After 3 years!...

How I draw The Meiosis Webcomic

Beware: loads of text and pictures!

I want to mention that since at the time of writing this (25/02/2k9) I am still refining my style and technique I can't say this is the final technique that I will use for all Meiosis strips, but if you're so inclined it may be of interest. This is inspired by this thread in the Petroglyph Games' forums.

I draw using an H pencil on fairly cheap paper. I use WHSmith's own brand which has a pretty decent texture and is strong enough to be handled very roughly. You can tell I couldn't find the non-ringbound pads, so I just destroyed two of them. I love my metal ruler, I would never use a plastic ruler since I am very destructive. Yes, I do sometimes muck around when I'm stuck for expressions.

These are the completed pencils. It takes me a distressing amount of time to get posture and positions correct and it gets "worse" the better I get, I believe Tangents has documented the problem on his blog, but since I take more time "caring" about what I do, I feel that the increased "actions per minute" I do more than makes up for it, and I hope you appreciate it.

I ink using edding 1800 pens which are fairly reliable and are a compromise between cost and finesse. They're technical so line width is more dependant on pen choice then hand pressure, so not good for people who like grand strokes. As you can see, I scan in fairly messy. I don't force the scanner to reduce the greyscale to 2 colours you may notice.

I use PaintShop Pro version 7.04 for my work. I have read it is the best version and while clearly outshone by GIMP and Paint.net is a reliable underdog I've used for many years. I cut each panel into "frames" which I manipulate spererately. Firstly, I reduce the number of colours to two and clean up artifacts and make any edits that I may not have noticed.

This is a screencap from the actual frame being manipulated. I tend to name the linework layer anything I feel like ("Cat" in this case). The colours go all on a layer of their own unless the scene is exceptionally complicated and sometimes I may use multiple linework files to make a complete image. The lightness and darkness layers are given their own layers and the adjustment layer(s) (called "dark" in this case) has it's own layer and priority. Of note is that I don't draw eye details in my inks, I prefer to add them later.

As a comparison, here is the same frame with all layers but the linework and colours turned off.

A completed frame is then added to a new blank image file with a transparent background. I make the image huge to accomodate any weird layouts I may be using. I place all my other frames needed together. You may notice that I didn't add one frame from the original lines. Sometimes I remove frames that don't work as well or shift them a comic back/forward, depnding on the scene or context.

The completed comic. I still use PSP to do text and bubbles although I write my script in MS Works wordprocessor since PSP is terrible for mass text and has no spell check function. How I write comics is a different Quarantine Article I'm afraid.