Hari's Corner

Seventh episode. Enjoy

I cannot believe that this blog has actually completed seven years of existence; and that too without missing a single month. I emphasize that last phrase because I came very close to missing it on a few occasions and just avoided it. Sometimes consciously, in order to maintain the record.

I am not sure whether this is a big enough reason to merit a celebration, but I think it deserves at least a mention. And of course, it serves as an excellent opportunity to re-connect with my readers and online friends, if I have any left.

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Here's the sixth episode! Enjoy!

In this workflow tutorial, I will share my tools and techniques to create an entire digital comic with nothing but free/open source software and a digital pen tablet like Wacom or WizardPen.

Drawing a digital comic is hard work and I am not going into the artistic techniques of drawing or composing comics. There are plenty of online resources for learning artists. What, however, is not so easy is to achieve a good and efficient workflow that allows you to forget the tools and concentrate on the actual product - which, in this case is digital comics.

Luckily you don't have to blow a whole lot of money in order to get a decent set of tools for digital comic creation. There are some great open source graphics software that closely resemble the expensive proprietary software that most digital artists prefer and use.

Drawing an entire comic strip involves four major steps with a few minor steps which I will outline below. To follow this workflow tutorial, you need a working installation of (preferably) Linux or any platform that supports your Wacom (or similar) pen tablet and the following software:

• MyPaint - a great raster paint program with lots of realistic brushes and support for pressure sensitivity in pen tablets.
• Inkscape - a terrific vector drawing graphics program similar to Illustrator and such.
• GIMP - everybody knows about the GIMP, so I'll skip the intro

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Hope you like this one. Your feedback would be much appreciated.

Not being artistically trained, I have always had trouble drawing human faces in comics/cartoons. Somehow or the other, It's very hard to convey certain information from the simple lines of the comic or cartoony style. Unless you've studied human anatomy or attended an art course where they teach such things, age and sex is a bit of a bother to convey to the reader. However, here in this short study, I will attempt to show how to draw faces in a simplified manner using certain cues.

First of all, here's a cheat sheet of sorts.

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