For the email attachment panel I was looking for a photo that was
equal parts cheesy and stupid
(ie something you could only
find humorous in a spacey, sleep-deprived state). After a
fruitless search through my own email history I ended up falling back
on a combination of Google
and Photoshop
to piece together the above monstrosity (which I feel serves its
purpose adequately).
The entirety of the comics' hand drawn artwork was completed on two
11" by 14"
pages. The remainder of Rambles' 30+ panels were
illustrated in the computer.
This is a approach I like to
call "the environmentally-friendly artist" technique
(or,
more accurately, "the Eric's too cheap to scrimp for extra paper"
technique).
For this comic the biggest challenge artistically was spotting the
black areas of the
panels (something I haven't done a lot
of in the past). To make this process easier
I inked and
scanned the outlines first and then experimented with the placement
of
the dark shadows in Photoshop where I
could easily "undo" any mistakes I made.
For the computer panels I basically traced over slightly altered
screenshots using my tablet
to achieve the realistic,
hand-drawn look. For the final versions I decreased the resolution
of the
artwork to give them a pixelated, computer-generated
texture that contrasts with the other panels.