terence n. tijuana Office Cubicles in Space

But not so hiatus-ish until I can’t put out random content. I finally got my computer fixed!

I got Photoshop and Flash reinstalled, and found that I could still knock out a drawing of Ace Pilot. However, all my preset brushes for inking and colouring are gone.

Anyway, check this space for the occasional update. I don’t intend to return to regular webcomicking any time soon, but I may put up stuff now and then. Thanks for being a reader!

Today, I’m going to describe how I create some of the graphics in Terence N. Tijuana.

If you haven’t already noticed, I’ll point out that this comic incorporates ‘traditional’ hand-drawn stuff with ‘Photoshop-tomfoolery’.

The hand-drawn stuff are essentially images that I sketch out on paper, scan into my PC and ink over using my Intuos3 tablet. The other, non-hand-drawn images are created in Photoshop using a mouse and lots of mind-boggling patience and a million ‘Undo’ clicks.

This tutorial will cover the second type of art, and another tutorial which I’ll publish in a few days will describe the traditional approach.

We will be looking at how I created the spaceport in this comic.

Needless to say, we start by loading Photoshop:

Back in March, I responded to the Family Webcomics website’s call for artwork to be used on their homepage. The piece I sent them is finally up on the site:

Here’s a larger version of the artwork:

A while back, I made a guest comic for Lucy Lyall of the webcomic Kaspall. In return, she sent me an amazing character sketch, which you can view below:

Really incredible work! It’s more than I could’ve asked for.

You can view the guest comic I did on the Kaspall site by clicking below.

In case you’re interested, the comic above was based on a conversation in this Kaspall comic. And yes, my guest piece is a pale shadow of Lucy’s work.

Ok, so the comic for today is slightly delayed.

I’ve finished the inks, so you can take a look. First one to guess what’s going on gets 1000 points. When you’ve collected 1 billion points, you get to take over artwork responsibilities on Terence N. Tijuana.

Have you ever flipped through an old high-school year book and laughed at how you and your friends used to look like?

I did the same thing today, with the cast page of Terence N. Tijuana. Duuuude!

The characters looked so different (and ridiculous) back then.

This made me compile some pics to show how they’ve grown over the months (’grown’ being a respectful cover-up term for ‘inconsistency’).

Take a look:

The dudes:
Ace Pilot: Terence N. Tijuana’s defacto main character is easily the face I draw the most frequent, and it’s also the most flexible in terms of expressiveness. In the beginning, though, he was seriously the hardest to draw consistently. I’ve filled pages with sketches of Ace, because I just couldn’t get the shape of his hair right.

General: The General looks less kid-like nowadays, although I always intended to inject a certain childish quality into his design to reflect his blundering personality. He’s also relatively easy to draw from all angles.

Helmsman: Formerly known as ‘Main Pilot’ until I renamed him, he’s made very few appearances so far. I don’t know why I don’t draw this dude more often, his spiky hair requires no effort. His design hasn’t changed much from the original.

Rookie Pilot: Rookie’s design was an adaptation of the main character (Trent) from my previous comic, t-n-t. Since I’d had lots of practice with his predecessor, he wasn’t hard to draw and I’ve managed to maintain consistency (ergo, no growth).

The ladies:
Captain: This fine lady has certainly morphed drastically from her original design. She’s the most mature character (although she acts silly occasionally) and the original design was just too… cartoonish for me. Of all the cast members, her eyes give me the most trouble because I can’t distort them much (for expressions) or she’ll look like another person. Her hair is the most fun to draw. It’s CRAZY!

Chief Engineer: She’s another character who’s undergone a fair amount of transformation. I found the original unappealing: small eyes spaced wide apart, squarish jaw, huge mouth. I must’ve been drunk when I designed her . Her most challenging angle is her side profile.

Doctor: Formerly known as ‘Medical Officer’, this character has been very quiet lately. She’s supposed to be the youngest and smallest, hence her large, manga-esque eyes. I haven’t had much opportunity to give her wild expressions, so I’m still ‘getting to know her’.

