Nestor (solyo) approached me a while ago to do this collab with him, giving me a pretty awesome concept for a comic as a t-shirt, so I'm going to finish the design for my second threadless loves comics submission. As with the first one, which you can check out, and score here: I'm going to post a blog of the entire design process from start to finish:

1. Since I'm going for a more loose cartoony look I went pretty straight to pencils for this design, and added some temporary type for the bottom half:

2. I'm pretty happy with the pencils as are, and will tighten them once I get to the inking stage. So, I'm going to blue line the inks to print out onto bristol board. Here's how I do that:

First I make a new layer:

Then I set my color to 30% cyan:

Then I fill the new layer with the 30% cyan:

Then I set the new layer to "Screen" over the bottom layer:

Which leaves me with blue lines I can print and ink over:

1. Once I've printed out my bluelines, I go to inking, using 005, 01, 05, and 08 microns, and my pentel pocket brush pen. Finished inking the header... Now to brew some coffee, and take a brief break! Sweet! Finished inking!
2. At this point, I scan in my bristol board:
3. I then clean up and separate my ink layer from the white page. Here's how: A. I use "curves" in photoshop to adjust my inks to where they are a solid black and solid white: B. I select the page and cut it, then make an alpha channel in channels: C. I paste the image into my alpha channel: D. Staying on my alpha channel, I then click the circular marching ant icon shown below: E. This selects the black on the layer: F. I then go to the cmyk channels: G. I then Fill the selection with black: H. I make a new layer, and drag it below my line layer: I. I then fill that layer with white (temporarily): At this point, this is what my layers look like:
4. Coloring. I pick a shirt color from threadless, and color my background layer based on that. Then I make a new middle layer, which I use to paint on the flat colors: Which under the linework look like this: I'll post as I get colors done, although I'm liking the idea of halftones as well, and some distressing, so it might take a while. Sweet! Finished "flatting" the colors for the design: under the line layer: 8.Texturing and halftoning I added textures, and halftones, and simplified the design's color pallette: Without lines: And finally, with lines: Now to put together the submission!

Subbed!