Rick The Stick – a comic on the Interwebs

Good morning!

We’re still back! During my two week break, I’ve tried to improve the process in which I create the comics from start to finish. Yesterday, I posted the old process:

1. Excel: write the comic out – usually a week at a time to tie together a theme ending each Friday with the climax for the week.
2. InDesign: paste in the text into my comic template. Print this out on 11×14 paper from my home laser printer.
3. Free stylin’: sketch each comic out during my lunch break at work.
4. Scanner: scan the artwork into PDF format (for multiple pages, usually scan a few at a time to cut down on emails and files)
5. Acrobat: cope the artwork from the PDF scan.
6. Photoshop: paste in the artwork, rotate, size and adjust levels – copy updated sketch.
7. Illustrator: paste sketch into template. Ink over and export as an .EPS (this allows me to export it in any size format – including hi-res printing at a later date if necessary).
8. InDesign: import .EPS file, format text accordingly and export (having the file in InDesign was to help me when it came time to put the book together).
9. Photoshop: open inked artwork, adjust if necessary, format and size for web.
10. Cyberduck: upload completed JPG to server.
11. WordPress/ComicPress: Format and update 11 fields for each comic post including scheduling, SEO, mouseover (hover text), categories and tags.
12. Review and check everything – post comic for release.

The bolded line is one I forgot to add – and one of the most important! There were 12 steps to the process.

Here’s my new process:

1. Excel: write the comic out – usually a week at a time end each Friday with the climax for the week. Reducing the overall running thread.*
2. Illustrator: paste in the text into my comic template. Print this out on 8.5×11 paper (2 frames on a sheet) from my home laser printer.
3. Free stylin’: sketch each comic out during my lunch break at work.
4. Scanner: scan the artwork into JPG format (for multiple pages, usually scan a few at a time to cut down on emails and files)
5. Photoshop: paste in the artwork, rotate, size and adjust levels – copy updated sketch.
6. Illustrator: paste sketch into template. Ink over and export as a JPG.**
7. Cyberduck: upload completed JPG to server.
8. WordPress/ComicPress: Format and update 11 fields for each comic post including scheduling, SEO, mouseover (hover text), categories and tags.
9. Review and check everything – post comic for release.

9 steps now allow me to complete the comic. It removes a lot of importing and exporting, waiting for my computer to format the file when opening in a new application. It seems to be a very good time saver. I’ve completely eliminated InDesign which was a huge time suck between it quitting and stalling when I switched back and forth from other apps and it.
* The overall story of Rick the Stick will slow down and in place, there will be week to week stories to help new readers get into the flow. With nearly 450 Rick the Stick comic strips, that’s a lot of story to catch up on!
** By eliminating InDesign, there is a lot more direct transfer of files between apps saving me computer processing time.

Another bonus is the preview of the comic. With InDesign, you have an option for a higher res preview, but scrolling and time waiting for the rendering made the low res preview a better option. Although there were times I had to go back and tweek things accordingly. Here is the before and after (first two are before).

This was the old process – illustrated in one application, layed out in another. No text here.

The old process of importing the illustration into a page layout program. I chose to use the poor resolution option for rendering purposes.

The new process incorporates all the steps in the illustration application. This is from tomorrow’s strip…

I’m excited to see how much time the new process saves me! As you can see, the previewing part is a lot better – since I’m also sketching the strip at a larger scale, I should be able to get more into the strip without making it more crowded – including word bubbles.

Thanks for dropping by!
Ken

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Rick the Stick is a webcomic – true that.