Done with my first full-color comic

So I finished (pending a few minor tweaks that I may or may not do by the due date, which is next Sunday) the 3 page Captain America fan comic that's going in a fanzine alongside lots of other VERY pretty art. And it was definitely a learning experience!

Unfortunately, zine rules means that I can't post the finished pages digitally until end of August (so that people have an incentive to order the zine).

But here's some things that I did that I've never done before:

- Do a full color comic! This meant I had to create color swatches and be much more conscious of the warm/cold, light/dark, and saturation levels of various colors. In the process, I also discovered that:
A) Sketchbook Pro's color picker is broken. I'd eyedrop the same color patch and get different results every time. I ended up writing down some key rgb #s using the Photoshop eyedropper and then manually entering it to get the right skintone, etc.
B) I really like Sketchbook Pro's color puck, after I figured out that it could easily adjust HSB. Basically dragging left/right adjusts saturation, and dragging up/down adjusts Brightness. Clicking on it brings up a color wheel to adjust Hue. It made shading pretty easy once I got the right base color. (The problem was getting the base color because the eyedropper was whack)

- Draw an open landscape! In Tisquantum it's been either trees or buildings, but this time it was set in a cemetery, so I found myself figuring out horizon lines, hilly terrain, and open sky for the first time. Had to ask myself crucial questions like "is the top of the sky darker or the horizon line?" For the first time, I had thoughts like "hmm... how is early autumn late afternoon light different from mid-day mid-summer light?" I'm pretty happy with the colors I picked for that -- not perfect by far, but not bad for the first time. And now it's something I can be more observant about in the future! :D

- Dealing with getting 1.5 pgs of material to fit either as a 2-pager or 1-pager. It was an interesting learning experience -- I can't say more without showing examples, but I think I learned some stuff about comic flow and cutting out the dialogue cruft. Basically I made the 2 pages feel thinner by using 1.2 pg worth of dialogue, but gave the art more time to breathe, and I think the pacing worked out. There's something here to think about re: panel size, # of panels, and amount of dialogue/emotion covered in 1 panel, and how they interplay to set the pacing and flow. (And how effective each of those 3 elements are at lengthening/shortening the pacing.)

- I chatted with other cool fandom artists! A number of them are in the midst of con season, so it was interesting to see them approach fanart as a means to make a living.


Also, I should really get a font editor and make my own comic font. I'm not happy with any of the ones that I'm currently using. :/ Comic fonts have pretty particular requirements! To wit:
- Legible
- "handwritten" feel without getting too much personality (not too cutesy, not to haphazard)
- "I" needs crossbars. (And "l" should be able to substitute for crossbar-less I)
- Length of space shouldn't be too wide, but needs sufficient width to make words more readable
- Capital letters and those lines that go down (in y, g, p, q) and up (in b, d, l, h, k, t, f) in lower case can't be too tall
- Needs to be rounded for better legibility, but also skinnier to fit in more words
- Have good BOLD options???