How Muffin Time is Born: The Making Of
At the time of this writing, I use Macromedia Flash MX Pro 2004 to draw the comics, and Adobe Photoshop for editing, resizing, and other things of that sort. Making these comics is a nine step process. Each process is very labor-intensive and makes me want to die more and more. And with that said, here are the steps!
Note: Screenshots can be clicked on to view a larger version of said image
Step 1: I use the magic of words and punctuation in order to come up with something cohesive that someone, preferably a comic character, and even more preferably one of my comic characters, may want to say. Hopefully such means in communication will be able to make you giggle a bit, or maybe even a light chuckle. If not, that's okay too.
Step 2: I now start by drawing the basic forms and shapes of the charcters. It's usually nice if I try some variations in poses to shake things up a bit, but I'm lazy so I usually just put them in a more static pose. Oh well.
Step 3: This is the step where I bring personality and life into the characters but making silly expressions using lines and circles! I try to push these as much as possible because funny faces just make things more fun to look.
Step 4: Repeating the previous two steps for the other panels, I get the character onto all three panels. Magic!
Step 5: On a separate layer I do this all over again with another character, and sometimes more if needed. I keep all the characters on their own layer. The backgrounds, text, speech bubbles, and panels all have their own layers as well.
Step 6: Then comes the backgrounds. Just like the poses, I like to make these different from comic to comic, but I usually just get lazy and make something more generic. This is not the case with this comic, though. I even switched things up and made the sky purple!
Step 7: When I'm done with all the drawing, I copy the characters and put them on a new layer. I make the characters black, then taking those forms I squash them and angle them behind their feet for the shadows. Then I make these into a symbol by going to Modify > Create a New Symbol, then under the Properties bar change the Alpha to about 15%. This makes the shadows a bit transparent.
Step 8: I learned this little trick in my drawing class. See, school is important! I only do this if the feet or bottom of the characters are visible and touching the ground. I pick a tone slightly darker than the shadow and draw around the bottom of the figure where it's touching the ground. This gives the figure a better feeling of weight so it doesn't feel like it's just floating in front of a background.
Step 9: Last but not least, I add use the circle and line tools to make the speech bubbles and then adjust the text so it's centered within the bubble.
After the actual comic if finished I save it and export it as a 600dpi jpeg image for personal archiving and printing purposes. Then I open it up in photoshop, resize it for the net and then when the day comes for that comic, it goes up on the site! See, now wasn't that fun? Okay!