Bro It Up: The process

I drew a small comic last semester and the apparent lesson was boring dialogue. Despite the waste of time the assignment was, I drew it anyway. The penciled line art and dialogue had to be finished in an hour so I saved time by producing the lines on a 7" x 10" sheet rather than a full 11" x 17" sheet and used a simple cartoon style. Now if the class had time to sit and think of interesting things to say, we all could have produced something fantastic, unfortunately, for some reason, it had to be rushed like a bat out of Hell. I scribbled down a conversation much more bland than this the first time around.

This semester, the digital colouring instructor wanted us to hand in a fully finished comic. I rumaged through my stack of comic strips and I found this one burried at the bottom, totally forgotten. The cartooning style made it unique. If you know who the Gorillaz are, you could probably see the similarities. I was viewing some of their art at the time I drew this and gained some inspiration from their eyes and noses.

I slapped the sheet back on the table and put ink over top the penciled lines. I scanned the comic into Photoshop and produced the flat colours creating a vibrant colour palette. I began using multiple layerd for shadows, midtones and highlights but that first panel took far too long. I cut back to the basic tones for the rest of the comic, just using the lasso tool and nothing else. The colouring went by quickly after that and them came the time to add the ballons.

I opened the page in Illustrator, selected the elipse tool and set fill and stroke attributes before dropping circles in all the panels. The dialogue is inspired from a Derrick Comedy skit found on youtube called "Bro Rape: An Investigative Report". some hilarious stuff. The guy with the bag is definitely a bro and he's speaking to an emo kid. That third fugly guy is there for no reason.

After the text was dropped in, the ballons were adjusted accordingly and then added tails to each of them. The fonts were downloaded off the internet from BlamBot and I converted all the text to shapes because i knew printers rarely have a font called Evil Genius. The final layout, with both tiff and eps elements, was composed in Quark Express (I still say it's better than InDesign).

I gather the process, from pencils to pre press, took about six or eight hours.