the issue of limits on what would fit in my flatbed scanner when I did the T-shirt by cutting up the drawing and then scanning pieces of it.
For the panel with the guys sleeping, I did the characters as a separate layer from the background. For all the other panels, I flatted and colored characters and background on the same layer. Flatting was done with the polygonal lasso tool and the paint bucket, and shading and highlights were done with the basic brush tool. I seem to gravitate towards a more hand-drawn, hand-colored look even as I make my (somewhat ungainly) transition into digital cartooning.
I actually was just going to draw Boomer Santa about to upchuck on Josh's head, but in looking for reference shots of caribou I found one reindeer that had
the exact same expression on his face as the reference image for the
Smoker...
Good times, good times.
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