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Monday, December 23, 2013 at 11:04AM A couple of years ago, I posted a few thoughts on the idea of taking a weeklong hiatus for the Christmas holiday. It featured a guest post from "How To Make Webcomics" co-author Dave Kellett on the topic. The entire thing is worth a read, but I'll paraphrase...
Saturday, December 21, 2013 at 10:07AM Today's dive into the archive goes really deep -- 2008 deep -- for a post about the process of filling your line work with flat colors ("flatting").
If you digitally color your comic like me, then you know that "flatting" is one of the most boring and time-consuming steps. This is the process of filling all your line work with flat colors. Photoshop has a magic wand tool that should, in principle, make coloring easy since you can select closed areas of your line work to color. The problem is that you want all the colors to be right up against each other underneath the line art with no white showing (this is called trapping). This is essential for making sure your comic prints correctly. You can mess around with the expand selection option, but this is time consuming and not very precise. Fortunately, I've found a free Photoshop plug-in that does this all for you. It saves me a ton of time and is one of the main reasons I'm able to update a full-color comic three times a week. This was originally discussed in a Questionable Content tutorial.
Friday, December 20, 2013 at 1:09PM Today's Archive Dive comes from Dec. 26, 2012, when I shared some lessons learned from switching to Google DFP to administer my ad chain.
If you haven't, you'll want to read the primer on Google DFP from last week.
Having had a little experience with DFP, I wanted to share some more of my experiences.
Thursday, December 19, 2013 at 11:24AM I've been giving a lot of thought to the upcoming new year. This has been my first full year of full-time webcartooning, and I want to take what I learned in that baptism-in-fire and apply it to doing even better next year. And, I think the answer comes down to one word: Planning.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013 at 10:16AM A while ago, I read an angry letter to the editor about a syndicated comic strip that drew the ire of a reader (who made the ubiquitous subscription-cancelation threat). The comic was seen to be "insulting and degrading."
And, like it does every time I see a work of humor attacked for its cruelty, I had to laugh... nervously.