General’s Wife: The General’s Wife, like her spouse, has ‘grown-up’ quite a bit. She’s also pretty easy to draw.

Trivia!

(Because trivia is uncomplicated and requires no cohesive planning)

The General and his wife basically share the same face, with different hair slapped on.

Other than the couple, all the characters have different eye designs.

Helmsman and Rookie Pilot share the same ear design.

Ace Pilot is the only character with no ears or eyebrows. (Some of the ladies’ ears are covered by hair)

The married couple share the same nose, but all the other characters have unique nose designs. Chief Engineer’s is close to the couple’s, but lacks the extra ’stroke’ across the top. Rookie Pilot’s and Doctor’s are similar, but his is curved whereas hers is angular.

All the female characters have double-coloured pupils except Chief Engineer. All the male characters have single-coloured pupils except the General.

Captain is the only character with lips.

Have you ever read a Terence N. Tijuana comic and then wondered, where the heck is this taking place?

Do you ever get the impression that the backdrops in the comic are just that, random backgrounds that the artist came up with?

Does going through the Terence N. Tijuana’s archive make you feel lost and desolate? (lol)

Well, here’s the solution to all your troubles:

Source of the panels:

Panel 1: Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

Panel 2: Disengage Lock

Panel 3: T Minus One

Panel 4: Space Fighter Launch Sequence

Panel 5: Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

Panel 6: T Minus One

Panel 7: Delectable

Panel 8: Delectable

Panel 9: Disengage Lock

Now you know!

Jackson Ferrell speaks to the creators of one of my favourite webcomics, Blank It, on his webcomic review site. If you enjoy online comics, you really should check out his site, because he does a lot of the reviews in, well, comic-form! Double the goodness.

On a side note, here’s a Blast From The Past: a Tijuana Freestyle comic where I snuck in a Blank It reference in the first panel:

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at today’s comic, as well as this comic from 3 weeks ago.

Figure 1 shows Ace Pilot’s air/spacecraft, after I sketched/scanned/inked it.

I actually extrapolated Figure 1 from Figure 2, which is an initial (and very primitive) sketch of the same machine which debuted in this strip 3 weeks ago. Some of the details from Figure 2 did not make it into Figure 1, which also contains features not present in the previous version. Yeah, there’s a continuity issue here, but seriously, you don’t care, right? Designing this stuff is complicated enough, and Figure 2 was a half-baked attempt which I obscured with a lot of shadows in the actual comic.

I bet nobody noticed until I pointed it out!

PS: If all goes well, you guys will get to see an exterior shot of the Terence N. Tijuana for the first time since this strip. Keep your fingers crossed, spaceships are damned difficult to sketch!

This is the first ‘tutorial’ I am creating for Terence N. Tijuana. I’m calling it a ‘tutorial’, but it’s more a ‘making-of’, because I’m going to gloss over all the technical details and just describe the overall process.

To be different, I am going to ‘reverse-engineer’ a comic for you. This panel was taken from Monday, July 27 2009’s comic:

Step 10:

The finished product, featuring almost the whole cast assembled together for the first time. They’re walking along a corridor in the Terence N. Tijuana, and you can see them through one of the ship’s large picture windows from the outside.

Step 9:

I strip back a few layers here, namely the reflections of light and the cityscape opposite the ship, which I drew on a separate layer and overlaid on the glass with lowered transparency settings. I also removed the ‘glow’ cast by the sun on the parts of the ship’s exterior surrounding the window.

Step 8:

I’ve removed the window’s glass here. The glass layer was constructed by layering a few layers (layering layers, heh…) of gradients and adjusting their transparencies.

Step 7:

Compare this with the previous picture. I’ve ‘de-coloured’ the lines which define the characters’ forms, reverting back to the original black. I coloured the inked lines above because it helps blend them in and lower their contrast, which is necessary because the characters are supposed to be positioned behind a layer of glass.

