The Draw Play Process

So, I've officially hit a milestone over at my webcomic. 100 comics! And here it is! Aaron Hernandez is so screwed.

 It's been going on for a year now, and for the 100th comic, I figured I'd take some time to talk about the creative process behind the comic.

Basically, each comic consists of roughly 3 big steps. Conception, Production, and Uploading. Each of those steps can further be broken down as well, and that can go even further. I'm going to take you though the 100th comic, step by step, and detail how we get to the finished product. Each comic is more or less the same.

PHASE 1: CONCEPTION.

Stages in Conception:
1. Finding a joke concept
2. Molding several joke ideas into one
3. Loose sketches
4. Thumbnails and layout

Before I make a comic, I gotta figure out what that comic is going to be. The ideas come from everywhere. Sometimes I see a post or request online that gives me a starting point, other times I take a joke I've already made earlier and try to develop it, but most of the time, my ideas come from just sitting around and contemplating general NFL topics, usually current ones. Once I know what topic I want to make light of, the jokes come fast and furious.

So for the 100th comic, Aaron Hernandez was the easy topic choice. It's the doldrums of the offseason, and a player possibly murdering someone is big news. So here we are, a broad topic with about a billion angles to hit it from.

It doesn't take long before my brain is going all over the place, trying to find something funny enough to produce. The problem I have most of the time with the Draw Play is that I cannot make comics as fast as the news hits, and I have a designated update schedule, so I can't jump on and make the obvious jokes. I also don't want to. It's a personal goal. I want the comic to stay fresh and different, so I can't take the easy way out. I want to give my readers something fairly unique to keep interest, otherwise I'm no different than a billion other sports humor sites.

This is easily the most challenging but rewarding part of the process, and sometimes my reaching to find a unique angle results in some surreal ideas. The 100th comic was no exception. Lots of Aaron Hernandez jokes have been made (several even by me!: ), but I doubt any of them involved Pat the Patriot acting like a creepy Batman stalking Hernandez the thug.

Anyway it didn't start there. It started with "What if Aaron Hernandez was Ray Liotta from Goodfellas, when he's being chased around by a helicopter as he runs errands!" I thought it was funny, but I don't want the joke to be just a reference to something else. I wanted the joke to be able to work by itself. A good reference is never the joke, but used to supplement the joke. So with that idea scrapped, I thought about Bill Belichick maybe trying to sacrifice something to the football gods for another SB win, and the gods demanded Hernandez's career. Then I thought about Hernandez caught by the police, on his phone, talking to OJ Simpson for advice. Ideas were everywhere. That last one however, led to me thinking maybe Hernandez isn't caught, but on the run, and talking to OJ on the phone. Then I thought maybe he is like a batman thug, and while on the phone with OJ he gets attacked by "Patman". That eventually led to the comic I drew.

That's about normal for my thought process. Lots of pacing around and just talking to myself as I mentally work the comic out in my head. I probably look like a loon while I'm doing it.

After I get the idea, I take out a sketchpad and I doodle some images I had in my head. Then I make thumbnails (For those of you not in the know, Thumbnails are tiny frames where you just sketch out the basic layout/composition at a very low resolution, simply to get a feel for how to draw the frames) and basically work out the whole comic in tiny drawings, until I think I've got good timing and it's not too big. This whole phase takes maybe an hour to 3, depending on how fast I can think of a good joke.

Here is a sketch page, pretty simple. Thumbnails and a few reference doodles

PHASE 2: PRODUCTION

Stages in Production:
1. Sketching
2. Linework
3. Color
4. Shadows and highlights
5. Refinement
6. Text/any extra effects

This is when I make my comics actually exist. First off, I go into Photoshop, open my "Template" file, which is just the black border and the title up top. I update the comic #, then break out the brush tool. I pick a light blue, and I start to sketch it (I use a Wacom Intous 3, with a piece of paper taped over the top to make it feel like I'm drawing on paper). I look at my thumbnails and roughly sketch out everything I need to get the basic layout. Then I go back, refine the sketches a bit so they aren't so loose. This is my favorite part of production, because I work fast and loose and have a lot of ability to change things around. I have a background in Storyboarding, which visually comes across in the comic layout, and I'm used to drawing panels and moving them around in different orders to get the right vibe.

