Everyday Comics #1 (Special Features)

As promised, here is some behind the scenes stuff for last Monday's cartoon:

1) Once I had the idea or sorted I knew I wanted to base the image off and actual comic book cover, like what I did for the Wanking Dead comic. Except this time, I thought I'd try and copy the cover as much as possible and just add some details in there. Now it did take me some time to actually find a decent cover surprisingly, pretty quickly after I started I knew it had to me a Superman cover, as it just seemed to fit. Especially as a lot of earlier Superman covers seemed to be him just lifting and busting out of stuff. So after spending some time with my old friend Google Image search, I found this beauty:

Which was just perfect, especially the way he has his arms and hands positioned and I also knew I could pull this one off as the background was really simple!

2) Once I had my image, I did a quick sketch to get the layout and text all sorted:

So you can see where I've played around with the "Everyday Comics" logo, and made a note that I'd have to do the "Shoppingbag" by hand, why? Well I honestly couldn't find a free font that was even close, which is odd.

3) Next I sat down in front of my PC with the original Superman cover on the screen and spent quite a while coming up with this pencil drawing:

4) Because I copied this as close as I could to the original I was worried that when I added the extra stuff in, like the shopping bags and logo, if I stuffed them up then I may ruin the whole thing. So to fix this problem, I grabbed some tracing paper, stuck it over the top and just added in all the extra stuff, which looks like this:

All I had to do after this if lay both the sheets on top of each other on my light box (It's a big box with two fluoro bulbs in it and a glass top so I can trace pencil drawings onto my good inkjet paper) and just trace both at the same time onto inkjet paper.

5) Once it was traced I then went and inked the image using various ink pens (Sharpie Fine Point, Bic Mark It Ultra Fine Point, Staedtler Triplus Fineliner and a Copic Multi Liner 0.1 to be exact) to come up with this:

6) Now is where the fun begins and the magic happens; I scanned this image into Photoshop and cleaned it up (I messed around with his face as well as I wasn't happy with it, in fact I'm still not) and coloured it and made the background transparent. I then imported the image into Illustrator where I used quite a few layers for each object. So all the text was separate, as was the background gradient and all those damn lines. Man those lines took some time and patience I tell you. So finally we get this:

I hope you all liked it, I had a lot of fun doing this one, hence why I'm now planing some more "Everyday Comics" cover soon!

Mike