Creative Process

The artwork & the process

I have been noodling around with this idea for years - original incarnations used hand inked pages scanned to Photoshop and Corel Paint for final lines and coloring.  Today's comic has been created digitally using Procreate on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil for the artwork followed by Comic Life 3 on a MacBook Pro to lay out the panels and text.

Physical notebook

This all started in 2009 while on vacation with my family on Martha's Vineyard.  I sketched out the idea, story, and initial images in a physical notebook, then set the idea aside for a while.

The original notebook sketches are available here

Sketchup Model

I'm an amateur artist at best, and the airship I'd designed was hard to draw well from varying angles!  I decided to create a 3D model of the airship to help with this challenge.  This took a while, and was my first real experience with 3D modeling.

Children's book

In 2013, I created a version of this as a children's book for my kiddos titled "We live in an airship!".  It was fun for the kids, but I didn't like it nearly enough to share more widely.

Embarrassing (to me) but available here

Digital notebook

In 2016, I rebooted the idea as a series of Tintin-esque adventures set in the indeterminate future, taking part in creative technology solutions to the challenges of climate change.  (All via GoodNotes on iPad).

Read: Series notes, Our life in the sky, Clouds over the Pacific, Sketches

Procreate

All the artwork in this comic comes together in Procreate, using 2 simple brushes (technical and studio pens) and liberal use of flood fill / layers.  You'll see I am unabashed about building on top of existing imagery I find - I want to tell a story, not prove my artistic abilities!  Still, everything is hand drawn at the end of the day.

Watch all the pages as they come to life on our YouTube channel

Comic Life 3

Originally I'd planned to do lettering and gutters by hand, however I found it frustrating to edit / rewrite text, and I'd had fun with Comic Life years ago.  Not perfect, but sufficient to the task - this allowed me to lay out and tweak text over time, replace portions of images as I improved them, etc. 

Publishing files

The final step is bundling the comic up for various ebookstores.  I use Amazon's Kindle Comic Creator to create a version for their store (with panel view support), and then used Sigil to create a simple epub version for the Play and iBooks stores.  (I'm publishing through Streetlib for those latter stores).

I plan to create a print-ready pdf for Amazon's KDP, however this is less important and kind of annoying... so not there yet.