Monday 20 February 2012

Going Digital.

So it seems that my family and I have gone over our download limit for the month. This leaves a bored Jin who can barely search the net and can not actually play DC Universe Online at all. So I thought that I would take some time to talk about something that has been on my mind a lot lately.

Comics and the digital world.

When it comes to comics it would seem that I have nearly gone 100% digital in every way possible. In both the consumption of comics and the creation of comics.

With the huge rise in popularity of tablets and smart phones comics now have never been as easy to purchase and read as they are today. In fact now that all the major publishers are pushing for day-and-date digital comics I have dropped most of my comics that I pick up from local comic book store and and now get them digitally. Which ends up being much cheaper for me since I live in Australia and comics are here priced a bit higher than the American cover price. But digital comics haven't won me over on price, they have won me over on convenience. I am starting to get to the point where I have nowhere to put all my comics. Now that I have my entire digital library on any tablet device or PC in the world I couldn't be happier.

On the creation front though, things get even more exciting for me. I used to do everything the "old school way" using blue pencil on an art board, then pencils, then ink followed by scanning in 3 parts... The whole process is time consuming and since I do everything by myself in most of the comics I work on, everything becomes tedious and I just get sick of working on that page. Ever since the last page of Sonic the Comic Online #256 I have pretty much been doing my comic art on my computer with a tablet exclusively. What a difference it makes. Being able to play around with layers, move things around as I see fit, the whole process of making a comic has become super fun and most importantly fast. Since I am cutting out so many elements like the scanning and the touch ups more than half the time to finish a page has already been cut out. I actually can't believe I did it any other way now.

As you can probably tell I am super excited about the digital future of comics. Especially with what Graphicly is now doing for creators with their digital distribution platform, it would only seem that the world of comics is about to explode with awesomeness. We are now going to see more great independent books come out that just couldn't before because of logistics, and we are going to see the art in comics taken to new heights as other artist also start experimenting with what can be done on a computer now days.

Since I have been going on about digital one of the other cool things I can do is show you the process on how I work digitally. Check out the video below!


Thanks for taking the time to have a read and watch, until next time stay safe!