The Skyrim comic samples will be coming a little later. I've just started the process for getting the first volume of my webcomic, Spidersilk, published as a comic through Inkblazers.com. The process will take a month and a half or two, from start to finished product being available in the store. The option to print is reserved for featured and premium authors, and after I was promoted to featured in February, I began planning for this step. I did consider redoing the first two chapters for some time, and finally asked for the general opinion from fellow artists on the website. Redoing is a case-by-case decision, and I'm not for or against it. For my particular case, the pros were not strong enough against the cons, so I compromised. In any case, it was more important to continue the story at its current pace than to redo something that wasn't entirely broken. Yesterday I laid out the book's proposed content. Chapter six ends at a suitable (though quiet) moment of suspense, so I will end volume one there. It is also roughly 100 pages of content at that point. I am including a chapter of concept/ behind-the-scenes works including early sketches for the characters and for the very popular magic summon, the Ambassador. Some of these early sketches have never been seen by anyone but me. I noticed a lot of creators on inkblazers offer such a thing, and really ... I am very interested in that kind of information about my favorite stories! My next step is to begin working with the provided templates, and make further edits if necessary. I have some experience in editorial design and laid out my first comic for print (in two different sizes) for my final illustration project, and it's something I enjoy doing. Publications were some of the most interesting classes I took in the digital art department, but I'm no expert. If I run into trouble, I will get assistance. I have to edit it anyway to make it print-ready, and as I did this I made minor revisions: adding/removing/changing dialogue, breaking up the word balloons, moving word balloons, adding sound effects, etc. In some cases I redrew a panel or two. Shuffling the panels around was a nice challenge, but it was time-consuming! I wish I'd planned to print from the get-go, rather than assuming it'd always be a webcomic. Too many important elements (art, dialogue) are in the margin. Still, some part of me thought I may print since all pages have a 5x7.5 save at 300dpi. I can be thankful for that preparation at the very least. This is not my first comic, but it is my first purely digital comic. As I went along, my process refined, became quicker, and the later chapters are much easier to edit! After the chapters for the book are edited, I'll go through them all and do a quick test-print of some of the poorly saved pages to determine if they must be redrawn or not. Below you'll see the cover I currently work with. and below that cover, some page edit samples. Click the cover below to be brought to the comic. Above, the very first version of page two, chapter one, done in September of 2011. I'm not even sure of the time taken, but every page was painfully slow and required me to edit the linework in illustrator since the tablet was so new to me. Halfway through chapter two I no longer fixed up lines in illustrator, and for the past several chapters the timeframe has been in the three to five hour range (with few exceptions).
Below, you can see the minor tweaks I made to this page. Now that I've posted this, I see that Prentice's hair is still shiny and I don't like that! I began doing his hair simply black by chapter three, so I have to change it in earlier chapters. That's what editing is for!
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