As of writing this at the beginning of March 2022, I purchased an iPad Pro for $799.99 USD, an Apple Pencil 2 for $129 USD, and a copy of Procreate for $10 USD. Here’s my review of the first 30 days of using the iPad and the App!
The last time I used any Apple product is when I had an iPod Touch. I dropped them for an Android phone when it became a pain in the butt to transfer my music files from ripped CDs that I had.
Continue readingThe month of March has been mild. The most I can say is that I celebrated my birthday and trudged forward on small art projects.
As of the 3rd of March, I turned 30 years old, and I’m trying not to get crushed by the anxiety of aging. I covered it up by having dinner with my family and buying myself an iPad and Procreate! Now, I can draw on the go! I’m writing an article about my time with Procreate at a later date.
On April 8th, I’ll be at the College of DuPage Convention answering questions and selling art! There, I’ll be selling the finally printed Pizza Man book! So if you’re in the Northern Illinois area, stop by and grab a copy with my stickers as well!
The week after, I’ll be at the Schaumburg Library Convention on April 16th.
I have a big thing planned in the summer later this year! I’m preparing some of my art for something I’ve never done, before. So, I’ll keep you in the know once everything is arranged!
Most of my art time has been occupied with writing Blackmask as a story. My focus is split between re-editing existing ideas for the demo story and the big narrative of the entire game.
My personal hope for Blackmask’s main quest is that players can choose a level toplayin any order they want, Mega Man style. A connected Metroidvania-style world or an Open World is tougher to design without ballooning the scope even more.
My programmers and I check in on each other in our messages. We’re both doing our best to keep going during our bigger commitments. Adam’s tackling enemy AI next, as there’s not much left to do with Cole’s abilities for now.
I’ve been doing tiny website tasks to streamline my websites stuff. The Art Page now has all my art on it instead of having separate pages for each category of art I make. If it ends up making loading issues a pain, I change it back, but right now I want my archive front and center
There’s more blog articles in my back burner that I want to finish up, such as my tutorial series on making Incident at the Game Store. There are other articles that I want to write when I make the time.
I’m struggling to keep my focus on one specific art task. I keep dipping so much into different shit that I can’t choose an art direction for myself. My schedule is a loose cloud of “what is currently unfinished that I could finish now?” on my project list.
It doesn’t help that I keep falling into that trap of posting on my socials to say I’m alive on them. My game stuff is in my programmer’s hands. I’m messing about, sketching, and procrastinating on writing a game story. Am I busy or making up meaningless tasks for myself? I need to improve my personal project management skills.
I have some store news for you all! There’s new stuff on my Etsy Store, Ko-Fi Page, and Redbubble. I’m a busy bee indeed!
After years after finishing the original Instagram challenge, arranging the pages together, scraping up funds out of my own pocket, I finally have print books to sell to you all!
To remind you all, The Pizza Man is an improvised story about a simple pizza delivery driver, who must drive through insane obstacles to complete his order on time!
This story was completed in June 2020 for the Journey June Art Streak challenge. Journey June is an art challenge for those who want to improve their storytelling.
I took it one to the suggestion of my friend, but I wanted to see if I could do a comic sequence every day for 30 days. It was stressful, and I thought the story was getting too complicated, but it’s a nice notch in my art-making belt!
Things have been picking up for February! I’ve been starting up the con season, doing commissions, and more art! If you want to keep up with my tasks in real time you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram! I’m also cultivating my new Ko-Fi page for tips, so stop by there as well!
Most of Early February was preparing for Northwest Indiana Comic-Con, the first con I’ve had in years due to the plague. It’s nice to resupply and get ready. I’ve been taking on extra hours at my day job to get more money to print and reprint missing things. Luckily, NWI Comic-Con was better than I worried about! My Cat Stickers are a smash hit, they sold even more than my comics!
My stickers have grown with my newest addition to my growing collection of stickers!
Thanks to StickerNinja, you can get a large 5×4 size of my Hipster Medusa stickers!
