something less offensive // swegener: Economy of Scale Over the past few...

swegener:

Economy of Scale
Over the past few months I’ve been playing around with the size of my artwork. There are a lot of assumed “rules” in traditional comic book making. It takes x-number of people to make a book, art should always be inked, pages should be a certain size, you should give up all your creative rights to a giant corporate publishing house and just be damn glad they even let you work for them, you worthless artist. Et cetera.
But computers make all that stuff just a bunch of antiquated nonsense. The Internet makes it possible for a single person, with considerable talent, to do quite well for themselves without even producing a physical product.
So I’ve been messing around with the size of the pages I draw for Atomic Robo. from right-to-left (oooh manga-style!) we have a page from Atomic Robo Vol.6 on traditional 11x17” bristol board. I get it from the amazing eonprod.com. BEST. PAPER. EVER.
In the middle is a page from our upcoming Free Comic Book Day story. Giant *SPOILER* here: Dr. Dinosaur is back, yet again, for FCBD. Shocking! I scaled this page down to be just slightly larger than a comic book. I learned a few lessons here -like I need to darken my pencils more in PhotoShop if I won’t be shrinking the art as much as I am used to.
The page on the left is from a webcomic idea that Brian Clevinger and I kicked around. I did this on (official?) manga-sized bristol.
The big page took me a day and a half to draw: 10-14 hours. The FCBD pages took, on average, a day to draw, but I was also thumbnailing them out as I went along, and I had to design a few things along the way. So call it 7-8hrs a page.
The tiny manga page? Over the course of about 6 hours, spread over two days while visiting friends, I sketched out six pages, and finished four of them.
Crazy, right?
Granted, the tiny pages are nothing but fight scene -super easy stuff with no technical drawing to speak of and only minimal background work. The implications are no less stunning to me though.
My only worry is that the super-small manga pages are too tiny for the densely packed pages that I came to love while working on Robo Vol.6. FCBD handled the denseness of art just fine. So I think for Robo Vol.7 I will scale my pages to lie somewhere between FCBD and the manga page.
And, if I change my mind half way through Vol.7 you will never notice the difference. Because computers are fucking magical.

Economy of Scale

Over the past few months I’ve been playing around with the size of my artwork. There are a lot of assumed “rules” in traditional comic book making. It takes x-number of people to make a book, art should always be inked, pages should be a certain size, you should give up all your creative rights to a giant corporate publishing house and just be damn glad they even let you work for them, you worthless artist. Et cetera.

But computers make all that stuff just a bunch of antiquated nonsense. The Internet makes it possible for a single person, with considerable talent, to do quite well for themselves without even producing a physical product.

So I’ve been messing around with the size of the pages I draw for Atomic Robo. from right-to-left (oooh manga-style!) we have a page from Atomic Robo Vol.6 on traditional 11x17” bristol board. I get it from the amazing eonprod.com. BEST. PAPER. EVER.

In the middle is a page from our upcoming Free Comic Book Day story. Giant *SPOILER* here: Dr. Dinosaur is back, yet again, for FCBD. Shocking! I scaled this page down to be just slightly larger than a comic book. I learned a few lessons here -like I need to darken my pencils more in PhotoShop if I won’t be shrinking the art as much as I am used to.

The page on the left is from a webcomic idea that Brian Clevinger and I kicked around. I did this on (official?) manga-sized bristol.

The big page took me a day and a half to draw: 10-14 hours. The FCBD pages took, on average, a day to draw, but I was also thumbnailing them out as I went along, and I had to design a few things along the way. So call it 7-8hrs a page.

The tiny manga page? Over the course of about 6 hours, spread over two days while visiting friends, I sketched out six pages, and finished four of them.

Crazy, right?

Granted, the tiny pages are nothing but fight scene -super easy stuff with no technical drawing to speak of and only minimal background work. The implications are no less stunning to me though.

My only worry is that the super-small manga pages are too tiny for the densely packed pages that I came to love while working on Robo Vol.6. FCBD handled the denseness of art just fine. So I think for Robo Vol.7 I will scale my pages to lie somewhere between FCBD and the manga page.

And, if I change my mind half way through Vol.7 you will never notice the difference. Because computers are fucking magical.