As
I got deeper into the March creative challenge, I assembled all the
drawing I had made that I would use for my mini comic and marveled at
how bad I thought they were. I wanted to keep the feeling of the hand
drawn images, even if they were rudimentary.
The
first step was to render the drawings digitally. I’m sure I did this
the most inefficient way possible. I simple scanned each drawing and
made them into a .pdf. Then I opened the .pdf in Illustrator. Once in
Illustrator I took a few different approaches, but the end result was
a much cleaner version of what I had drawn. Now, if I had a digital
sketch pad, I could have simply drawn them digitally to begin with.
In
Illustrator I had a few choices to make. I decided to keep everything
in black and white. This was somewhat of a funny thing because I had
made an initial mood board and it included a color palette. I made it
black and white only because I wanted to make these drawings into the
classic 8 panel zine. That said, I wanted to reproduce these easily
and cheaply. A black and white photocopy doesn’t cost nearly as much
as the color one does.
Then,
once I had all my images the way I wanted them, I was able to resize
them to format of the zine. When using a standard letter size piece
of paper, each panel gets to 4.25” by 2.75” with very little room
for error. Each of my images I put to words and then I fitted them on
the panel. I made a few new illustrations and I was off.
When
making these zines, I kept the photocopier in mind. Each photocopier
will grab the paper differently, so I had to make sure the images all
stayed on their respective pages. I kept this in mind and I made my
layout accordingly.
I
went to the copy center, and I made copies and it worked.
I
took my favorite illustration from the series and made it into a
cover for the four comics I made, so that they all stayed together.
The real inspiration was the size. Years ago, I was taken with the
repurposed cigarette machines in Las Vegas that sold art. So, that’s
what I did.