While there, I took one nice marker commission of a Tracksuit Mafia guy from the Hawkeye show and comics.
His comic-inspired colors were simple enough, though I was worried I’d run out of ink in my Copics.
My next cons are CODCon, and Schaumburg Library Con. All of these before my giant event at Anime Central in April! It’s going to be a big jump for me, and I have a bunch of rethinking of my convention approach to do.
I’ve been working on new digital commissions as well! This Family Portrait commission is another experimental one where I’m doing my hardest to try simple painting. I’ll say that I’m getting faster and cleaner at painting, since I’m not getting lost in the weeds with brushes. I also decided to stick with my stylization and not stress hard about an exact likeness.
This one is more of a likeness drawing, and I get kinda nervous when it comes to commissions where I draw likeness. But my client was satisfied with the sketches, so I’m no longer worried.
The Art experiment continues where I skip the inking process and go straight to colors. The coloring went faster overall because I began the flat coloring at a lower resolution and I didn’t use the lasso tool on my line art.
To break out of my comfort zone, I bothered to look up how the skin varies in temperature. Unfortunately, I got frustrated by the odd in between look of this painting, thinking I was making the face look clownish. I settled for a subtle red splotch in the middle to settle my mind. I’ll figure this out if I do studies in my own time.
This next part is the more tedious part, as I’m painting over my pencil art like a physical painting. Without formal painting training, I’m going off of tutorial videos. Many about basic edge control and blending.
I don’t like the rendering step in the process because it’s boring, and I have no idea how to make it interesting. The rendering is half the reason I don’t like painting. Despite that, I press forward!
I tackled another large commission for a friend. This one was for an icon, which is simple enough for me!
I’m getting used to sketching in the Artflow Phone App on my Samsung Galaxy Note 9. I draw all my icon sketches on 150 dpi 3 inch canvases because it emulates drawing on a Post-it Note.
She liked sketch number two on the top middle and wanted the Mohawk to be longer, so I obliged.
I ink and flat color in my trusty Clip Studio Paint program! It’s a common step where I use my Lasso and Hard Round Brushes to get down a drawing area. Once that tough part is done, I can plunk down the basic colors I need with a Clipping Mask!
There’s plenty of trial and error with figuring out my lighting. Other than that, I took enough breaks to get out of my own head and simplify what I wanted to do.
Add some detailing to show off the materials and I complete a great looking icon for silly Discord conversations!
If you want a commission yourself, you can check my prices on my commissions page!
Here’s some old art from a game jam Adam and I worked on 2018 about being a liar in an office space. I was messing around with silly designs for office workers. Adam converted my art to pixel art, as I didn’t know about making pixel art at that time.
Other Art I’ve been doing and uploaded to my Illustration and Sketchbook Galleries. A bunch of bird people just vibing. I don’t draw that many birds. There’s too much to draw out there.
Some dog guard sketches that I’m brainstorming for Blackmask. I’m still doing new writing for the game, as I’ve sent so much pixel art for Adam to program. Adam’s shooting for having a playable demo ready for summer, but I’ll keep you all informed.
Monkey Knight Sketches I’m also considering for Blackmask. I haven’t thought about monkeys that much before recently. But now I’m figuring out cool ways to work in Blackmask. Having a prehensile tail is a straight-forward, yet unique way to add some flair to a sword and board warrior.
And finally, some more miscellaneous sketches I drew of people I see around when I’m at work or anywhere else. It gets tough seeing people’s faces with their masks on, so I use my imaginations on many of them.
These posts get long in the tooth, so next time I’m going to make shorter blogs for easier, faster writing. Otherwise, follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more of my daily tasks. I’ll be off to celebrate my 30th birthday!
Back in 2013. I took a Freelance Project for Dan Verssen Games that I only know as “Nephilim.” These are some sketches I did for that game.
I had some basic write-ups about the world, and I wanted to do a good job and have lots of detail in the character designs because that was the typical thing in tabletop game art.
That tabletop art informed my choice to put my characters more realistic compared to my general cartoon style.
