Switching to vectors
By AlI know what you’re thinking. You can’t hide it from me. You’re frustrated. You’re annoyed. You’re wondering to yourself “why has he only done one friggin comic?!?“. Well the answer is simple;
Creating them in Photoshop takes bloody ages! But fear not, because I have finally figured out how to use Adobe Illustrator enough to start back on making comics, and although I won’t be doing them on a daily basis (not that that won’t be a possibility in the future) I should be able to make them within a night.
Click on the image below to see a larger example of where I’m up to so far, along with a contrast in quality…
When I decided to start doing comics as part of TheChoad.com it was mainly because I was inspired by two webcomics; Penny Arcade by Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik (aka Tycho & Gabe) and RealLife by Greg Dean.
Visually my comic style has evolved since my high school days. Back then it was really poor and it wasn’t until I adapted a slight Simpsons style into it (i.e. the mouth - as the eyes and nose were always drawn that way) that it started to look okay. This is pretty much how it looked during the original version of the site over at http://choadarchives.blogspot.com
Now it’s taken on a more Penny Arcade style, but even so a lot of my inspiration comes from Greg Dean - he skips the hand-drawing sketch process that I go through and does his strip 100% on computer. He does all his in Illustrator aswell and as a result he gets high quality images which he can put together to form a comic in the space of 30 minutes. I really admire his simplicity, as people who know me will know that I’ve always thought that sometimes “less is more”.
RealLife: The Complete Year One Collection
This is Greg Dean’s first book and I’ve been reading it constantly since I got it last week. I highly recommend it, as it has every comic he ever drew during his first year along with a very interesting and highly amusing commentary.
Buy it from Amazon
Penny Arcade Volume 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots!
This is the second book I bought. Like RealLife, it has the very first comics from Penny Arcade along with a great commentary. I’ve only looked at this one briefly as I’m working my way through RealLife at the moment, but again, it’s an awesome book which I highly recommend!
Buy it from Amazon
If you’ve never seen either of the two webcomics, then you have seriously been missing out these past few years! Get your butt over to them, and start reading! As always, their links are on this website should you ever forget them, but obviously my advice is to either bookmark them or add their RSS feeds to your RSS reader. (If you don’t have one, there’s a good RSS reader available for Firefox called Sage.) This website also uses RSS so that you can keep up-to-date with every post 
Anyway, don’t expect comics to start appearing within the next week - I still need to finish creating the characters along with various basic expressions etc so that I can start churning them out regularly. I’m also still new to Illustrator and trying to come up with various techniques to speed up the whole process. So whilst it may still be a while before comics come up here regularly, I just wanted you all to know that I have not forgotten about them and that they’re in the works. 
February 20th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
if you create them in flash they look really good in quality and look toony
February 20th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
That’s because Flash uses vectors aswell, just like Illustrator does. Flash isn’t a good medium for making comic strips though, especially if you want your work printed. Besides, I find that most flash cartoons look the same to some extent, and the picture quality for an individual frame isn’t as good as what you could make in Illustrator. Plus with Illustrator, you can always import to and from Photoshop aswell if you need to (such as adding special effects).
I use Macromedia when it comes to web design, but all the graphics I do are 100% Adobe baby