Louistrations

A slightly different take on a Summer scene. I wanted to focus more on the warm Summer breeze rather than beaches, bikinis and barbecues. More of a realistic British Summer you might say.

Chipper's outline was created as a vector image using the pen tool, whilst the background is basic pencil on paper. Some finer details were added directly using Photoshop, so there's a bit of everything really.

I drew the background whilst watching Wimbledon on television, which is probably why I spent so long drawing it. The background consists of several layers, a lot of what I drew isn't even visible in the final composition. There's an entire hillside - but you can only see the tiniest portion between Chipper's legs.

You don't want to know how long it took to complete; I was worried I wouldn't even get in finished for Summer!

Wow, that's a lot of dialogue! I hope that it all makes sense, I've been looking at the page for so long that it's lost any meaning for me!

After experimenting using only pencil, I ended up using ink after all. The page was made in a very similar fashion to the previous two pages.

I made a really bad job with the inking and had to redraw a lot of it using my graphics tablet; Something that I don't like doing and that I'm not particularly good at. I wanted to scrap this piece on numerous occasions.

For the next page you get Chipper in kindergarten, it's also the first appearance of the support character. Although I'm currently working on a stand alone picture, so that will probably be posted beforehand.

Once again, I've posted snapshots of the piece at various stages below. If you're inclined to see my many mistakes and edits, please feel free to take a look.

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This picture was made for my deviantART front page. It's a relatively simple picture of Chipper drinking from a mug. In fact, you could even go so far as calling it a mug shot of Chipper. Da-dum-dum-tish!

I realised that I didn't actually have any pictures of Chipper other than those on the comics. The image currently used in the top-right of the website along with it's earlier incarnations (including when she had bright pink hair) was lost when I inadvertently forgot to back-up my websites folder.

You'd be right in thinking that this seems a little familiar, it's the same basic comic as the previous one but in an entirely different setting. It also took longer to complete than the last one. I started working on it a little over three months ago, admittedly it's not been everyday; but it still feels like I've spent forever working on it. It's hard to justify putting so much time into a single six panel comic strip. Regardless, I'm happy to say it's finally finished and move on to something else.

If you're interested, I've posted below snapshots of the piece taken at various stages of it's creation. All the way from the initial scribbles to the final composition.

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Who's this? You'll probably recognise her as the girl drinking from a mug in the top right-hand corner of the web-site.

She's been there in various different forms from early on in the development of the web-site. She's named Chipper, which is actually the project name I gave to the web-site which she inherited. During my time coding the web-site and doing menial database work I came up with a handful of tea related comic pages about her. You see, this is what happens when I get left to my thoughts for too long!

This page took far too long to finish, a lot longer than I had anticipated. Although it's all my own doing, it's very much an experimental piece. I tried out a lot of new techniques, most of which failed horribly. Most notably was my brilliant idea of inking directly on to tracing paper; I could have lovely clean lines without the original pencil lines interfering! What was I thinking? Ink doesn't take well to tracing paper, I got ink everywhere! What a noob!

I did have success in a few areas though. For instance, this was the first time I've used masking in Photoshop.

Update: I've gone back and compiled snapshots of the piece at various stages like the subsequent pages.

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