This is the cleanest my pencil art has ever been, as I draw them on 8×11 printer paper. Looking back to this art compared to my current art, I feel like my pencil sketches have gotten looser because I ink my own artwork these days and I leave the cleanup for that instead.
My earliest art for when I realized that I needed to study animal anatomy more. The bear doesn’t look offensive, but it does look stiff and lifeless to me. I also never paid much attention to fur rendering. My fur rendering is still spotty, but not as spotty as back as.
It’s been several years, and I’ve never gotten word on if the game released or not. My client seemed to have liked the art enough, but I’m indifferent to it these days.
The status of Blackmask is the same as it’s been so far. There are tiny updates working on specific mechanics, like projectiles and stealth.
Continue readingAfter Inking, Cleaning Up the Inks, and a side step into Screentoning, It’s time to get on to the lettering phase of Incident at the Game Store. If you’re up to having a signed physical book of Game Store for yourself, you can stop by my Etsy store and grab a copy!
In this step of my multipart tutorial, I’ll be talking about how to set up text and word balloons for comics!
Again, I’m making the pages with print in mind, so I need the images in as high of a resolution as possible. I often do my heavier text editing in Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape is a freeware alternative that is as good and better than Illustrator! For now, these next steps are in Illustrator. I make a new file with six art boards to the pixel size of the pages I plan to import.
Illustrator gives me more options to mess with my text than Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint. I import or “Place” my images in Illustrator, so they’re all in one large file to look at!
I get myself started by dimming my art and typing down my general typing and lettering. If you have a script typed out in a word processer, you can copy and paste to your heart’s content! I’m not worrying about the exact font at the moment to start getting the words out.
I refer to my thumbnails for the bubble placement to the art and the original post image to the dialogue. Not only that, but I cleaned up the dialogue at the feedback of my mom, so it lacks teeth compared to the original post.
I’m not as confident with my ability to draw word balloons myself, so I generally do it separate from the artwork digitally. Most of what I know about making word balloons is from this tutorial by John Roshell.
I begin the real lettering by arranging the dialogue words in a centered diamond pattern. I take time to putting words on different lines until it looks more professional.
Next, I expand the balloon size and set it up to “anchor” to the top of the panel. I use the Rectangle tool to make a new shape and put it on top of the balloon shape. Then, in the Pathfinder Box’s Shape Modes (Shift+Ctrl+F9), select both of the shapes, select Unite. The paths of those shapes will merge into one new shape.
Time to create a balloon tail to point to Fatty. Using the pen tool, I can draw a rough tail shape and use the Direct Selection tool to work the shape to a pointed tail. The same steps to Unite the tail to the balloon to have a connected balloon.
Now make more rectangles and arrange to align to the borders of the panel. I get rid of the fill color for a short time, only seeing the lines. The rectangles must arrange over the round balloon. You can select Object>Arrange>Send to Front) or Ctrl+Shift+] to send objects above each other.
After that, select the rectangles and the word balloon. Next, select the Pathfinder’s Shape Modes, and select Minus Front. Cut out the balloon shape for the panel anchoring.
These steps work for most of the dialogue bubbles I did in this book. For one of them, I made a yelling balloon. Found this tutorial for making yelling dialogue balloons by Jim Campbell.
I go on Page 3 to do some work on this charging scream from the boyfriend character. I convert the text into an image and then re-arrange and resize the letters. The results are a nice, disjointed scream that emphasizes the dude’s rage well!
Now that my letters are in a good position, I can punch the screaming up with bold outlines! I used some tips from Comicscraft‘s book on making Emphasis Bubbles.
I make a new little speech bubble and move it to the middle white letter stroke color layer. Next, I manipulate the shape of the ellipse to make the stroke size 10 pt. Then, I adjust the bottom black letter stroke color layer to make it look seamless.
I use my previous balloon-making techniques to build up a new balloon shape.
I rearrange the bubble back in the proper place. Plus, I fiddle with a few more adjustments in my vector nodes, and I’ve completed a new screaming balloon for page 3!
