December 6th, 2007

Everyone who’s ever been in a serious relationship has at some point gotten the “love you, too.” Hurts when they leave out the “I,” doesn’t it?

I almost forgot that today was an update day! If I hadn’t checked the site at random and seen that the new strip was up, I never would have remembered. I hope other people remember that Tee-mab updates twice-a-week now! Maybe I should put something in the titlebar about that, actually. I’ll go do that right after I post this newsie.

Something I was reminded of the other day, that I wish I could remind myself about more often, is that lines parallel to your panel borders are dangerous. They trick the eye into thinking the panel ends at them, rather than at the panel border. This past Monday’s strip, for example? My cubemate at work thought it had six panels, instead of five, because the doorframe looked like a border. Not the first time I’ve gotten that, and I’ve seen it in other strips, too. I’m gonna have to start keeping an eye on this kind of thing.

Next week’s strips are outdoors, though, so it won’t be a big problem.

Speaking of which, I’m trying to sketch the next two strips on the computer. I’ve so far found it really difficult, because I’m used to doing my sketches with a real pencil on a real sheet of paper. Unfortunately, because of the new format, I can’t work as large as I used to. The older, skinny format could be broken up into individual rows, and then those rows could be enlarged to fit a full sheet of paper, but the new format already takes up the whole page without being scaled up. It made this week’s strips a little difficult to sketch. Drawing small is difficult, and it forces you to sacrifice a bit of detail.

Sketching on a tablet is tough, though. My hand-eye coordination is trained to expect to see results where my hand is pointing when my brain is in sketch mode. I also really miss the feel of the pencil. I’m an extremely messy sketcher, and I liked being able to sketch my formless little blobs really lightly and then press down to clean the sketch up to the point where it looks like a Tee-mab strip.

I put together a couple brushes in Photoshop that I feel mimic the behavior of a pencil at least a little bit. If you’re curious, I’ve got the line width and the opacity mapped to the tablet pressure sensitivity, and then I also set the scattering up to 100%. So, I’m getting the slight imprecision of a dull pencil point, which lets me gradually home in on the lines that I want to make up the drawing, and I can also press down to create darker lines.

It’s working well. I just need to get used to it. I’m also kind of doing it animator-style and doing a super-rough sketch, followed by a cleanup sketch on top of it. That’s helped a little bit. We’ll see how this goes. At least I have more room now.

CURRENT MOOD: Onion Blossom