Comments on: Bee Allergy.

By: Jarrett

Jarrett — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:17:16 +0000

brilliant comic. it took me two looks at the thud panel but so what.

By: jim (JP&TM creator)

jim (JP&TM creator) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:52:51 +0000

Thanks M, I’m workin’ on it!

By: midnightalone

midnightalone — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:10:16 +0000

This is a great webcomic *salute*

-M

By: jim (JP&TM creator)

jim (JP&TM creator) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 02:58:19 +0000

Thanks Dave, now how about you go out and get furious? I’m afraid your Europe vacation may have taken some of your edge off.

By: Furious D

Furious D — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:45:47 +0000

Loving the more ambitious layouts. And sadly, though I’m not allergic, that’s exactly what I do when I see a bee.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:35:23 +0000

I’ll have to check into fontlab. Thanks for the tip.
No, I have not listened to the podcast yet. I’m at home now, but most of my web comic viewing I do at work. Checking out comics is one thing, but I don’t think it would be apreciated if I was streaming audio in the office.
To comment on Illustrator vs Photoshop for text: In Illustrator, once you have the text typed, you can “create outlines” and then manipulate the text further just like any other vector art, or just add stroke if the font doesn’t have a bold version. As I said earlier, I am partial to vector art, so I prefer working in Illustrator. I do prefer the filters and adjustment layers in Photoshop to anything Illustrator has in it’s filters or effects.

By: jim (JP&TM creator)

jim (JP&TM creator) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:16:48 +0000

hm… not sure, I don’t use photoshop for it much, but I use illustrator because I have my frames, word bubbles and text all in one file, and it’d divided by layers, so there’s a bubble layer, a text layer and a frame layer, and it’s more convenient to manipulate them as objects on the same layer than the way photoshop puts all that stuff on it’s own layers. I don’t know if it would pay off for daily strips or not, but for more complicated arrangements, I like it.

By: wit

wit — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:30:19 +0000

Are there any other benefits with using Illustrator to letter your strips rather than Photoshop (other than spell check)?

By: jim (JP&TM creator)

jim (JP&TM creator) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:54:57 +0000

I used fontlab. I found a book “learn fontlab fast” which was priceless and pretty much worked as advertised. I never bothered learning the more high end font stuff though, because I found that using a digital tablet and the brush tool in fontlab, I can whip up a font pretty quickly, and then it’s just a matter of adjusting the spacing. (I guess kerning helps here, but I never got to that chapter in the book)

Speaking of working digitally, Have you listened to the comics coast to coast podcast yet? There’s a link in my side bar to it… In the episode where they interview the creator of Baldo, he talks about working digitally, and he mentions how fast he can create a daily strip… He also covered digital work a bit more in the forum when I asked him about it… good info there.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:42:17 +0000

I’ve never used painter. I have recently started working with a wacom tablet in Ill, Freehand and Photoshop. I really have not gotten the feel for working strictly digital yet. They say practice makes perfect, but we’ll see. I would like to move out of the stone age, but for now I work paper/scanner/Illustrator.

On the topic of fonts, I have recently started using Font Creator 5.5. It has been tedious, but its free. Which program did you use?