Hello Underground!
I’m once again way behind on updates, so I’m doing a more broad overview today and a little behind the scenes of today’s Thanksgiving comic.
This last month has been pretty busy, and some of you may already know that I flew out to DC a couple of weeks ago as the Guest of Honor at the Security Bn’s 250th birthday ball in Quantico. I gave a speech to about 500 Marines and families in attendance and then was plied with an exorbitant amount of alcohol for the remainder of the evening.
Overall the evening was a ton of fun, met a really great bunch of Marines in Quantico and they were all excited to have me. I was told by more than one person it was the first time they had ever had a Guest of Honor that they actually recognized.
Since I’ve been back I’ve been on the mend with a somewhat excruciating sinus infection that has sapped away a lot of my time and energy, but I think I’m on the upswing at this point.
Today’s Thanksgiving comic “Pardon Me” was a short and sweet idea I had with the holiday this week. Unfortunately there is no video of me drawing this one, because I chose to mix it up and try out Clip Studio Paint for the first time.
The comic has a long history of different tools and techniques used to illustrate it over the last 15 years. I actually began the first TL comics on ink and paper (with digital lettering). It was pretty early on that I switched over to fully digital, which was done in Photoshop for a long time. Once the iPad Pro came around, my comic work eventually moved over to Procreate, where it’s been for the last few years at least.
I wanted to mix things up a bit mostly because I just redid my entire office and got my Cintiq fixed up, so I figured I would do a comic on my desktop for old time’s sake.
For many years I’ve seen artists talk and rave about Clip Studio Paint as a preferred artist software and I always ignored it as an ardent Photoshop user. However, with Procreate being so user-friendly and offering a lot of artist-geared features that Photoshop lacks, I figured I’d try out CSP and see what all the hype was about (you’ll notice in this screenshot I’m still on the free trial).
Overall I really like using it! It really feels like it’s meant for illustration in a way that Photoshop has overlooked for years. This may become my preferred desktop software going forward for comics and illustration.
I’ve got a lot of new things in the pipeline I am dying to tell you guys about, but I have to keep a lid on it right now. Stay tuned and hopefully I can share more about some upcoming projects soon.
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