It's the Future.

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In case anyone was wondering, and I know you were, quite a bit of time and energy goes into the creation of those longer form stories like The Laptop Charger, Night of 1000 Dog Farts, or Star Wars. 

It can take weeks to complete one depending on how many pictures I have to do. Part of the reason the process is so arduous is that I do things pretty low tech.

For posts like the ones I mentioned above, the process of doing one drawing from start to finish goes something like this:

First I do an initial sketch.

 
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Next I take that sketch, clean it up and trace it onto a new sheet of paper, getting it just the way I want it.

 
 

After that I ink the drawing and put in the shading.

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Next I use a scanner to scan the inked drawing onto the computer, to get a .jpeg format image.

 
 

After that I have to crop it to the proper size and upload it to this site which has a few rudimentary tools for editing images. I mess around with the brightness and whatnot to get it as close as I can to not looking like it's a scanned piece of paper.

 
 

If at any point I mess up my lines, get a stray mark on the paper, or the scan comes out kind of funny, it usually means going as far back in the process as re-drawing a new version from my original rough sketch, then doing the whole process over again.

It's kind of a pain in the ass. Not to mention I go through mechanical pencils, micron pens and pads of sketch paper like crazy.

BUT NO MORE!

The future is here and it is in the form of thing I bought called a drawing tablet. 

It's basically a device that lets you draw on it with a stylus and use a program like photoshop to create illustrations. That means I can do my drawings for this site right on the computer and not have to deal with the 432344562 steps it takes to do everything by hand. PROGRESS!

It's a pretty weird experience using the thing as you see what you are drawing on your computer screen instead of under your hand. It's kind of like having to re-learn how to draw. Actually, a better example might be if you remember art class when you were a kid and they did that thing where you have to draw a picture without looking down at the paper? Sort of like that.

 There are about sixteen million features to learn how to use, but it's a lot of fun and at least I don't have to scan two dozen pictures by hand for every post anymore. So yay. 

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  And hey, color!