Webcomics Created in Adobe Illustrator
February 17th, 2008If you have been reading webcomics for a while, I am pretty sure you have stumbled across PVP. PVP is created by Scott R. Kurtz and it is one of the poster-boys of webcomics. It has a huge following, spawned a website dedicated to criticizing it, and due to its success, Scott works full time making a new strip everyday, and sells all kinds of PVP related merchandize.
PVP is partly webcomics and partly blog (just like my site). On 2008/01/19, he posted his video podcast about his wish to turn his “Adobe Photoshop + Wacom tablet” comic workflow to “Adobe Illustrator + Wacom tablet”. Illustrator outputs vector graphics, which allows the user to stretch or shrink the art to any size you want without any loss of quality. Photoshop images, which are bitmap graphics, on the other hand, lose their quality when you enlarge them.
See his podcast here for his dilemma:
Now guess what? My comics are all created in Illustrator. I have been using it for years (my full time job is a casino game designer), so it has become natural to me. Ironically, I wish to draw freehand professionally in Photoshop like Scott and other proficient webcomics artists. Illustrator webcomics takes a long time to create, and simple strips like mine can easily take me 3 to 5 hours to create and polish and still I cannot achieve what you can do with Photoshop.
I am learning how to make a comic the new traditional way, but first I have learn how to draw with pen and paper as I have zero patience with them.
A couple days ago the news showed the artist at Google creating the doodle on the company’s web front page. He had a must-be-25-inch touch screen titled in front of him which he sketched on with a stylus just like an artist would with pencils. He picked his colors from a palette shown on the right side of the screen but it didn’t show how he erased. I guess you need to have one of those to do this professionally.
Ah, perhaps you can ask your boss to foot the bill, then you wouldn’t mind having it all smudged up with finger and palm prints.
Comment by markng.net — February 18, 2008 @ 3:41 am