{"id":15078,"date":"2017-02-26T19:44:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T00:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2017\/02\/26\/how-i-work\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:34","slug":"how-i-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2017\/02\/26\/how-i-work\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of our clients at work has a son who wants to be a cartoonist, so I just wrote a little “inside peek” at how I do my work for Strategic Coach<\/a>. I figured I should share that here, too.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n

When I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with coming up with my own characters (“copying” was a swear-word to me). Unfortunately, though, I stopped there, just drawing each character standing still, over and over.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Working with Dan has been a brilliant challenge for me. He’ll say, “I picture dozens of entrepreneurs jumping from one platform to another, all of them looking and doing something different.” Um… okay! As a result of taking on these challenges, I’ve learned a ton, and my skills have just exploded over these past few years.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In other words, I’m finally drawing characters in comic strip panels full of action.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The biggest tip I could give about drawing goes back to all those books on cartooning I read as a kid — although at the time I found their advice constantly frustrating — as is summed up perfectly in this internet meme:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"own<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But I’ve finally caught onto this principle, called “under-drawing”, and it’s made a huge difference in my abilities.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Putting pencil to paper and producing a finished drawing is like walking out of the shower, onto a stage, and performing an opera. Sure, there’s probably someone who can do it, but most of us mortals need to rehearse.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In comics, the equivalent to that rehearsal is “under-drawing”: using a light “non-photo blue” pencil to rough out the shapes that make up your character and scene, then going in with your pencil or ink to do the final lines — the “performance”.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The advantage is that it makes everything hold together — whereas if you just start out somewhere in the middle and go from there, you get some pretty weird anatomy happening, find your words all squooshed into a corner, or you make a mistake you can’t undo. (Okay, I do my final Coach work in software, so, yes, I can undo it. But I can’t Control-Z on paper. I do often find myself trying to “pinch-to-zoom” on paper as well.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So this is how I work:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

1) I’ve made cereal box cut-outs for all my different sizes of comic panels. So I start by tracing out my panel on paper.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"cardboard<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

2) Inside the panel, I rough out the geometric shapes that make up my characters and the scene. Then I go over the lines in pencil. (You can see my blue under-drawing here. I had trouble getting the hands and the book right!)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"pencil<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

3) I scan this and bring it into the program where I do all my cartooning work, Clip Studio Paint<\/a>. It’s a complicated monster of a thing, translated from Japanese, but it is incredible. It does absolutely everything — like Photoshop on steroids, just for cartoonists. Unlike Photoshop, though, which is $50 a month forever, Clip Studio Paint is $50… once. I don’t get how it can be so cheap, but I’m grateful to the people who make this miracle of a thing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I was spinning my wheels trying to understand it until I found some great YouTube videos<\/a> that helped me get started, and I’ve been learning something new just about every day since.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

4) In Clip Studio Paint, I can turn my real-world grey pencils into blue lines again — like digital under-drawing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"CSP<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

5) I do my final “inks” on the computer. Clip Studio Paint has layers, and I use those a lot. It’s so much easier than drawing permanently, destructively on top of your original. So I create a new layer and ink on it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"CSP<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

6) With my inks in place, I turn off the blue layer, create another layer underneath my inks, and colour in the character. (In the comics profession, this is called “flatting<\/a>” — probably because “colouring-in” doesn’t sound like a job somebody would get paid for.) Some of the brushes make hard lines, whereas others are soft, like watercolour brushes — I like to use those for shadows. (You can see those softer brush-strokes on his cheeks, hand, arms, and hair.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"CSP<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

7) Then I put in a background on another layer.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"CSP<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

8) Now it’s time for all the decoration and special effects, which I putter around with a lot — but, since they’re on their own layers, they don’t damage my foreground character at all.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"CSP<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

And that’s how I make my cartoons for Strategic Coach!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I hope that’s helpful.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of our clients at work has a son who wants to be a cartoonist, so I just wrote a little “inside peek” at how I do my work for Strategic Coach. I figured I should share that here, too. When I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with coming up with my own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}