Now I do a little to figure out what I can do for page 4 and the fat guy’s maniacal laughter. I try out a Blambot font called Torn Asunder. I created outlines out of the typed font, and edit each letter with the lasso tool to make it look pretty decent.
More progress on the laugh. I make it easier for myself to arrange the lettering in groups and manipulate them into sections.
Fore Page 5 Panel 1, I was laxer, and I stuck with using a Warp filter to the text.
Did some more work on some other panels. For the gross sound effect, I used Torn Asunder from Blambot again!
I didn’t plan enough for sound effects, but it will help to have them. I’m using the Damn Noisy Kids font from Blambot.
I’m very close to the wrap-up phase of lettering. I first started to use the Newsflash font from Blambot for my title and endings, but I still didn’t feel it was right.
But then, I looked up GameStop’s logo and learned something hilarious and pitiful. GameStop uses the Impact font, a terrible free font that’s in most computers and terrible image memes.
Now to start wrapping things up. First, I unlock full of my usable layers, making sure Overprint stroke is checked on all my balloons. Next, I Select all the letter stuff in the panel.
I go to Object>Rasterize and Set it to the Highest Print Res that I have.
That’ll make it easier to export the text back to Clip Studio or Photoshop as a transparent layer. I can overlay this on top of all my pages.
I did some last-minute stuff to add a new reaction bubble for Panel 1 of Page 2.
Now it’s time to export my stuff from Illustrator. The original digital file is at 600 dpi because it’s easier to shrink than to expand them. So I save to 72 dpi to keep space low.
So I export it as a transparent PNG so it will fit in the pages with the screentones that I’m still working on back in Clip Studio Paint.
After importing the rest of my lettering, I use my Layer Masks to clean up the text to fall behind the monster on the page.
I fiddle about with my Lasso, Magic Wand, and Hard Brush to work with my mask. The lettering is now behind the monster, as I need it to be.
So I do this for the other pages in the comic, fiddling with other lettering areas.
I’m not liking how straight one panel looks, so I curve it down a bit.
One sound effect kinda blends into the line art, so I did a bit of toning work to get it to pop out more.
I’m pretty much finished with the lettering now, I’m 90% finished with this story! This step was a large learning experience for me! I knew that lettering is an underappreciated art that’s very easy to mess up. I wanted to do my best with this comic, and that includes getting more familiar with lettering. There’s much to still learn, but now I can press forward with Game Store’s tutorial!
It’s been a productive start to my new year. Despite nursing a head cold, I had for the first few weeks, I made plenty of art to prepare for the coming year!
On February 12th, I’ll be tabling at Northwest Indiana Comic-Con! It’s the first time in two years that I’ve tabled at a con!
The things you’ve seen on my Etsy Store, you can get them at the con! This comes with the added benefit of meeting me in person and having a chat!
If you don’t know what you want to buy from me or have everything I have to offer, from my comics to my stickers, I opened a Ko-fi page as a tip jar. You can drop a small tip to me and commend my efforts!
Continue readingWhen I drew Incident at the Game Store, I didn’t plan to color the pages because I wanted to make a larger anthology. I’m keeping this step because I already put in the work for it. So it might be helpful for anyone who wants to take the option.
If you’re up to having a signed physical book of Game Store for yourself, you can stop by my Etsy store and grab a copy!
It’s time to use Clip Studio to do something experimental. I’ll be adding screentones to give some of my art a gray tone with only black and white dots. I’m working on a tutorial on screentoning from Whyt Manga. Also check out his comic, Apple Black!
In Manga Studio 5 EX or Clip Studio Paint, there is a Material Tab. It would be in the default UI but if it is not, go to Window>Material>Material[Dot]. You’ll find a variety of textures and screentones from this tab, and you can make custom ones, but I’m making a basic dot pattern.
