Comic Report #82.1 - Dawn of a New Era

Hello again!  So this week's update is kind of exciting, but this is the first update of a main comic page that hasn't been done in Photoshop.  Last Saturday I put together, Sunday I enjoyed my birthday, and Monday I got an adapter to plug my 11-year-old tablet into the new GPU.  A funny story about that: the tablet I use is a gen 1 Cintiq 21UX, which isn't supported anymore, so when I was backing up files from my old computer to bring to the new one I looked at the very bottom of my downloads folder and there, from back in 2011, was the driver installer for my tablet!  What a miracle that was, it saved me a lot of headaches and my hardware is up and running again.

I've used Photoshop to make Dead Winter since the very beginning, but since I got this new computer up and running I wanted to try to pivot into making comics in Clip Studio Paint.  I've been using it to make the minis and acclimate myself to the software, but rather than reinstall an ancient version of PS or pay a subscription fee I'd try to set up CSP to get the painting aesthetic I like to work in.  I have some new brushes I think might work so the real interesting part is going to be coming up in the next phase of painting, but for now I got everything inked and flatted and it basically looks like any other Dead Winter page.  I think CSP's lines come out a bit smoother, and I have some more complex brushes to work with; the end comic might look a bit sharper than they did in Photoshop but it should still feel the same in the end.

One of the things I don't think CSP handles well that I need to resolve for this comic is animation.  I might end up needing to port back to PS at a later point to add animation to a strip, or figure out how CSP manages it, but that is a defining feature of my work and something I still need to maintain, although I'm in a position now where I don't need to really worry about it yet, it is something that is still weighing on my mind.  I'll make it work, but I'll also cross that bridge when I get there.

That's what I got for now.  I've got most of the growing pains ironed out so I'm ready to keep working on a more modern computer, barring any unforeseen problems.  Next week will be the really interesting update, since I'll be painting with brushes and a program I've never really worked in in this way before, so please look forward to that.  Until then, take care and be well.