Step 6:

Here, I’ve removed the shadows in the background and foreground. Shadows are important, not only because they anchor the figures and objects to their surroundings to increase realism and believability, but they also do wonders in unifying the different arrays of colour present within a panel.

Step 5:

In this step, the characters themselves lose their own shadows. Shadows on figures help define and emphasise them.

Step 4:

There goes the interior background….

Step 3:

…and the exterior foreground.

Step 2:

The characters lose their colours. Here, you can see how Terence N. Tijuana would look like if it were a black-and-white comic.

Step 1:

It gets messier. I inked the characters on separate Flash documents before importing the results to Photoshop and assembling them together. As you can see, the inks overlap, a lot. They have to be erased before a coherent image emerges.

Step 0:

Yup, ‘Step Zero’. I’m a software engineer, that’s how we roll. Anyway, the inks started out as penciled sketches on a notepad. I scan the sketches into my PC, open up Photoshop and turn the linework blue-green for ease of inking.

Tutorial ends here. Isn’t it amazing how 5 hours of work can be compressed into 11 easy steps?

If you’ve been planning to make your very own Terence N. Tijuana, NOW YOU CAN!

Disclaimer: This step-by-step guide reveals the process behind one particular panel. Other panels/comics may have slight variations in the way they were created. For example, more complicated backgrounds are sketched on paper first, as are machines. Oh god I am taking myself too seriously. Seriously. Just scroll back up and watch the comic assemble itself.

So I’ve been working on next week’s comics, when it hits me suddenly that I’ve left you guys with no new content at all this week!

Well, here’s a panel which I actually finished sketching, inking and colouring, but decided to redraw because the composition didn’t really fit:

What a waste…..

Anyway, have a great weekend!

Here’s a closer look at the car I designed for Panel 2 of today’s update:

And here’s one from an old Terence N. Tijuana comic (now found in the Tijuana Freestyle section, link @right sidebar):

The anorexic wheels on the car below will probably affect sales badly…..

25 Essential Expressions, featuring Ace Pilot:

If you’re interested in doing your own version, a blank sheet is available here.

Monday’s comic (2009-06-08) had an earlier incarnation; I first mentioned it in a piece of teaser news just before I posted the first revamped Terence N. Tijuana comic a couple of weeks back.

After I completed 3 panels (out of 4) of that strip, I got an epiphany, one that made me decide to narrow the palette of colours for Terence N. Tijuana from gaudy-free-for-all to greys and reds for all backgrounds.

This meant I had to go back and rework the damn strip (damn damn damn), but I think it turned out better in the end (and longer too! Score!).

You can look at the final (left) and earlier (right) versions below:

Today, I posted the first comic for the new Terence N. Tijuana, a comic with a proper cast and some semblance of a storyline which does obeys the space-time-continuum.

Over the past year (on and off in 2008 and regularly in 2009), I drew this comic as a creative exercise, with a set of characters which morph stylistically in every update, and an incoherent storyline that jumped back and forth in time. The montage below represents some of that work from this past year:

Today, Terence N. Tijuana is beginning a new lease of life with the aim of being less confusing and more focused.

The old comics will still be available in the Tijuana Freestyle section, and I may even add comics there when time permits me.

For now, enjoy the new comic, with the first update on May 25, 2009.

Here’s a character I designed for Thursday’s update:

Like I promised, here’s a look at a scene from And The Award Goes To… which was edited.

I drew the entire comic purely from my imagination, and sometimes, this means really, really awkward-looking results.

Take the limousine in Panel 1, for example. Now, I’ve never drawn a fancy stretched car before, except maybe some random hideous doodles in my childhood. Take a look at the GIF below which shows the vehicle’s rear, before and after:

I’d finished sketching, scanning, inking and colouring the panel before I took a step back, winced at the awfulness and MODDED the damn thing. Do you think the ‘after’ version is loads better?