![Window>Material>Material[Dot]](https://i0.wp.com/www.mastafran.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Digital_work_42.png?resize=584%2C963&ssl=1)
I select one of the pre-made tones and edit them by clicking “Settings of Toning…” This will give you the Simple Tone Settings window. Next, set the number of lines for 70, which in this instance, determines the amount of dots in the pattern. Then set the Density(B) to 30, white, then determine how big and fat those dots are. After that, I set the Angle at 23 degrees, this is the rotated orientation of the texture. I made it at an angle that’s not an even number, giving it a tiny bit of flaw to the texture.
So now we can drag this texture to my comic and now the entire screen has screentoned! It’ll make a separate screentone layer with a mask of the texture, so this saves a ton of work than other programs.
Fill the layer masks with a transparent color to mask it out, a staple of digital image editing programs. I then edit my masks with a normal unaliased round brush.
You can also select with my lasso and magic wand tools to mask and unmask as needed. I usually start a panel by selecting an entire panel and filling the general screentone.
I also do some other screentone things, like adding a darker screen tone for the black girlfriend.
II continue these processes for the rest of the pages. I’m nailing down the rough spots I need.
I did more experimentation with screentoning. Trying to stack screentone layers on top of each other and masking with a soft brush to for a gradient look.
Again, I created this step before I decided to color the comic properly. The original idea was to keep the book black and white, so there are many steps before I colored.
Now that this all is done, it’s time to put some words to these pictures!
Onward from Part 4 of my Inking Section
After inking my comic, Incident at the Game Store, I make some touch ups to the pages to prepare for coloring! I split this section from my inking part, so it won’t stretch so long.
If you’re up to having a signed physical book for yourself, you can stop by my Etsy store and grab a copy!
To start, I scan my pages in any scanner that can scan a Portable Document Format (PDF) at 600 dpi and I use Photoshop to import the PDF pages.
I scan it in Color, Greyscale and Black and White Modes for coverage. But I generally use the color scans, so I have more control over the gray before I work them down to black and white.
When you open the PDF in Photoshop, the image files separate. I prefer to pull them into one document, with each page in different layers. This will make it faster to resize and adjust for the print margins!
I use Multiply Layer mode to help me align my artwork, so it’s consistent to crop and align for lettering.
All the layers are on the Multiply Layer style mode: meaning the lighter colors of the layer are clear while the darker ones are solid.
Next, I crop the page for coloring, adjusting to the comic paper’s trim line for later printing. Don’t fret too much about making it perfect, as it’s difficult to get them all aligned like that in the first place.
Here’s a page that’s now cropped.
From here, use Image>Adjustments>Hue and Saturation to clear the blue pencil sketches. Use the Cyan and Blue dropdown settings to only affect the blue pencil work. Push down the Saturation Bar, then push up the Brightness Bar. This will keep as much gray tone as possible to not destroy my blacks too much.
I then work with my Image>Adjustments> Levels to bring up the contrast of blacks and whites. Doing as little as I can to not destroy too much of the thinner lines.
More Level editing as I try to make my blacks deeper.
This is the panel of art so far. Now it’s time for more intricate edits.
This next process is simpler. Use the round brush and tools for a pressure sensitive, size changing brush tool with a white color to clean up stray lines and specks.
The scan caught my paper edits, so I need to clean them up. I use the Lasso tool to move parts of the background lettering to realign the sign letters.
I work on the mall kiosk line art to realign it to something normal.
Continue with my Brush tool to clean up mistakes I didn’t catch with in the ink drawings.
Here is the entire page so far! The same process is used for working with the rest of my scanned ink art. Time to prep this page for future coloring!
First, I adjust the art to be completely black and white with no gray by using Image>Adjustments>Threshold.
Adjustment to make sure thinner lines don’t disappear too much.
Select >Color Range, then select the white color anywhere.
This will select every pixel in the image with that white color.
I make a New Layer (Shift+Ctrl+N) and Fill (Shift+F5) in a Black color, making a layer with only the black line art. In general, I do this process with all the pages. You can also get away with putting your line art Layer Blend Mode to Multiply. But you’d miss out on the flexibility of editing your lines, including the ability to color them without affecting your normal colors.
Here are all page comparisons, from initial scan to final touches!
