Catching Wi-Fi

...aaaaaand we're back!

Ladies and gents, my deepest apologies for my absence over the past few weeks. I was kind of exhausted (and didn't do anything interesting to blog about) after I got back from Europe, and then I had band camp. Marching band at the collegiate level is intense, and therefore my life consisted of nothing but band for about a week. But now classes have started and I'm settling back into a normal routine, so I'm going back to blogging!

The Wi-Fi in the dorms is always a little sketchy at the beginning of the year. Some of my devices are having better luck with it than others...

Since it's been forever since my last post, I wanted to do something kinda big to make up for it. I decided that I wanted to do a really traditional cartoon with pens and pencils and all that, like I did before I got my tablet. So I sat down the other night and sketched out a cartoon that had been in my mind for a while. After I penciled it, I inked it using two different kinds of pens (the difference isn't that noticeable). After erasing all the stray pencil marks with the fancy-dancy eraser I got in France (I'm so kidding-- I got it at a French grocery store), I went to get my colored pencils to color it in.

And I apparently do not have any colored pencils.

Which is weird, because I know I saw them while I was packing, and I'm pretty sure I put them in the box with all my other office supplies. I got really annoyed. Frankly, a lot of the stuff I had before the summer started is missing. Like my dustpan, ice trays, and hovering TARDIS. I think I know what happened to the ice trays, but there's no telling with all the other stuff. Absolutely no telling.

Anyway.

I couldn't color in the cartoon because I didn't have any colored pencils, but I thought a plain old black and white comic wouldn't suffice for the occasion. Therefore, I used my tablet to digitally color it. Of course, that almost didn't work, either, because the USB cable had gotten separated from the tablet and it took me a really long time to find it. But I found it!

I'm pretty happy with the color in this comic. The only thing I'm really unhappy with is the way the black ink shows up on the scan. You'll have to take my word for it, but the ink on the original is as dark and solid as it can be. Sometimes black ink just doesn't transfer too well. I gotta wonder how professional comic artists do it. Is there a type of scanner that produces higher-quality scans? Does India ink just show up better after scanning? Who knows? Not me, that's for sure.

I'm thinking a lot about this because I'm actually taking a graphic novel/comic book class this semester, and I'll be required to draw comics for a grade. I will probably have to scan something at some point. I didn't have a problem with the way my Blue Justice cover scanned, and I used the same kind of pen, but maybe it just looks better because the lines aren't as thick? Or something?

I don't know. I like inking with physical ink because I'm just better at it than I am at "inking" with my tablet. But maybe from now on I'll just pencil my comics on physical paper and take care of the rest on my computer. According to my Stan Lee book, a lot of comic book artists do it that way these days. We'll see.

Hopefully this comic book class won't be the death of me!