For this comic’s post, I’m going to continue with how Zip and Li’l Bit Funnies get made. Last time I included a sample of the little drawings (doodles) that I make when I’m writing out the comic. From there, I’ll scan those pictures in on the computer and arrange them on a page with the text bubbles. The software that I use to lay everything out is Adobe Illustrator, in case anyone’s taking notes.

Here’s a sample of how today’s comic appeared in this rough layout form:

Laying everything out like this may be an unnecessary step to do on the computer, but I like it because when it’s on the computer screen it allows me to re-size the images and move everything around very easily so I can get a good idea of how the page is reading before I start actually drawing. On this page, for example, panels three through six are actually quite close to the finished drawings, but panels one and two stunk, so I had to keep working on them.

Since we’re on the subject of page design, I’m sure people have noticed that I don’t vary the panel layout of this comic much, if at all. Part of the reason for that is because I’m still a bit new to the whole creating comics thing and when I started Zip and Li’l Bit I didn’t want to spend a lot of energy worrying about the layout of the page and concentrate more on telling the stories and the working on my drawing. As I get better though, I may try more sophisticated layouts. It will depend on the project. For Zip and Li’l Bit, I like keeping things simple and I think it fits the tone of the comics. I also enjoy the clean, steady rhythm this layout gives to the strip.

Okay, enough of that. Next time I’ll talk all about how I draw Zip and Li’l Bit. Whooo!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Pages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.