I have an idea. Let me show you guys how I made a Terence N. Tijuana comic.

Today, we’ll look at Bad Reception, which I posted on The 4th Of July, 2008. A significant date for a certain population, I realise.

The panel I’m interested in is the sixth, which features our main character gazing in surprise at something in the sky as he stands at the top of a skyscraper. The challenge here was drawing a human figure from a top-down angle, with foreshortening. I Googled around and managed to pull this off somehow, so, yay…

1: The sketch, done in Flash.
2: Flatting, which is the initial few layers containing the foundation colours.
3: Shading. There are many ways I use to shade, and in this piece, I used the ol’ slap-on-a-darker-colour-and-summon-gaussian-blur.
4: Highlights, using the same technique as #3, but with lighter colours.

The next challenge was rendering a believable surface to represent the concrete roof of the building. This was incredibly difficult to do realistically, and I experimented a lot before producing results I was satisfied with.

5: Laying down the basis for the concrete surface.
6: Adding a bit of texture with Photoshop’s Cloud filter, and inserting a shadow for the character (see #3).
7: Adding more textures to simulate a ‘concrete-y’ look. I used the selection tool to outline certain areas, filled these areas with dark colours, and ran them through a motion filter in Photoshop.
8: Repeat with whites and yellows instead of dark colours. I also added some Noise to the lighter areas.

Voila! Throw in a few more shadows to indicate the presence of objects in the sky above our charater, and we’re done! A grand total of 68 Photoshop layers!

You probably came from Part I.

For the Monday update, I have all time in the world (almost). If I feel like it, I can start prep work on Thursday evening, and work through Friday and the weekend to complete a fairly content-rich comic. That’s 4 nights, not to mention time to doodle a bit during the day as well. Even when I’m having a busy weekend with friends and family, I can cram in some work late at night.

The Thursday update is a different story altogether. I work at the office weekdays, and that leaves me with just 2 hours a night, for three nights (Monday to Wednesday), for the comic. That’s not counting the time I take off from webcomicking to hit the gym, catch a movie or wash my car. I think it’s already pretty amazing that I ever get to update regularly on Thursdays at all…

Part of the reason why Terence N. Tijuana is a difficult task can be found in the very concept of the comic itself. I try to learn something new with every update, artwise. The characters, though recurring, are re-visualised each time. This can be likened to drawing a brand new webcomic twice a week. How does this slow me down?

Well, for instance, my right hand has to get accustomed to drawing in a different manner each time, so it doesn’t have the chance to memorise strokes and that. Drawing a constantly redesigned character and maintaining consistency, but only for a particular update, is exhausting and frustrating, especially if I have to rotate the character around to portray a variety of poses and angles. Very often, I start off promisingly, then slip back into old habits and compositions. The old, familiar facial expressions reemerge.

Man!

That sounds awful, but Terence N. Tijuana does give me a lot of freedom. I am not constrained by a fixed number of panels, by a limited genre of gags, nor a need to maintain a uniform ‘feel’ and atmosphere. If I’m busy, I can do a single-panel setup and be done with it. If I’m bored, I can try a totally different approach, anytime I feel like it!

However, as the comic progresses, I sense a need to drift towards a more standard style, both visually, storywise and formatwise. It’ll help me develope my skills in areas I’m more interested in, and maybe cut short the time and research needed for each update.

Whew! Anyway, let me illustrate with the following figures:

Perry Bible Fellowship (above and below) is an excellent webcomic, known for its versatile visual presentation.

However, its creator has a standard, default art-style which he falls back on every now and then.

Optipess (above and below) also dabbles in a variety of visual experiments, with amazing results.

To maintain a regular updating schedule, however, a default style is utilized liberally.

Truck Bearing Kibble (above and below) is a slightly different story. The creators started of with slight experimentation, producing stunning but different creations.

Over time, as the artist’s skills matured, the updates became more asthetically uniform.

Quoting these incredible examples makes my comic look so bad. Damn….