Well, since you asked so nicely, here it is...
the Making of Surf Rat & Spencer
When I originally wrote this, I was working off an old Packard Bell that I've had since
'93. For obvious reasons (the largest one being the whopping 850 MB hard drive!), I have
since switched to an e-machines 366i2, I boosted the RAM to 160, and haven't had too
much trouble with it choking on REALLY large files. I'm still using my old Mustek scanner and a Zip
drive I couldn't live without. If you have the means I highly recommend you pick one up.
Okay, I first draw the strip on a piece of 8 1/2" x 11" bristol, then
I ink it with disposable technical pens. I erase my pencil marks and
then scan it at 150 dpi in color. If you scan in black and white or
grey scale, the pixels break up too much and it makes everything look fuzzy.
After I scan it, I drop it into Photoshop 5.0. If you don't have
Photoshop, the rest of this may not make much sense.
Once I have the strip in Photoshop, I first click on Image and then
Adjust Levels it automatically balances out the contrast between the
black and white. I then click on Image again, and then on Levels.
It opens up the same thing again, but this time you have to adjust it
yourself. It will show you a graph, and at the bottom of it, it has 3
little triangle/arrows. The one on the far left, I bring over to so
it's centered under the first peak on the left.
After this, I usually drop in my lines to divide the panels, and clean
up any obvious mistakes, or eraser boogers that accidentally got scanned.
After that, I start dropping in color. I work at first with the RGB
pallette. I played around with the color a bunch before I got it to
where I wanted it. Which is a realy good idea if you want to print
your work out later in color. CMYK is really huge to work with, and
the colors don't convert well to the web. RGB has fewer colors, but
when you convert to index colors for the web, they don't get really
weird like they do when you convert CMYK colors.
I keep a reference strip handy for the colors, so that my characters
don't change colors everyday.
I use the paintbucket tool and drop colors in the characters first. I
then use the paintbrush tool, and set it to Darken. I trace around
the area I filled with the paintbucket. It fills the little white
spaces that the paitbucket didn't reach.
After I'm through with the base colors on the characters, I start
filling in the props and backgrounds. The way I do this really varies.
Sometimes I just put shadows or colors, or sometimes I drop photos in.
It all depends. I've even used 3D models and pasted them in as backgrounds.
After the areas are filled in, I do my shading and effects. I use the
magic wand tool and select a color. I then use the Select, then
Similar option and then airbrush in a color a couple of shades
darker than the one selected.
After that's finished, I drop in any text that I didn't hand letter. I usually
hand letter the dialog, but use different type faces for sound effects.
I check the positoning of the hand lettered text, and proofread everything.
Sometimes I may change a line, and I have to scan in new dialog.
After that's complete, I reduce the image size to 7" x 2 3/4". I then
save it as a JPG. After that I reduce the image to 524 x 205 pixels. I
then convert it to index colors. I usually use the adaptive setting,
because it tends to keep the image from breaking up. I then save it as
a GIF.
After that I post the GIF to my Web site. The GIF loads a lot quicker
than the JPG, and is good enough quality to view, but not good enough
for print. Which is good, because I don't want anyone printing my book
before I get the chance.
If you want to break down the GIF even farther, you can go to
www.gifoptimizer.com, and there you can break it down for free.
I hope that helped. If you have any questions,
feel free to write me at kylegoodman@surf-rat.com.
