mababang langit

finally got started on that munny i promised to make for sputnik comics ages and ages ago. here are some of the materials i'll be using: first we give the munny a good wash: then we soften the vinyl (by heating it with a hairdryer) and cut out the ears with a hobby knife (got it cheap at saizen). reverse the ears, put them back in and stuff the resulting cavity with aluminum foil. hot-glue everything in place. trim off excess glue with knife. put some pre-kneaded sculpey over the hole and attempt to approximate a round head despite not really knowing what you're doing. i've started on the 'palong' here. i probably won't be able to find the appropriate googly eyes for this project, so, more sculpey. beak (looking more like a bill) and tongue. okay my fingers are raw from hours of rubbing sculpey by now, so let's work on the arms for a while. the munny came with a set of angel wings as accessories; i separated them using scissors and attached one to each arm...

this a follow-up of sorts to yesterday's comics-making guide by gio paredes. callworks cartoonist hazel manzano shares her self-publishing guide here . and by self-publishing i don't mean photocopying or print-on-demand; hazel basically shows you how to set up your own publishing company. it's neither easy nor cheap, but there's no bigger dream for an independent-minded indie creator.

kalayaan creator gio paredes put together a tutorial on how to make your own indie komiks here .

earlier i described my process for drawing my comic "ang maskot". you can read that here . so now i have all 48 pages done in individual adobe illustrator .ai files, and the next step is to get them ready for the photocopying shop. not having any desktop publishing software (and not knowing how to use 'em anyways), i did some common-sense improvisation: taking fourteen pieces of scratch paper, i folded them together in the middle to make a mock-up pamphlet, numbered the pages using a ballpen, and then took the pamphlet apart gain. now all i have to do is replicate the ordering of the pages on the sheets using the same program i started with, adobe illustrator. i open a new document 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches high in illustrator. based on the mockup's page numbering, i paste the two appropriate illustrator files onto the new document. here it's the front and back cover-- the outer face of the first sheet. i then arrange them by hand, leaving a bit of margin al...

five days to go before komikon! i made a crude sldeshow of my comics-making process for "ang maskot" described in my earlier post . but blogger doesn't seem to support flash animation, so i had to upload it to my deviantart . click here to see it.

this is a sample page from my self-published comic, "ang maskot", which i created entirely as vector art in adobe illustrator. the techniques i describe below were essentially made up as i bumbled along, so they may amuse and/or tick off any comics pros reading this. so let's start off with brainstorming. "ang maskot" began long ago with an overheard conversation about a friend who may or may not have dressed up as a mascot for a children's party--i'm a little fuzzy about the details. but eventually ideas started coming together in my head until one day i finally sat down and started drawing thumbnail sketches (if you can call 'em that): just quick scribbles on the cheap mini-intermediate pads i favor as scratch paper. plot, layouting, pacing, a smattering of dialogue... i lay things down so i won't forget later. and since i'm both writer and artist, the drawings only need to make sense to myself (but even there i've failed once or twic...