Linework is next. Add a new layer, turn the brush black, and do digital inking. Depending on how complex the comic is, this can take a while and be a pain, or it can be over pretty quickly. Pretty straightforward. I usually put the characters/foreground on one layer, and the background on another.

Then comes color, which is probably the hardest part. I make two new layers (at least, sometimes more depending on the comic), one under the characters and one under the BG. Then I start splattering colors on them. I don't follow the lines, I just throw colors down so I can get a feel for how they are working together, changing things around until I get the color scheme I want. I usually use something online for reference, especially on the more complex lighting comics, like this one.

After I get the scheme I want, then I make a new layer over the color ones, turn the opacity down somewhat, then pick good shadow colors and draw the shadows over the color. Then I do the exact same thing, but with highlights. Pick pure white, set blend mode to overlay, mess with the opacity and draw highlights on everything that needs it.

Once I get that done, I have to clean it up. I go back, erase every color that sticks outside the lines, clean up the edges. Tedious, but necessary.

Then I finally add the text, if there is any. When I draw my panels, I try to leave a certain empty space somewhere for the text bubble to live in without getting in the way. I write the text, add a new layer underneath, make the white bubbles, then add a drop shadow with tweaked effects to get the black borders.

Then I sign it, & put a Sexy Rexy in it somewhere.

PHASE 3: UPLOAD

This is pretty much the self explanatory stage. I draw the comics at 300 resolution, and the full size is about 3600 pixels wide (The length varies from comic to comic). I save it out at 72 resolution, which takes the width down to about 900 pixels, then save out the PNG. Go onto the site, upload, write the words at the bottom, then set the comic to update at 12:01am tuesday or thursday. Get up the next day, Tweet it out, post it to the facebook page, post it around the web. Moderate comments, Laugh as someone inevitably can't find the Sexy Rexy.

The entire process takes about 6-8 hours total. I spend less time on them than I used to, because #1: I'm just faster and more efficient after doing it for a year and #2: I now update twice a week, which gives me less time to work on a single comic. It's taken the quality down somewhat, but my skill has grown since I started so it kind of evens out.

Anyway, that's enough words for now. I hope this satisfied anyone who was interested in how a comic gets made. I was going to do a post soon giving a retrospective on the Comic thus far, now that it's been out a year and hit #100, and for that, I'd like people to submit questions they have for me about the comic. I'll do a mini Q&A, you can ask me anything about it. Post your question in the comments, on the facebook page, or on my twitter, and I'll get to the post when I can.

FB: https://www.facebook.com/TheDrawPlayComic
Twitter: @DrawPlayDave or @TheDrawPlay

The NBA Draft pics!

So after the last partnership with Draftpedia, we decided to team up again to make more draft pics, this time for the NBA! This was a new experience for me, as I've never really been the biggest Basketball fan, and I've never watched the NBA draft before. It was quite the experience. I'd say it was probably a lot harder to  follow since the NBA draft has players get picked, then traded, which means I'd color a player for one team, then have to spend another couple of minutes frantically re-coloring. Needless to say, it wasn't long before I got backed up and completely confused by everything happening. Eventually I got myself sorted out though, and if I do it again next year, I will be far more prepared.

So thanks to Draftpedia  (A great free app for draft information, go download it!) and also to Bleacher Report for handling some of the pictures, I now give you the entire first round of NBA draft picks!

Now to give my arm a much needed rest. 

What if all the NFL logos were British?

So about a year ago I put Peyton Manning's face on all 32 team logos.


Now I did it again. This time, with all the talk about the NFL possibly expanding into London (which for the record, I think is a terrible idea for a multitude of reasons) I decided to make every logo and team name...a representation of the British Proper Gentleman! Get ready for some monocles! And Bowler hats! And Mustaches! Don't take them too seriously, folks.

And here are a few alternates for the Browns:

Bam. Anyway in case the watermark on each picture confuses you, that would be my Football related webcomic, The Draw Play. I spend far more time updating that instead of this page, so be sure to check it out! I update twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) with football jokes. And yes, it's going to continue during the offseason. It will help slow the pain.