Transcript For Strip 1100

How a quantum vibe strip gets made

I normally write scripts a week at a time, first consulting with an outline I create in Open Office Calc at the start of a volume. Here’s a fractional screen-shot:

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I don’t follow the outline slavishly, often adding or subtracting bits or diverging completely if an idea inspires me. A bit less of that as I get close to the end of an arc or volume.
The scripts are written in Open Office writer. Here’s a screen-shot of a script for strip #101 of
Volume 3:

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Then I open a template file in Photoshop and fill the panels with the text from the script. The text tends to direct eye-flow and should be the first thing that goes into a panel design. at full resolution this panel is 1200 pixels wide.

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Then, while zoomed to 50% magnification, I draw in the pencil roughs on my WACOM tablet. I like Photoshop for penciling because I often select elements and move, rotate, scale or duplicate them at this stage and it’s a lot easier in this application.

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Then I move over to Manga Studio, which has far superior inking tools, giving smooth, scrisp lines and also better tools for drawing smooth curved lines. When done with this I bring the page back into Photoshop where I will add some notes about coloring and lighting for the colorist.

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When the colors come back, I may add some tweaks, then bring the text back in from the pencil version of the file (because Manga Studio rasterizes Photoshop text), and then import the page into Adobe Illustrator. This application has the best text and object-handling tools, for word balloons and special-effects lettering.

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Then for the web page, I export a low-resolution version of the page, open it in Photoshop and cut the panels out and stack them vertically, and save to a jpeg file. The high-resolution version in Illustrator will later be imported into an InDesign file for book Design and publication.

Web-comics Scott Reads

SPACETRAWLER
Grrl Power
Schlock Mercenary
Unsounded
Diesel Sweeties
Girl Genius
XKCD
Drive
Day By Day
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Questionable Content
Gunnerkrigg Court
Something * Positive
Oglaf (NSFW)
Trekker
HELM
POWERNAP

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