Treading Ground is a comedy series
about working-class people in their late teens and early twenties.
I couldn't help but notice there were approximately one and a half
assloads of webcomics out there about crazy college kids and their
wacky antics, but none that depicted what the rest of us were
up to at that point in our lives. So, TG is my attempt at
filling that gap, using my own experiences as a guide.
The series is set in a fictional town called Long Point, a small coastal city in the Mid-Atlantic United States.
NOTE: This is how I used to do the comic
when I first started doing this. Once I settle on a new method, I'll explain it here.
Currently, my process is as follows:
1. Draw the lineart in standard mechanical pencil on whatever sheets are
available. I normally draw 4" x 3" frames on a
standard piece of copy paper. Since I have problems with
proportions, I use an oval template to start my heads.
Background lines are drawn after the characters, or left for
Photoshop.
2. Since my penciled lineart is
always rough looking, an inking phase is necessary. I ink the
comic using a
lightbox, marker paper, and the same pencil I used to sketch.
The marker paper works very well with the lightbox, making the trace
less difficult. I use a fair amount of pressure on my
"inking," creating nice dark lines. But this way, if I
screw up, I can still fix it without waiting for the digital phase.
3. Scan the (relatively) clean
lineart into Photoshop at 600 dpi. Make any necessary edits and clean up the lines.
Fit it into a panel template. Merge the panel layer with my
lineart. Color or color using
grayscale, add in the text bubbles, flatten the image, and resize to
500 width.
