How I do my Comics..

There has been many questions on how I do my photocomics over the years so it is time for me to answer all your burning questions.

Well, its a Mac program called Comic Life Deluxe by Freeverse Software. It rules. (www.freeverse.com)

I take pictures with my Kodak Easyshare 7.1 mp camera. I hook the camera's USB cable up to my iMac. I turn on the camera once more. iPhoto pops up. I upload the pictures by clicking a button, and another one to clear off the camera's SD card.

I can then do light editing in iPhoto. (crop, redeye correction, color saturation, ect.) Sadly I do not have Photoshop or something similar so I cannot do really neato effects which would make my stuff look really keen. This is butt. However I could spend 100 bucks on Photoshop Elements.. or 79 bucks to get Rockband 1 complete AND Rockband 2 the game for 79 with free shipping. Or the Korean rerelease of the GaoGaiGar combining figure for 56 and 4 bucks shipping. Or 70 for Demon's Souls Collector's Edition on the PS3. Or 42 for an online retailer selling that Warhammer Fantasy Chaos in the Old World boardgame. Or more funnybooks. Or more RPGs. Or more of the existing games I love.

Yeah, Photoshop Elements is not a must buy for me.

Then I boot up Comic Life which is normally set to use any pictures I may have in my iPhoto library. Then I begin to play. I can make and resize photos, image boxes, text boxes, dialogue bubbles, and sound effects. I can change color of the page background and the style of the various boxes and bubbles. I can use a variety of fonts and colors as well.

I then give it a quick look over and any noticeable edits that need to happen. I then save it in its normal Comic Life format, and as a JPG to my desktop. I then load up Flickr and upload the pictures.

If you have a Mac and like me want to save image space (I mostly use Flickr for my pictures) its MUCH easier to make a Comic Life comic instead of just throwing up some pictures and then writing captions in one's blog. Plus if Blogger ever dies while my text might get lost to the Ether, my comics will still be saved to my hard drive in an easily editable form.

Lots of people seem to like my comics, and I find its a fun and highly useful way to impart information without getting overly wordy.